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 3 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Loot River - Thoughts

Like a hobo's bindle, Loot River is a ratty patchwork of incongruous ideas. Occasionally you'll glimpse snapshots of a clever gimmick—such as gambling with your healing potions to earn more of them next stage—but promising concepts are the best the game has to offer. Spending a mere hour with Loot River will reveal that it's less than half the game that it should be. It's not simply rough around the edges or in urgent need of more playtesting; Loot River is completely unrefined, like a gnarled tree trunk posing as an IKEA dining table.

Loot River's premise is distinctly alluring: a top-down action roguelite that sees you venturing through a forgotten, flooded city via sliding polyominos that you control with the right analogue stick. It blends tense combat with impromptu puzzle solving, letting you choose how and when to engage groups of enemies. You can briefly connect platforms to pull enemies one at a time, or split the battlefield in half to deal with the runts first, or blitz your way over to a block, break away, and forego combat altogether. A lot of the decision-making is left in the player's hands, which is one of the rare things Loot River gets right.

A shame that everything else is such a mess.

First up, build variety doesn't exist because the player is given nearly no choice in what to receive. Despite there being a decently-sized unlock tree for weapons, armor, and spells, there's no way to start a run with the paraphernalia of your choice. Instead, you'll either receive the default starting set or a completely randomized loadout. New gear can be found during a run, but not only is such a thing rare, but its quality is completely randomized—meaning you stumble across low level equipment even in the endgame. So expect to find one or two upgrades at best.

Shops could theoretically remedy this issue, but there are only a handful in the game—all of which offer a single randomized item at a time. It boggles the mind! There are over 50 pieces of equipment to choose from, which could have easily expanded the shop inventory to three or five items—or at least allow categorization by type (weapons, armor, spells, etc)—but Loot River simply shrugs its shoulders to such obvious solutions. Exacerbating this are the randomized shop prices, tending to land on the expensive side more often than not. So shops wind up being a complete non-factor in determining a winning run—which is a bizarre design decision for a roguelite that leans so heavily on its item pool for variety!

And that's all without getting into how rubbish the majority of your equipment actually is!

If you seek to best Loot River, you must understand one simple rule: speed is king. Big weapons might look impressive as your character drags them across the ground, but they're too unwieldy, lacking both the damage and reach needed to offset their slow attack speed. Parrying is also linked to weapon attack speed, granting quick blades nigh-invulnerable when you spam the parry button again—a tactic that works on almost every enemy in the game! And there's no drawback to it either! Loot River lacks a stamina system to punish you for spammy play, meaning you mash your way through any fight and escape those you can't by repeatedly dodging over and over again. And since bosses are the only lock-in fights, it's fairly easy to sprint to the end of the game and parry the final boss to death with your starting weapon. I tested this out a few times and got a sub-10 minute run, placing me in the top 10 for the XBOX PC leaderboards... an achievement I'm not sure I'm proud of.

There's a bit more to the combat—like a string of combos, charge attack, and spellcasting—but you won't need anything beyond the very first attack. By far the optimal strategy is to attack once and then dash behind the target, resetting your combo so you perform your opening attack again. This is because some weapons like the axe and rapier have blazingly-fast pokes that do solid damage, capable of stunlocking enemies and pounding bosses into a pulp. Better yet is if your weapon is enhanced with electricity, as it will continue to damage and paralyze enemies while you're dashing behind them—a maneuver that even keeps even the final boss fully locked down and helpless! The other enhancements (poison, fire) are hilariously useless in comparison, applying a single damage DoT (as in, one damage) that does little more than color your foe a light shade of green or orange. Seriously, if you find a lightning rapier somewhere—no matter the level quality—prepare to steamroll through the game faster than a Ferrari through a sand castle.

You may be wondering if there's any incentive for fighting enemies you can easily flee from, and my response would be "kind of". You receive both gold and experience from squashing your foes, but the former is so scant as to rarely matter (again, shops price gouge like crazy). and you only need a small amount of the latter to beat the game. When you level up you can increase one out of six of your stats, which sounds like an interesting choice—except that it isn't. What you'll end up doing nine times out of ten is increasing VIT to 13 and then, depending on the weapon you're wielding, dumping the rest into either STR or DEX. Sure, you might be tempted to spend your points elsewhere, but considering that you only net 6-8 levels before your run concludes, it's hard to beat the unstoppable combo of HP & DPS. And considering how floaty, inconsistent, and obfuscated the combat feels, you really won't want to play more than you have to. Seriously, the game needs to sit down and figure out what Hyper Light Drifter and Curse of the Dead Gods did right, because it's barely better than a Newgrounds flash game.

