Évaluations récentes de Arsene Lupin

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#503 out of 700+)... it's time for .hack//G.U. Last Recode.

In the great pantheon of classic PS2-era Japanese-style roleplaying games, the .hack series is perhaps among the most-fondly remembered and also—paradoxically—least-discussed. Boasting a unique (at the time) premise—people trapped inside of an MMO, where death or injury in the game equates death or injury in reality—and an ahead-of-its-time episodic release structure, the .hack series was an ambitious project that consistently failed to fully realize its own aspirations.

Much of your enjoyment in the G.U. trilogy is dependent on how inherently interesting you find the games' core premise, as well as how fondly you feel about the character (who mostly fill out the expected early-2000s shounen anime archetypes. In other words, the combat isn't terribly impressive or engaging. In the first game, you can smash into enemies with one of two weapons (dual daggers or a greatsword) and each sequel adds on additional weapon you can use as well (a scythe and dual pistols, respectively). Each weapon has a handful of special techniques, and then there's the rengeki special attack/counterattack options to make things a bit more dynamic. And as one would expect, most enemies are especially vulnerable or resistant to specific weapon types. Most of the difficulty arises from level disparities—if you want any kind of challenge, you'll only find it against enemies of significantly higher level than the player. Unfortunately, because this remaster rebalanced experience progression, you will most often be several levels above the foes in whatever area you find yourself in—especially if you spend any time at all completing sidequests. This ultimately reduces the game to a fairly mindless ARPG—I don't think I ever had to use even a single healing option. Even up against powerful optional bosses. This is one of those games where you'll hit the level cap about a dozen hours before finishing each game, which always feels pretty unsatisfying, yeah?

And then there's the story. You'd think there'd be a lot of fertile ground to explore with a premise like G.U.'s, but the narrative we wound up with is surprisingly unambitious and unimaginative. This is one of those cases where the writers have an interesting premise, yet remain totally disinterested in exploring it. The plot of all three games, for example, hinges on drawn out tournament sequences—while the more interesting aspects of the setting, viruses and artificial intelligence and other heady science fiction concepts are only ever referenced or alluded to, with no meaningful exploration or discussion. The end result is a story that, essentially, is no more than a shounen tournament anime with some interesting SF set dressing.

All that said, despite the weak gameplay and disappointing storytelling, the .hack//G.U. trilogy is still solidly fun to play through, owing mostly to presentation. It is astonishing, frankly, how well the pre-rendered animation holds up (putting many—or most—modern games to shame, some twenty years later. The animation, too, is especially praiseworthy, featuring some truly fantastic and well-choreographed action sequences. All of which is set to the background of a delightfully baroque, steampunk world and a genuinely god-tier soundtrack. In all earnestness, and I cannot stress this enough, the music is phenomenal; achingly beautiful.

And while the ubiquitous “normal gampelay” environments are about as generic as they come, it's impossible not to appreciate how evocative the landscapes of the unique “lost grounds” are—many resembling the oft-praised designs of much later games, like Bioshock and Dark Souls.

The end result is that /hack//G.U. is a popcorn game—certainly sufficiently entertaining, but far from thought-provoking. And it's hard not to exit the series without feeling disappointed by its lack of imagination. This is a setting where the boundaries between simulated worlds and reality are blurred and muddy, each seeping over into the other—where electronic viruses can infect human souls and manipulate our emotions, and eventually become self-aware. All very interesting, potentially profound SF concepts used only as decoration. If, perhaps, the games' had some set of compelling ideas or themes to explore, this would be forgivable, but mostly the narrative just reeks of a story that had very little thought put into it—even by the end, even with the bonus fourth game included in this remaster, it's clear that none of the writers involved had a clear vision of what kind of story they wanted to tell. So they gesture at the SF concepts lightly while regurgitating the same tournament-style plot again and again. The contextual justification for the tournaments differs slightly from game to game, but ultimately you're stuck going through the same motions three times 'round.

You might think that in another, better world the new fourth game included here—really little more than an extended epilogue—would be an opportunity to finally dig in to the SF issues... but, once again, the writers swerve hard into tiresome tropes and refuse to do anything but the bare minimum. Presumably this apathy is a direct result of marketing concerns: I'm told that the peripheral .hack media does a better job exploring these ideas—but if so, they've sorely misjudged. If you want to get your audience interested enough in a story to consumer peripheral media, you do that by making the initial story interesting, not cutting those interesting bits out to sell piecemeal later.

