Rayman 2 is a weird little game. It's of the 3D platform collectathon ilk that the N64 is remembered for, but it has Wild Tone Issues and a bizarrely expansive scope that it has no business having, but somehow pulls off. These aren't drawbacks. The bizarre tone, which ricochets between screwball comedy and deadly-serious apocalyptic drama, sometimes multiple times in the same minute, is not exactly high art, but personally, I thought it worked. It certainly leaves an impression. The scope is more interesting. The game feels both very big and agonizingly small. Some of the levels sprawl and sprawl, while others get you in and out in a mere couple of sections, and there's not a lot of exploration to be done. Aside from a few clever hidden rooms, a moderately curious explorer could find all the collectables in a couple of tries. And yet, the world feels enormous. The swamp goes and goes, changing elevations and taking two levels to cross. The sanctuaries of the masks feel like enormous abandoned temples of a forgotten deity. The pirate ship that floats through the sky is miles across. When Rayman and Globox plummet to the ground from the same place at different angles, they land miles and miles apart. The game takes breaks from the platforming to do ship-sailing and shell-flying that sends you spiraling through huge areas that would take fifteen minutes to cross on foot. The world is enormous. These two aspects of the game are what stuck with me and bring me back to compulsively replay it every few years. And playing it is not a chore. The platforming is a bit floaty, but satisfying, the collectables are fair and don't need ESP to find (except for that one secret lum and the two in the Fairy Glade that are only accessible from a different level, but yes), and the graphics are aging beautifully. A real treat to play, and exactly long enough to not overstay its welcome. Totally worth a playthrough.
A throwback to the old dungeon crawlers, most comparable to "Legend of Grimrock" these days, It's a good execution of the ideas - I wasn't a fan of Grimrock's "wandering preset encounters" idea, and Ludus Mortis' "movement attracts attention" encounter variant is much better in my opinion. Unlike Grimrock, Mortis is grindable - a big boon, considering how XP-intensive the game is. You can commit to a preferred party of four, or you can grind older dungeons and fill out your ludus with about fifteen different classes of fighter. The game starts slow with your party missing half their attacks and getting offed pretty easily, but as you level up, the game opens up with more interesting dungeons and cooler equipment and useful abilities that massively increase a fighter's usefulness. Huge fan of the customization, from the many classes down to the frequency of fights (low if you want to grind item chests, high if you want to grind XP). Also a fan of the risk/reward weighting (the longer your streak of fights without using the recovery statue, the higher your XP and money multiplier), as well as the tabletop influence (3d4 versus 2d8 damage is a more interesting choice than "4-8' versus "2-12". Artstyle is a bit scrappy, but in a fun way. It really feels like an old dungeon crawler with an HD mod attached, and that's a compliment. "Ancient Rome with Zombie Demons" is a fun setup. The only real heartbreaker is the gllitches. Most of them are navigable with a save-exit-reload (or a forced exit if you're unlucky), but I had two save files rendered permanently broken because stepping on a question-mark event tile at the same time as combat starting breaks the game and then saves it, but it's avoidable, so it doesn't damage the game too heavily for me. With patches, this could rise from a gem in the rough to just a plain old gem of a game.
It's a fun little time-eater, not very long and never too hard. While it encourages some out-of-the-box thinking (such as damaging your health with one item and then healing with another in order to have to pack neither), its concept ultimately limits itself - by level 30, the game is out of tricks, so you kind of coast to level 40. That said, I enjoyed myself, and it was certainly worth the pittance of a price. Worth getting if the idea of packing an inverntory tight appeals to you.
This is one of the rare times my nostalgia buzz actually undersold the game in question. Voyage, inspired by a Jules Verne novel, is a pleasant and highly whimsical adventure game with a ton of weird ideas of what we might find on the moon. It's weird, it's a bit incoherent, and it should be annoying, but somehow it all works rather delightfully. Bouncing around the moon is a bit of a gas, and finding your way into the strange caverns below is intriguing without being overwhelming. The game map is quite self-contained and all takes place in one particular crater, meaning that the game can spread its puzzles all over the place without backtracking becoming a problem. The game is brimming with little touches, such as the protagonist getting a bit tipsy with hiccups after a glass of wine and "cured" with a glass of water - you don't need to drink the wine at any point, it's just a fun detail - the various carvings you find have a helpful translation in the corner of the HUD once you have learned their meaning, endless supplies of certain objects encourage experimentation with fun results, etc. It's all the fun parts of an adventure game with comparitively very little frustration. There are death states, but they're undone with a click - highly welcome with some of the timed sequences being a touch too tight, but they never become annoying. As a young teen, I thought the game was a solid 4/5, but replaying it now, I'm bumping it up. It's a quintessential point-and-clicker, indulging in all the things that make adventure games fun and crafting a frankly unhinged story and absurd pseudoscience, and it's just plain fun to lose yourself in it. Totally worth it.
I really like it in a lot of ways. The additions and small changes were fun - I especially like that there's a Puzzle Randomizer available now. However, it has three main problems: -Day/night cycles have been removed -Rime is missing -The character models are disastrous If you're already a Myst fan and a Cyan supporter who wants to get a new take on the classic, this is a great buy and a lot of fun to add to your collection. If you're new to the franchise, though, I would direct you to the excellent realMyst Masterpiece (2014) instead.