There are a couple more systems Loot River includes that range from curious (using run modifiers to unlock the true last boss is neat) to obnoxious (why send the player back to the hub after every stage? Why make some of the charms so ineffectual and others OP? Why does the fetid shawl drop over and over and over again?!) but I grow tired thinking about this game more than the developers clearly have. Loot River lacks common sense, too eager to blend ideas and playstyles together while doing little to make itself enticing, cohesive, or properly balanced. Its combat is messy, its equipment is boring, the money is useless, and experience is practically predetermined—but the most odious culprit is the titular loot. Loot River is not keen on doling its items out to you, and even when it stubbornly does, expect it to be hot garbage most of the time.

While playing through Loot River, I was reminded at times of the equally-strange Loop Hero... but any comparison I could draw between the two will betray how distant they are in quality. Loop Hero may fall short of its true potential, but one can walk away from it having been satisfied by the puzzle presented—or at least, tickled by its mechanics. Loot River on the other hand, is half-baked, routinely imbalanced, and—at most—mildly entertaining when it works as intended. Which is not often! Perhaps one might find it fascinating from a cautionary, post-mortem perspective, the same way that failing a midterm test can convey the importance of routine studying. As for me (and much to Loot River's chagrin) the only thing I found notable about it is that it's one of the firmest "do not recommend"s I've played in a long while.

Moonscars - Thoughts

Left in the wake of Salt and Sanctuary was a tantalizing concept: Dark Souls as a 2D metroidvania. Ska Studios showed it was possible—with a one man team of all things!—so indie studios got to work on creating their own Frankenstein's monster. Numerous notable titles emerged from this trend such as Blasphemous, Ender Lilies, and GRIME, with the tally only growing each year. But this sudden burst in popularity brought with it a muddying of the genre, blending many of these gothic-medieval games into a gray soup of stamina bars, cryptic lore, and corpse runs. It became harder to stand out, harder to tell at a glance what your game did different from the myriad of others.

Moonscars tries to leap ahead of its kin thanks to a strong art style and gorgeous animations, but it never fully emerges from the muddy swamp. Rather, it is stuck waist-deep in mediocrity, vainly reaching for the feet of its golden idols.

Before I begin, let me just state that Black Mermaid should be proud of the work they've achieved here. To come out of nowhere and drop such an impressive, gif-juicy game like Moonscars is admirable, even if the experience is far from perfect. There's a lot of praiseworthy material here: the world is somber and alluring, attacks have great weight and flourish to them, and the smeared, smudgy art style is a clever fit for the game's earthern theme. The magic system is also an interesting departure from genre conventions, utilizing a replenishable resource that doubles as your healing pool. Since magic can only be recovered by attacking, it stops you from having to constantly return to a save point to restore health, while simultaneously encouraging a risky, aggressive playstyle. It's a smart system... 

... would that I could say the same for the rest of the game.

The boldest idea Moonscars brings to the table is its roguelite perks: transitory passives that reset upon death. Although you can hold up to five perks, there are a scant six in total to choose from, with a majority allowed to be taken twice. This means you're likely to end up with the same exact build every time: two 25% heal increases, two 10% crit increase, and whatever fifth suits your needs at the time (like the full hp heal). Toward the latter half of the game you'll come to lean more on the spell cost reduction perks, but it hardly feels like a game changer. Eventually you'll realize that perks largely serve as a "death tax", momentarily weakening you until you slaughter a handful of enemies to get back up to speed. And considering how the game bizarrely has endgame enemies provide the same amount of experience as its starting foes, expect to warp back to the beginning to do some menial, risk-free grinding over and over again.

What you won't grind for, strangely enough, is experience. And that's because there are no level ups in Moonscars—only spells, trinkets, and permanent upgrades scattered throughout the wild. This renders the power curve distinctly flat with a slight uphill slant; although you'll be stronger at the end of your journey than its start, it'll be mostly due to the hours of play time you'll spend studying enemy attacks, as well as your own. The only vital items to hunt for in Moonscars are the damage upgrades, but they suffer from a bizarre artistic flaw: looking like every other sparkly item on the ground. This deflates the joy found in exploration, as you have barely any upgrades to keep an eye out for—and those you are in need of look like every other useless trinket that'll clog your inventory.