Perhaps it may seem I'm being overly critical here, and perhaps I am—but it's hard to play through these games without wondering at how much more interesting theyvery easily could have been. Even the conceit of playing an MMO, and being able to “exit” the game to the user's PC desktop is woefully unexplored. You'll occasionally read message board posts, but have no real ability to interact with anyone, and even the email chains rarely prompt replies. This has the (most likely) unintended affect of painting Haseo's real-life player as deeply antisocial: a person who spends much of their time lurking on message boards and reading emails, but unwilling or incapable of communicating with any other human beings outside of the very narrow context of the MMO setting. And, look, I get it (selective mutism sucks, yo). But it comes across entirely as an accident of apathetic design rather than something intentional—this is not, and I cannot stress this enough, not a sublte game.

Note: also played on Sony Playstation 2 and Sony Playstation 4.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#502 out of 700+)... it's time for Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.

Long before I began this Impossible Quest of mine, I found myself compelled to review what was then the single most disappointing and, frankly, disheartening game I'd ever come across. I was in despair. That game was Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, and it was an abomination. Words cannot quite express how happy I am now, exactly five-hundred reviews later, to be here writing about Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. Where Assault Horizon represents the lowest point in Ace Combat's venerable history, Skies Unknown represents the series at its very best. I am, in a word, ecstatic.

For the uninitiated, the Ace Combat games are a series of arcade-style flight combat simulators that forego the usual tropes of the genre (realistic physics and correspondingly complex controls) in favor of simple, responsive and engaging mechanics. Learning how to fly in an Ace Combat game is the easiest thing in the world—and frenetic dogfighting combat is just as immediately accessible, though of course there are advanced tactics and techniques that will require practice and commitment to fully master. The gist of the game is simple: you're a one-man-army in a fighter plane loaded up with (literally) hundreds of missiles, and use your power to single-handedly direct the course of battles and entire wars. Replete with gorgeous visuals and some of the most invigorating music you're ever likely to hear.

(Please note that it is vitally important to use “expert controls” – the game is far less accessible, nevermind rewarding, otherwise.)

The most unique aspect of Ace Combat is the setting, known by fans as the strangereal world – it is a planet not unlike our own, only with different landmasses and nation-states. This setting allows the stories to be wildly ambitious without any tedious necessity of maintaining status quo to real-life. One of the key events in the recent history of Ace Combat, for example, is a nuclear world war fought in the mid-1990s. The strangely real setting also allows Ace Combat to integrate science fiction technologies, concepts and narrative tropes, all of which serve to make the storytelling just as dynamic and engaging as the gameplay. Skies Unknown offers perhaps the most ambitious and unwieldy of narratives in the series, told across three wildly different acts, as conflict erupts over disagreement regarding the use of an enormous space elevator. I won't spoil too much, save to say that partly due to Ace Combat 7's laser-focused mission design, the story is confusingly told, relying more on implication than exposition. To fully understand what's happening, you're going to need to read in-between the lines, so to speak, because you're not going to get the full picture of this war without due consideration.

That laser-focused mission design is Skies Unknown' greatest strength and biggest weakness. Essentially, every mission is built around a specific gimmick, or concept. From dueling aces in a thunderstorm, to flying through densely-packed radar fields undetected, to tracking ground convoys through a sandstorm. These missions are often challenging and, frankly, a delight to play through—and make almost every mission feel downright iconic—but this focus also decreases the quantity of missions available, thereby restricting the opportunities to fully develop the story. The result is a narrative that is almost (but not quite) incoherent. Had the developers thought to insert a few “padding” missions (perhaps generic furballs) to boost the mission count, it's very likely that this tale could've been much more compelling. As it stands, each of the three acts feels incredibly compressed, with almost all nonessential exposition and characterization totally absent.