On the one hand, this game has a lot of the things that made Schizm great. The environments look gorgeous for their time. There's a strange underlying intrigue. And when the puzzles are good, they're fantastic. However, it is often quite obtuse and there's some item hunting necessary. The environments aren't huge, so the pixel hunting isn't too bad, but it's there. And some of the puzzles are pretty poor and badly telegraphed (the Three Buttons puzzle springs to mind). And most importantly, hoo buddy, who on EARTH greenlit that ending? Plotwise, the game is fine. It starts kind of abruptly, but does a good job of keeping you invested and trying to move forward, even as the plot subtly changes up on you. Graphically, the game is pretty dang good - looks good (albeit a bit unnervingly smooth nowadays), has great world design, and the style changes are drastic enough to yank your attention. The game is also really atmospheric, and in an actually good way - every location is just removed from reality enough to stay completely foreign and somewhat unnerving. And lastly, the puzzles - the logic puzzles were a ton of fun and really satisfying. Some complained that the final puzzles at the end were too annoying and difficult, but I really enjoyed them - Reverse Towers of Hanoi is a fun concept, and I enjoyed sketching out the Eight Dot puzzles on a piece of paper and solving by hand. It awoke a lot of nostalgia. Unfortunately, the environmental puzzles were pretty bad across the board. Not enough clues given, illegible symbols, forced wandering, easy-to-miss information that you can get an hour past before having to go back and find it - yeah, I used a walkthrough, and didn't feel bad about it. But the ending, oh the ending... who greenlit that? It literally is designed to make the game worthless and to kill replay value. The good stuff in Reah is great, but man, did it turn sour.
I'm kind of at a loss for what to say, because this game is kind of flawless. It knows exactly what it wants to be - a metroidvania-inspired action-adventure game with pinball as its core mechanic - and goes on to execute it better than one could reasonably expect exploratory pinball to be. The mechanics are very simple - movement keys make you, a dung-beetle postmaster with a ball of usually-not-dung, roll your ball on low-grade surfaces or across water (the ball floats). If you encounter blue/yellow paddles and springboards, one of the Shift keys will spring them, letting you use special passages or enter "tables" where you can play a game of pinball for fruit (currency) or to open a new way forward. There's a few upgrades you can unlock, such as a fish that lets you dive underwater, or a kazoo that lets you summon people out of their houses/break things nearby. It does have a metroidvania feel to it without feeling too restrictive regarding where you can go. And it's fun! It's really, really fun. They really did an amazing job of polishing the gameplay to a shine, and the graphics and characters really feel part of the experience. The story is... cliche, but that makes it easier to abandon the story entirely and go hunt down the people with delayed parcels. The slow pace of walking (you're a beetle, after all) is offset by the exhilarating pinball mechanics and a brilliant fast-travel system. My best one-sentence description is this: Imagine if Rayman Origins was actually a set of pinball tables. Highly recommended at the asking price. Possibly my favorite game of 2018.
I really liked Big Pharma, but had a few issues with the minutiae in the game. But with this second round, Twice Circled comes back through swinging for the fences. The charm of Twice Circled's games, so far, is that they pick a small concept and execute it well. Megaquarium has a very simple conceit: Run a tourist aquarium. It's not complex, the finances are streamlined as hard as they possibly can be, and the only real thinking you have to do is "what will my aquarium's layout be?" and "which fish can I mix together in a tank without any tragedies happening?" There's not a lot of depth, but this game doesn't need it. There's an unexpectedly large array of fish (an improvement on Big Pharma's overly slim 15 ingredients) and tank types to put your fish into, as well as a good array of themes and decorations. There's no micromanagement, which is what lands it that fifth star for me. Everything takes care of itself as long as there's a worker with a food bin and sponge sink available. While you could just dump fish into their own tanks with no mixing of species (like a lot of aquariums in real life), you limit yourself a lot by doing that. Half the fun of this game is optimizing the resources you get from each tank (received by having the tank viewed by a customer), and instead of having three large identical fish, you can have complete ecosystems of six to ten fish that net you much more nature (needed to buy more fish) and science points (needed to get more advanced equipment). Obviously, different fish have different needs - one needs rocks and another needs plants, and one fish will eat a certain other species in the same tank - which is where the natural puzzle element comes in of trying to get the best mix of fish into the fewest, most impressive tanks possible. It's a great management game - relaxing, intuitive and fulfilling. It's guaranteeing that I'll be buying the next Twice Circled game on day one - they're turning out to be a gem of a dev.
I impulse-bought this one, because resource management and RPGs are both my jam. I thought it would be a low-key, fun little toy to play for a bit when I have half an hour to burn. It's... more than that. Graphically, it's very smooth and consistent, with a really nice art style. Nothing looks out of place, even the things in the game that are patently out of place (more on that later). Music is... repetitive, but the loops they've picked are charming and feels very in-place. The gameplay is very simple resource management - you have people, you have resource stations. Sometimes there are Darkest Dungeon-esque fights, sometimes there are special pick-your-own-adventure events while exploring. Something that will upset a lot of players - but is a big selling point for me - is that a lot of the game, especially the fighting, is risk management. There's an RNG, it doesn't like you, and it has its grubby fingers in everything you do. I love this sort of thing, but if you don't, skip this game. It's even most RNG-run than Darkest Dungeon, more on par with XCOM. I didn't think there'd be a particularly great story - the marketing blurb says "Twice as Long As Harry Potter", so I thought it would be a clumpy mess with too much detail. But no - it's a very simple and involving slice-of-life story so far about a family that fled their home and have to rely on each other to survive, with all the friction that brings. I very quickly started to care about the characters, which doesn't happen that often. Plus, the story has taken some weird turns in the first few hours I've played. Why is there a Roman missionary on this island, suddenly? (He's recruitable, as it turns out.) Why is there a naked blue lady with altogether too many cats sitting in the middle of a field, unconscious? I'm actually getting quite involved with the story, which I didn't expect. On the whole, I'm really impressed. It's a good game, buy it if you like the RNG risk management genre.