Plus, it's not as if exploration is one of Moonscars' key features. Despite having all the telltale signs of a metroidvania, the world of Moonscars is practically on rails, guiding you from one area to another. You can't stumble upon anything you aren't supposed to, nor fight any of the bosses out of order. Only when you find the game's lone mobility upgrade does the world open up a little bit, but even then the new paths will lead to dead ends until you visit them in a specific sequence. The final act in the game kills the metroidvania comparisons outright, devolving into a string of dull arena fights against enemies in flat arenas that you've dispatched a dozen times already. Lastly, the in-game map is horridly unwieldy, lacking markers for both switches & doors, as well as scrolling agonizingly slow (seriously, what is it with metroidvania games having glacial, impractical scrolling?!)

Perhaps you're hoping that the lore of the world can keep you hooked, but the story is sadly ripped wholesale from From's catalogue. The analogues to Dark Souls/Bloodborne are glaring: the medieval kingdom has fallen into disrepair, Clayborn are Undead, getting cleft is going hollow, the moon is a major antagonist, and every NPC is an asshole that speaks in riddles. There's a kernel of a good idea here—namely, every death letting you slough off a useless skin that may or may not come back to haunt you—but the storytelling in Moonscars is needlessly convoluted and poorly explained, throwing line after line of dialogue at you that ultimately reveals nothing. The gargoyles in the hub are the worst offenders, prattling on without end while glibly mocking you the entire time. While there are major character reveals and plot developments, nothing in Moonscars is surprising because nothing is expected; the story is a nonsensical proper noun salad that vacates your mind as soon as you turn off the game.

Combat stays strong for the most part, but even it starts to stagnate by the end. Despite the alluring animation of the game's heavier weapons (like the hammer and painwheel), Moonscars values quick attacks over outwardly impressive ones. This, combined with the slow start-up of spells and high damage of parries, funnels you into a rapidly striking playstyle where retaliation is king. This only becomes more true as the game gets harder, with enemies lobbing off half of your health bar in a single, wide strike. And even when you realize the power of the parry, it remains a temperamental and finicky maneuver, no matter how often you use it. The best tip I can give is to try and parry enemies before you think you need to.

Speaking of enemies, Moonscars could've benefitted from a larger bestiary. What's here is thankfully varied, but the game runs out of new monsters in its last third, a problem further exacerbated by the shift to arena battles. To mask this shortcoming, old foes are reintroduced with an immunity to physical attacks—a gimmick you're either going to find mildly interesting or painfully annoying. While this does prompt the player to reexamine their spell loadout, flying foes are an eternal nuisance, as there aren't a lot of quick and effective aerial spells. It doesn't help that the skybound enemies are some of the worst in the game, whether it be the floating priests that spam a powerful AoE heal or the tiny gargoyles with their deceptively wide spears. Bosses at least provide an interesting challenge, but not only are they few and far between, but half of them are also aerial foes, meaning your solitary midair swipe will be getting quite the workout.

Moonscars makes a valiant effort but ultimately falls short of greatness. Everything besides its animations comes up lacking: an uninspired world, lifeless map, hitchy combat, low build variety, and square room after square room of enemies made immune to 70% of your combat repertoire. Despite my cartoonishly long list of grievances (that continue to unfurl and bounce down a staircase), I nevertheless had fun with Moonscars, and would recommend it only to diehard fans of the genre. The game has inarguable foibles, but the worst of its sins are still forgivable, merely needing more polish rather than a drastic overhaul. If I was to make a single, potentially-damning comparison, Moonscars feels like the Mortal Shell of the 2D Soulslike genre.

Raft - Thoughts

Amid a sea of crafting games, Raft asks an interesting question: what if you had to take your base with you when you traveled? Or rather: what if the only way to travel was to take your base with you? At first it seems a cruel joke, your buoyed home little more than a block of wood set mysteriously adrift. But by the end it'll feel like home—your home, complete with its own shoddy craftmanship, loose inventory, and piecemeal renovations. With this home, you'll sail across the endless expanse of blue, looking for other survivors, uncovering new schematics, and maybe even bringing some animal buddies onboard.

Raft justifies a playthrough based off of its houseboat concept alone, but where it really shines—as hard as it is to believe for an open-world crafting game—is in its story missions.

A word of warning I'd issue to new players is that Raft's food and water meters are grueling taskmasters. They deplete so fast at the start of the game that it's far easier (and less resource-intensive) to simply die and wait for an ally to revive you. Even when your kitchen can finally serve enough food and water for your crew, you'll be rapidly depleting its stock at all times. This is doubly true for the story missions, where you're docked at a single location for days at a time, devouring every fish, fruit, and vegetable in sight. The sooner you can establish a self-sustaining farm the better—and the larger you make it, the less often you'll have to hear groans of "we're out of watermelons again!"