Relative to other entries in the Ace Combat series, Skies Unknown represents an enormous leap forward in quality in most aspects. Combat has never been faster or more engaging, environments have never looked prettier, and physics have never been this complex—this new flight model adds some unpredictability to the game via weather effects and high wind conditions, but never to the point of distraction. Despite its shortcomings, I'd even say that the story Skies Unknown tells is one of the best in the series, second only to Ace Combat 5.

That said, there are still some important areas where Ace Combat 7 falls short compared to prior games. Most notably, the UI is too pale for the often very-bright environments, making readability in certain missions a significant concern. Further, several of the more nuanced mechanics of prior games are absent here, making the gameplay feel shallower than it ought to be. In Ace Combat 0, for example, enemy aircraft would withdraw from the airspace after taking damage; in Ace Combat 5, players could use the D-pad to respond to allies on the radio and issue orders to squad-members. This last omission is particularly conspicuous, as much like Ace Combat 5, Skies Unknown eventually puts the player in the role of squadron commander. You'd think that commanding a squadron would involve commanding your squadron, but not this time. Also disappointing is the relative lack of multiplayer modes: only deathmatch and team deathmatch. This seems an odd choice, as to me the core appeal of the series if the frenetic one-versus-many combat, which would be ideally suited for cooperative multiplayer. Ah well, maybe next time.

Ace Combat 7 is not a perfect game. But it is, however, very nearly perfect. And I say this with untempered delight: this is what an Ace Combat game looks like at its very best. This is the game we spent more than a decade waiting for. This is as close to a miracle as we're ever likely to see in this industry. Skies Unknown is quite literally a dream given form—an immediate classic.

Note: also played on Sony Playstation 4.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#501 out of 700+)... it's time for Deathtrap Dungeon: The Interactive Video Adventure.

If someone had told me last week that I'd not only be playing what is essentially a VHS game in the year 2021, but falling in love with it... I'd've laughed in their face. These games are not supposed to be good! They are, in fact, infamous for just that! But Deathtrap Dungeon here... is revelatory. I've never, personally, had the pleasure of playing an in-person Dungeons and Dragons game... but Deathtrap Dungeon feels like the next best thing, actor Eddie Marsan standing in for an (excellent) dungeon master, calmly—but enthusiastically—outlining the adventure and reacting to the player. Unlike D&D, you only have a handful of stats and inventory items to manage, but this relative simplicity keeps the game consistently engaging as you typically only have a handful of options at any one moment—you're constantly being forced to make do with limited resources and decide what you can safely risk, and what you can sacrifice. It's a similar challenge to those delicious, early levels in a D&D game where you're often outnumbered and outclassed, but manage to prevail anyway—resulting in much more satisfying encounters than the ones you steamroll through at high level.

As you might expect from the title. Deathtrap Dungeon takes place entirely within a dungeon filled with, erm, traps. Of the deadly kind. The story framing the adventure is a bit dated and overly simplistic, relying on fantasy tropes that have long-since passed from our collective zeitgeist, but remains largely enjoyable—despite a few problematic tropes rooted in colonialist and orientalist tropes. The core appeal of the narrative is not the larger plot, such as it is, but rather the vignette-style "short stories" that are told in as you proceed through the labyrinth: a collection of hallways and rooms where each chamber functions, essentially, as a short story. These encounters can be very unpredictable and wildly enjoyable, typically playing out in 3-5 minute bursts. I cannot quite stress enough how immensely enjoyable the minute-to-minute gameplay is here, despite its relative simplicity. This has the added benefit of making the game easy to pick-up-and-play after a long absence: you never need remember anything else save the simple fact that you must escape the dungeon. Nothing else on the market even comes close to delivering a similar experience outside of Inkle's excellent Sorcery! games, though they embrace text where Deathtrap Dungeon embraces video.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a game like Deathtrap Dungeon is accessibility, or a lack thereof. It would be very easy for a game like this, where fail states come unexpectedly and often, to be immensely frustrating. There's a map overlay which clearly and cleanly depicts the dungeon and your progress through it, making it easier to visualize the "shape" of the story and keep you properly oriented toward your goal, and each unique story event has a quicksave marker at the corresponding location on that map, making it easy to backtrack. The only thing missing is a brief summary of each event, forcing players to rely on vague memories to navigate backwards through time—was that encounter with the troll two rooms back, or three? This becomes especially annoying once you approach the end-game, where you'll almost certainly fail and need to restart (victory requires collecting three specific MacGuffins, all of which can easily be missed) and need to start over. Furthermore, there's no option to fast-forward through dialog, so you're stuck either rewatching old scenes fully, or skipping them entirely—where you're prompted to make a choice with no context save your own memories of the first time 'round.