What complicates this is that real estate cannot be found—it must be built. Combing the ocean's surface for detritus is the best way to gather raw materials for an expansion, but raft tiles aren't cheap, requiring a constant upkeep thanks to the ravenous shark biting at your wooden heels. Trawling the waves grants a steady but measly income, only allowing you to splurge on a home renovation once every few days. This, combined with the food drought, encourages you to always stay on the move, dropping by islands just to deplete them of their resources, like a button-up villain from an eco-friendly kids cartoon.

On one hand, the inexhaustible need to find more resources keeps Raft interesting, rarely making it so you can sit idly by and watch the waves. But on the other hand, due to the game keeping you constrained to a single raft, it can feel frustrating being beholden to the meager drip-feed of flotsam—especially when you hit a dry patch on the ocean. Other games like Valheim and Terraria allow players to split up and specialize, so one player can focus on fighting, another on gathering, another on building, etc. But Raft glues everyone to the same location, its freedom sharply ending at the boundary of the boat. Sure, you can still specialize in a way, but your roles will change moment-to-moment, determined by what resources are in which chest. As a survival game, it's a fascinating cooperative experience that demands flexibility; as a crafting game, it's an inconvenient, boring, and glacial crawl towards affluence.

But luckily, the story more than make up for this.

Before you get too excited, Raft's plot itself isn't anything to write home about. There's plenty there for the player that needs backstory in their games, but at no point did it ever pique my interest. No, where Raft captivates is in the sprawling design of its unique story islands, blending together item gathering, platforming, and the occasional puzzle solving. It harkens back to the PC FPSs of yore like Half-Life and Undying, where janky jumps and obscure paths forward were features and not flaws. Since this kind of unguided design has been absent in modern gaming (sans Destiny), it was refreshing to be thrown back into an open environment with nary a hint as to what I'm looking for. And thankfully, Raft never gets too bizarre or entrenched in moon logic; the entire campaign can be solved without a guide, as long as you're willing to experiment every now and then.

Plus the variety in the story missions is great—especially for an indie studio! Each islet has its own distinct themes and obstacles, with commonalities between any two kept to a minimum. You'll venture to some makeshift shanty towns, to an abandoned biosphere, and even to an arctic base sleeping in the shadow of a nuclear plant. What's great about Raft is that it keeps you wondering what's around the next corner, curious what's been hidden behind every locked door you come across. Sure, a lot of it is fairly mundane (expect to find a lot of scrap metal and cooked beats), but the game always goes off the rails at the right moments, slapping you across the face with some unexpected surprises. Playing with friends or family makes these moments even better, as you'll occasionally hear confused, breathless reactions while you're carrying out some menial task on the ship ("Help! There's a vulture dropping boulders on me!")

What really sweetens the deal (for me) is that Raft is a quick play, letting you speed through the game in under 24 hours. That might not sound quick, but I think it's exceptionally brief for a crafting game featuring nearly a hundred recipes. It won't all be smooth sailing—you'll run into the some resource bottlenecks like iron and titanium ore—but you can hack away at the story every time you sit down to play. For some folks however, Raft might feel too small—an issue exacerbated by the fact that there's no reason to continue playing after the story concludes. Well, unless you want to keep working on your dream house and don't mind scaring away sharks and seagulls every two goddamn minutes for the rest of your life (seriously, where were the endgame upgrades to repel them for longer?!) But in an era where games are encouraged to keep you playing as long as possible, I found Raft's brevity to be a plus—especially since short-but-meaty coop experiences are too few and far between.

It's obvious Raft was made by a small but passionate team. From the moment you dive in you'll have to adapt to some strange quirks that aren't likely to get patched out, like how opening a chest will show your backpack in the center and push the chests' contents off to the side, or that waiting long enough after a death lets you safely teleport your body back aboard your vessel (thus bypassing any kind of penalty). There's also not a lot of variety in the random non-story islands, nor is there enough titanium to build everything in the game (unless you REALLY like to scrounge). But if you're okay with the blemishes and ugly bumps, Raft's ride is a joy to undertake, one that will take you to some strange places. The game may lack the rags-to-riches glow-up of Terraria, but it's fun seeing how your modest, waterborne craft gradually transforms into a floating fortress, one that's capable of ferrying to the ends of the earth and back again.