Which is all to say Whoosh! Bang! Zap! — Deathtrap Dungeon is a game like no other. I have nothing to offer here but effusive praise. As I sit here, writing this, I am eagerly anticipating another go at the dungeon, and already excitedly imagining what treats a sequel might offer. I love it, I love it, I love, I love it.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a review for every game in my Steam library (#500 out of 1000+)... it's time for Chrono Trigger.


When I first started this Impossible Quest of mine, I never imagined that I'd make it all the way to 500 reviews. Insofar as numbers go, it's frankly obscene. And I can think of no better game to review in commemoration of this milestone than Chrono Trigger, arguably the single greatest Japanese-style roleplaying game of all time. And while I may not necessarily agree with that assessment (I think I've played far too many games to label any one of them the absolute "best" of its genre), it's impossible to understate the enormous cultural impact of Chrono Trigger and its broad, cross-cultural appeal.

Simply put, Chrono Trigger is held in such high esteem for very good reason, despite being among the first modern JsRPGs – Chrono Trigger released on the Nitnendo SNES in 1995, and until this point in time, home video game consoles' strict memory limitations inhibited the ability of RPGs to tell anything but the barest, most rudimentary of stories. With the greater power (relatively speaking) of the SNES, console RPGs suddenly found that they had the means to craft far more detailed and nuanced narratives – and Chrono Trigger took that opportunity and went running with it.

To sum the game up simply, Chrono Trigger is one of those rare games that has something for everyone --.everyone. The premise is both simple and familiar: a great big evil thing is going to destroy the world in the far future, so you and your band of merry companions must travel through time in an epic quest to stop the apocalypse! It's nothing you haven't seen before, a dozen times at least. But each and every element of the Chrono Trigger is lovingly polished to a perfect sheen, resulting in a game that holds up -- often very favorably -- to today's modern RPGs. Many of us have a kneejerk response to modern JsRPGs, where we immediately compare them to Chrono Trigger, simply because nothing else has come as close to its perfection in the decades since.

Let's do a quick run-down, shall we? The combat is very simple and straightforward turn-based fare with an absolute minimum of grinding or filler combat. The visuals of the game are gorgeous, with each era you visit being lavishly rendered with colorful, evocative pixel art; the character designs are utterly iconic and immediately recognizable as the work Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest fame, and posses some of the finest sprite animation the industry has ever produced. The various temporal epochs you visit (which I will avoid spoiling) provide multiple diverse and interesting (and, of course, enjoyable) settings to immerse yourself in -- none of which overstay their welcome. And as for the music? It is, in a word: sublime.

The story tying all of these elements together is, perhaps, Chrono Trigger's weakest aspect, as it's relatively simple with characters mostly embodying broad archetypes, but I believe this is ultimately to the game's benefit. There's a lot going on here, and with all of the time travel and different, interconnected plot threads, it could very quickly become overwhelming to keep track of. By keeping its characters and their motivations simple, relying on familiar tropes and archetypes, Chrono Trigger also keeps its story accessible -- and reduces the amount of time it needs to spend in any one place, where other, lesser games might mistakenly try to pack in an abundance of characterization or worldbuilding. Instead, Chrono Trigger proceeds with alacrity, moving at a a brisk pace that never fails to slacken its momentum. Here is a case where less is more -- resulting in an ambitious time-travel story with a surprising degree of reactivity (especially in the famous trial scene) that's easy to follow and maintains the players' interest from beginning to end.

Chrono Trigger's 1995 release marked the beginning of what we can now recognize as the beginning of a golden age of JsRPGs – a glorious era where that genre, itself, was if not born, codified. Playing Chronoo Trigger now, so many years later, it's hard not to notice just how few games since can be said to be its equal. Chrono Trigger hit a level of quality that few games since have dared approach. It's also difficult to ignore just how refreshing it still feels, fully withstanding the tests of time, even after multiple subsequent playthroughs -- Chrono Trigger is one of those rare, precious RPGs that never seems to waste the players' time, and always has something amazing to show you just a few more steps ahead.

A quarter-century ago, Chrono Trigger set the gold standard for the genre. Whether or not any of the succeeding games approached the same heights is debateable, but few would argue that any have exceeded them. Chrono Trigger is a timeless journey, a sublime adventure, an immaculate classic, a dream given form -- and as unique and wonderful and captivating today as it was generations ago.


Note: also played on Nintendo DS.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#499 out of 700+)... it's time for Final Fantasy VI.

Some people will tell you that Final Fantasy VI is the best entry in the series. I am not one of them--but I can say that it is an excellent game with a diverse cast of vibrant characters attempting a far more ambitious narrative than the modest Super Nintendo hardware could ever dream of pulling off properly. From the very first scene, you can practically feel the seams of the tearing, the game near bursting under the sheer weight of its aspirations.

So what holds Final Fantasy VI back in my estimation? Well, to be clear, the competition is stiff: the Golden Age of Final Fantasy, comprising all of the games from Final Fantasies IV through to Final Fantasy X, consists entirely of some of the very finest Japanese-style RPGs ever made. What keeps Final Fantasy VI from the top spot(s) for me are the presentation--simple 16-bit pixel graphics do little justice to this steampunk fantasy setting--and the villain. Some people swear by Kefka--I know this, I've met them--but to me he's sadly one-note in a series notorious for more (somewhat) more nuanced antagonists. And... nope, that's it. Literally every other aspect of the game? Sheer perfection. And if such a thing were possible, I'd say Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack for the game is somehow MORE than perfect.

And now for the unpleasantness: talking about how Square-Enix ruins everything.

This version of Final Fantasy VI is a port of the mobile (iOS/Android) version, featuring a reworked UI (which is mediocre at best) and revised character sprites (which are almost universally reviled). Personally I don't mind these issues, and if you think you might, there are plenty of mods available to more perfectly tweak the presentation the game to your preference. I'm able to forgive these issues because, for better and worse, this is currently (and for the foreseeable future) the DEFINITIVE version of Final Fantasy VI.

I write this in July of 2021, amid the final lingering days (we so hope) of a global pandemic. It hasn't been a great few years, ya' know? And for all of the issues with Square-Enix's mobile ports on Steam, the announcement of the "Pixel Remaster" series of all the classic sprite-based Final Fantasy games represented a brief pinprick of hope in these dark days that, hey, maybe not everything has to be just the absolute worst.

But Square-Enix.

So here's the thing: I won't comment in the visual fidelity of the upcoming remasters, other than to say it disappoints--the most crucial point of differentiation between this version of Final Fantasy VI and the upcoming "remaster" is that the former is based on the much-improved Gameboy Advanced Release--which features a far better translation and additional content--and the latter on the original Super Nintendo release, a localization with no small number of issues. (And check out those screenshots. What the heck is going on with that font?)

And when that "remaster" comes out Square-Enix will delist this version of the game.

So that's the choice we have: a PC port with questionable aesthetic alterations but a better translation and extra content, or a PC port that maintains a more faithful aesthetic but delivers a problematic translation. And it's a choice we only have a few weeks to make before Square-Enix decides for everyone.

So: there you have it. Final Fantasy VI is one of the greatest Roleplaying games ever made, and while none of its versions are -ideal-, this one, at least, is optimal. Perhaps, one day, we might see a lavish remake of this game in the same style as the excellent PlayStation Portable versions of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, with gorgeous 2D art that finally breathes life into the immaculate world of Final Fantasy VI that we now can only imagine from the crude pixel art in-game and Yoshitaka Amano's breathtaking illustrations.

But until that day, we must make do with the options we have, even if none are as appealing as we might wish--or as considerate as the material demands.

Note: also played on Nintendo SNES.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#498 out of 700+)... it's time for Children of Morta.

It's pixel art Diablo. That's it. That's the game.

Okay, okay. I suppose I can go into a bit more detail.

Children of Morta is a pixel art-styled top-down action roleplaying game in the style of Diablo or Ys, with an emphasis on cooperative multiplayer. Contrary to what the store page may lead you to believe, there are no roguelike elements to speak of—you die, you restart the level. There are a number of playable characters to choose from, each with their own unique playstyle, but nothing you haven't seen a thousand times before: the fast rogue, the deliberate swordsman, the agile archer, etc., etc. Perhaps annoyingly, these characters are unlocked one-at-a-time as you progress through the game, so if you want to jump into a co-op game you're gonna need to invest some time in solo adventures first.

While most of the upgrades you earn are universal—purchase the armor upgrade for one character, and everyone gets it—individual levels are not. This means you have two choices if you intend to play as more than one character: either proceed through the game very slowly as you keep everyone's levels balanced; or you periodically halt your progress in order to grind out levels with your B-team. I suppose to some this might constitute "replay value," but to me it's just mindless tedium.

In this Impossible Quest of mine, I've harped a lot on the necessity of context. Narrative framing matters, you know? Especially in an RPG. So why does is it always seem like storytelling is an afterthought? If you're looking for a compelling narrative, keep looking, Children of Morta will not provide. It is both profoundly generic -and- painfully overwritten. You'd be surprised how many words it can take to say, "there's big bad evil in the woods, we should murder it." Or, I suppose, if you're as fond of the genre as I am, you won't be surprised—but know that Children of Morta definitely errs toward the verbose (something, you've no doubt noticed, I am intimately familiar with). The writing also suffers at both the macro and micro level: characters will be referenced before they're introduced, subjects will change mid-sentence, and unclear pronoun references abound. It sometimes feel like the developers took a middling first draft for a generic fantasy story, and ran it through a shredder.

Fortunately the rest of the game makes up for these deficiencies. The game is gorgeous, and ubelievably detailed for the extremely low-resoultion pixel art used, and the combat generally feels weighty and engaging—though I did notice a distracting input, or rather animation delay with some of the characters. You typically see this in AAA games where the developers want to be extra-sure all of the players see and appreicate the detailed, motion-captured animations, so it's a bit disoncerting to see the same thing play out with characters barely six pixels tall. This robs the combat of the immediacy and intimacy it might otherwise have, but on the other hand, the animations -are- very pretty.

You may feel this review veers too strongly toward the negative to justify that glowing blue thumbs-up icon at the top, and you may be right. So often whether or not I recommend a game or not comes down to my mood at time of writing. Oh, for want of a yellow "shrug" icon! The thing about Children of Morta is that it's not a bad game, but it's not a good game either, and I went into it with a lot of expectations that were not met. And so I left feeling unsatisfied and disappointed. At the end of the day, it really is a pixel art Diablo, and I'd hoped for more. But I recognize that it's about as good of a pixel art Diablo as one could reasonably expect, and while I'm not the audience for that, I'm certain one's out there. If you're looking for an engrossing and compelling RPG, I can't recommend Children of Morta in any way, shape or form: but for a co-op adventure? Seems like it'd be a pretty good time.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#496 out of 700+)... it's time for Magicka 2.

Look, I'll be honest here, Magicka is a chaotic co-op action game and that's just not my thing. From what I can tell, it's one of the more interesting games in this style out there, but it just doesn't possess any real staying power for me, personally. The action, simply put, is too chaotic – I find myself forced to focus so much on the controls that I lose sight of what's happening on-screen. This becomes especially frustrating when the action on-screen becomes so intense that the spell effects partially obfuscate the characters, foe and friend alike.

Which is a shame because Magicka 2 has a really interesting and unique combat system. You conjure up elemental orbs, which you can chain together, and then cast—either projecting the elemental energies outward, imbuing them into your weapon, or channeling them into your wizard's body. It's a nifty concept. My problem is that there's simply too much to think about—and maybe this is just an issue of learning curve—with eight possible elemental attributes available at any one moment... and an additional eight available in a secondary pallate accessed via a gamepad's trigger button. It takes some getting used to, and frankly I didn't have much inclination to devote the time I'd need to get used to it.

It's no mark against the game itself: I have little patience for multiplayer gameplay, and the single-player side of Magicka 2 isn't terribly compelling. There's a very simple story stringing together a set of fairly linear levels, told in a please-laugh-we-want-this-to-be-very-funny tone that failed to elicit so much as a smirk. It's just not enough. For co-op, I imagine there's a lot of fun to be had here, and honestly I think it's probably worth recommending for the mechanics alone, if only to demonstrate how it is, in fact, possible to conceive of a wizarding game without falling back on the old cliches of mana, memorization, or plodding, tactical planning.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#495 out of 700+)... it's time for Druidstone: The Secret of Menhir Forest.

If there's some kind of pedantic leitmotif running through my cascade of reviews here, it's almost certainly my tendency to harp on the value and necessity of narrative context. No matter how compelling or engaging the core mechanics of a game are, without a firm foundation of narrative context I tend to quickly lose interest. Gameplay requires framing, I think, if it wants to attain any real longevity. Druidstone is an excellent example of why, I think: it's an excellently-crafted visually appealing SRPG with solid XCOM-inspired mechanics, that nonetheless manages to be pretty unappealing thanks to a rigorously uninspired narrative featuring deeply cliched characters fighting the usual tropey foes in a fantasy setting about as generic as they come.

It's a shame. And a big part of what makes the absence of a compelling narrative biting is the fact that the SRPG genre is, by its nature, kind of tedious. Druidstone is better than most—the UI is very responsive, animations are fast, and turns proceed at a pleasant clip—but at the end of the day you're still stuck spending a lot of time in combat. It'd be nice to have reward alongside respite when it comes to the story sequences tying everything together—alas, the tale told is a dry and humorless affair.

Which is all to say that while I enjoyed my time with Druidstone, more or less (the absence of tooltips was especially annoying) I never felt any pressing desire to keep playing. The opening set of missions failed to capture my interest or excite my imagination, and I plodded forward—by my estimation I've completed somewhere between one third to one half of the game—and this didn't change. The actual combat is pretty engaging, if perhaps overly simple (I'd love it if terrain and positioning played more of a role). Difficulty in Druidstone arises less from tactical challenges than time limits, shifting goals, and bonus objectives. While not quite to the extent of something like Into the Breath, combat levels often feel more like puzzles than battles. They're all about figuring out the most efficient route to your objectives so that you can complete all of your tasks, optional and otherwise, as quickly as possible.

And efficiency is a perfectly satisfactory way to construct an SRPG, but I can't help but think the presentation of the game doesn't quite complement that approach as much as it should. Replaying levels is a cumbersome affair (there are no level select menus) and there's no grading system in place to evaluate your performance. Druidstone does offer workshop support, so perhaps things will improve on this front in the future, with the possibility of user-generated content and patches shoring up some of the more keenly-felt absences.

Perhaps the core appeal of Druidstone is its accessibility: the simple narrative is easy to follow (or ignore) making it ideal for younger players or those who are either unfamiliar with or intimidated by the RPG genre. The core mechanics fast and responsive and very easy to learn, and the UI clean and effective. Druidstone feels very much like a "gateway game" for players who like the idea of an SRPG, but aren't quite ready to dive headfirst into something as complex as a Divinity: Original Sin game. For veterans of the genre, it is perhaps disappointingly lacking, but it remains a solid game nonetheless. Alternatively, I imagine it might be fun for more mechanically-minded players who don't want to focus much on a narrative, and won't something relatively well-polished they can relax to—a role Druidstone seems very able to fulfill.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#494 out of 700+)... it's time for Supraland.

Supraland is a a bit of a clunky, clumsy mess of a sandbox adventure game. It's also very unique, possesses a lot of heart, humor and wit, and is--impossibly--the sole product of a one-man development team.

And, I'll be honest, the limited development size and budget is immediately apparent: levels are very loosely designed, some of the physics-based puzzles can be incredibly idiosyncratic, and the combat has no real feeling of weight or heft. On the whole, Supraland is a game sorely lacking in polish.

But it is oh-so-very marvelous all the same.

The premise is simple: you dwell in a literal sandbox world, your god the small child who constructed an entire world therein. You are a small, red plastic toy--hero of an entire community of red toys. You have a mission: travel across the world to confront your hated nemeses, the blue plastic toy people. Between you and your destination are countless puzzles impeding your progress: platforms and switches and levers and pressure plates and doors and so on. Many puzzles make use of the games rudimentary physics engines, not dissimilar to Half Life 2's, and will see you using rocks to activate multiple pressure plates simultaneously, or carrying various MacGuffins from one point to another.

And everything just... works. Despite the lack of polish. The core mechanics aren't very compelling by themselves--combat and platforming especially--but the puzzles manage to perfectly hit that sweet spot where they're challenging without being too challenging, allowing you to progress through the world at a decent clip without ever being forced to a halt at some impenetrable game designer logic. The environments themselves are also a lot of fun to explore, as they're filled with secret areas to discover, optional puzzles to solve, and impressively scaled props, like enormous, towering No. 2 pencils and monolithic rubber erasers.

Simply put, Supraland is a joyous adventure game with little in the way of polish, and it manages to pack more charm and wonder in a few minutes of play than most games are capable of in dozens of hours.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#493 out of 700+)... it's time for Darksiders II Deathfinitive Edition.

My reaction to the first Darksdiers game was... unexpectedly harsh. In my review, I went off on the game a bit. Not because it was bad—because even a bad game is worth talking about, worth thinking about—but because it was neither good nor bad. It was a bland, perfunctory effort that produced neither affection nor disdain in my mind. All it accomplished was the annihilation of several hours of my time.

So jumped into Darksiders 2 with a weary sigh, hoping that this sequel would stand atop the shoulders of its unimpressive predecessor to say or do something interesting. Something noteworthy. Something worth talking about.

But Darksiders 2 is just what you'd expect from a sequel to a game that tried its hardest to be the least remarkable Zelda-style action-adventure game on the market: more of the same. Just as finely-polished, just as boring.

Our new protagonist, Death, has possesses all the personality of a tree stump. The characters he encounters in his quest (to resurrect humanity, of all things) are uniformly dull, existing solely to spew out exposition-heavy lore dumps and verbose quest instructions. The addition of RPG elements makes the narrative even more tiresome than in the preceding game, as now you have to select various dialog options from a wheel—none of which affect anything, and accomplish little more than drawing out each dialog sequence far beyond its welcome.

Combat remains fast-paced, polished and engaging as the simple puzzles in the dungeons remain familiar, constructed as they are in the Zelda formula, but neither produces much challenge. The puzzles are brain-dead and involve simply activating switches or platforming around obstacles; the combat is superficially satisfying, but it quickly becomes apparent that the game is unable to accommodate more than a small number of enemies on-screen at once, and that most of the difficulty is artificially created by injecting each foe with an inflated health bar. For one of the four horseman of the apocalypse, the manifestation of death itself, the player character feels surprisingly weak as he struggles to take out even the weakest of foes in fewer than eight or nine hits.

The only real challenge comes from the camera, which clumsily shifts about making it sometimes tiresome to locate enemies—even in the middle of combat—and often obstructs platforming objects. And the platforming, I should mention, is much as you'd expect from a AAA game so bereft of interesting ideas: brain-dead and utterly linear.

So I'm left in exactly the same spot as I was after dipping my toes into the first Darksiders: somewhat melancholy at the time I'll never get back, invested in a game I won't remember anything about an hour hence. As I said in my review of the first game, I believe Darksiders 2 embodies one of the worst aspects of modern AAA game design: it's so desperate to superficially mimic the aesthetics and mechanics of other popular games that it never even thinks to do or say anything interesting, compelling, or otherwise worthwhile.

Darksiders 2 is pretty and polished and has coasted by on the merit of that illusory quality. It's solidly constructed, competently built, but does nothing to differentiate itself in any meaningful way from the rest of the AAA chaff. It's a cheap imitation of better games with no self-awareness and not understanding of what made those games good in the first place. If someone were to tell me that the Darksiders games were created entirely by AI algorithms, I wouldn't believe them—but I'd be tempted to.

And so here I am at the end of my time with Darksiders 2, forced to say exactly the same thing I said after my time with the first Darksiders: this game does not deserve my condemnation, or anyone's condemnation. Nor does it deserve praise. Darksiders 2 is not a bad game, but also not a good game either. It is an utterly shallow and pointless product of inoffensive entertainment media that ultimately contrives nothing worthy or yout time or attention.