Now Playing: The Talos Principle

“Thirty quid for an indie puzzle game? That seems a bit steep.” That was my reaction when The Talos Principle launched on PC back in 2014. In an era of shorter games at smaller prices, this was an outlier – I didn’t realise quite how substantial it would turn out to be. So here I am, eight years and several discounts later, finally playing this comprehensive (and wonderfully mysterious) first-person puzzler.

Cubes, pressure buttons, forcefields, lasers and a disembodied voice telling you what to do… it’s like Portal, but outdoors.

Developed by Croteam, the Croatian studio behind the fast-paced Serious Sam games, The Talos Principle takes a step back from shooting and puts you in the body of a peaceful humanoid robot, solving mind-bending spatial logic puzzles. There are no weapons, nothing to shoot, no hordes of enemies swarming around you – in fact, it’s predominantly a lonely experience, set within a strange world that appears to be made of ancient ruins, castles, cathedrals and coastlines… but all is not as it appears.

Signposts helpfully point you in the direction of solved and unsolved puzzle rooms.

An all-powerful voice, calling itself Elohim, guides you through the many puzzle rooms. You are evidently a robot (the game’s optional third-person camera can demonstrate that) and there are no human people around, but you can also communicate to another entity through various computer terminals scattered throughout the levels. It becomes apparent early on that the world you’re in is not entirely real, but what’s really happening is something you learn gradually by reading fragments of computer archives and talking to the other entities. It would spoil things to say any more and it’s a much better experience if you know little or nothing about it beforehand, and interpret things in your own way.

An ominous tower greets you near the start of the game, but making your way to the top of it will take a long time. Also it’s forbidden, don’t go up there.

There is one large hub world, in which three buildings each lead to smaller hubs containing portals to seven ‘gardens’, and each of these gardens contains between three and six puzzle rooms. So that’s quite a lot of content in itself. Puzzles involve combinations of obstacles, but usually require you to open forcefields or clear a path to the objective, which is a ‘sigil’ – a Tetris-style block. Collect enough of these sigils and you can piece them together (by way of another puzzle) to open doors to new areas, to access new sets of sigils to open new doors, etcetera, and so on.

Sigils become pieces of increasingly complex block puzzles that open new doors. You will become utterly sick of them eventually.

A typical puzzle room might involve setting up a laser beam reflector to connect an emitter to a receiver. Most forcefield doors and other devices require a trigger like this to open them, and working out how to connect a series of beams around corners and over walls becomes a regular challenge. Or you might have to use an electrical ‘jammer’ to disable a gun turret (the only guns in the game, it must be said) or an exploding drone. Jammers can also disable forcefields, but only one at a time and you have to put them down first, so if you want to reuse one, you might want a second one to hold the forcefield open on the other side while picking up the first one to use it somewhere else. These sorts of navigational conundrums make up a significant portion of the challenge.

Laser beams can be connected across great distances but must not cross over one another.

There are weighted cubes, large buttons and other contraptions too. These are not especially original ideas but the competence in which the game uses them is exemplary. Later on you can use devices that completely change how you think about things, and it combines them all in clever ways that escalate the challenge gradually. Solving these puzzles is very satisfying, but if you do get stuck, there isn’t much you can do other than try a different puzzle and come back to it later. Technically, there’s a built-in hint system but it’s quite obtuse and first requires a detour to… somewhere that I can’t explain easily. Again, I don’t want to give away any clues here because it’s one of those games that’s so much better when you discover things for yourself, when you think you’ve broken the game open and are rewarded by something the designer put in there to justify your perseverance.

These shiny things are usually tantalisingly out of reach.

You can complete the main suite of puzzles in under twenty hours (or less if you’re particularly clever!) but there’s a lot more to the game than that. You will have to decide whether to break some rules and explore places you’re told not to. You can also collect ‘stars’, which are extremely rare and difficult items scattered throughout the game. While each puzzle room is ostensibly self-contained (purple energy barriers and high walls prevent moving objects between them), learning to connect elements from multiple rooms to solve other separate puzzles becomes essential to collecting stars. Again, it’s best to find this out first-hand because it’s very satisfying. I wasn’t able to fully complete the game and reach the third and final ending without the help of an online guide, but I did get pretty close by myself. I would generally encourage self-discovery as far as possible and don’t give up until you’re totally stuck. In my playthrough, I also found some secret rooms that appeared to have no purpose other than being mysterious secret rooms, which is pretty cool. I’m sure there’s more in the game that I still haven’t discovered.

Sometimes there’s a particular trick to using the gadgets that makes the whole puzzle fall into place.

I played this on the Nintendo Switch (a 2019 port), which has its positives and negatives. It’s great to have a game like this on a portable system so you can dip in and out easily. However, the game’s graphics prove a little too demanding for the Switch to handle. Even in performance mode, the framerate is inconsistent and not particularly smooth. Distant details fade in and out as you move nearer/further, and the game seems to employ ‘occlusion culling’ – a technique that hides parts of the scenery that aren’t visible. The problem is, this culling is a little too aggressive and you can actually see those bits of scenery popping in and out of existence as you move around corners. It can get away with it to some extent, because there’s also an intentional flickering effect on the walls and scenery, showing this to be a virtual world that’s falling apart, and all the graphical anomalies sort of mingle together, but it isn’t always pleasing to the eyes.

Computer terminals offer guidance, storytelling, fragments of philosophy and much more. If I would make one suggestion, turn the text size up to the maximum – a game designed to be played on a high-resolution monitor is difficult to read on a 6.2-inch handheld screen.

Also included in this version is ‘Road To Gehenna’, an expansion pack /mini-sequel with an epilogue style story and ingenious new puzzle rooms. There’s also a short demo, which is just a quick puzzle to demonstrate how the game works. It’s a good package, despite its technical shortcomings, and after playing it for more than fifty hours, I guess this one wasn’t so steeply priced after all. Whatever platform you have access to, this gets a solid recommendation from me.

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Now Playing: Valiant Hearts – The Great War

The centenary of World War 1 brought about an increase in media related to the subject. I myself performed in a local stage production of Journey’s End, which I found both emotional and educational. Around the same time, Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old brought incredible new life to archive footage and audio recordings of real soldiers. In the world of videogames, Electronic Arts released (the somewhat crass) Battlefield 1 to the market, but it was Ubisoft’s Valiant Hearts: The Great War, two years prior, that set a more appropriate tone for such a thorny subject.

Trench warfare provides a backdrop for much of the game.

Developed by French studio Ubisoft Montpellier, Valiant Hearts is a side-scrolling adventure game that uses their UbiArt framework, the engine that powered Rayman Origins. It has a distinct visual style, incorporating hand-drawn pieces of vector art to create chunky characters with sketchy outlines and present everything through layers of parallax scrolling. It’s a style that works well to show both over-the-top comic style scenes and stylishly dramatic tableaus. To be clear, this is a fairly serious game that shows the horrors of war on all sides through the lens of four different characters, but it does have some moments of levity and the occasional bit of over-the-top action too.

The driving sections are a little bit silly.

Principally, you move through different locations across chapters spanning three years of the war, solving simple puzzles, playing basic mini-games or working out how to get from A to B. You can pick up objects to use, but only one at a time, so the puzzle-solving rarely gets more complex than you might find in a Lego game or something, and if you die at any point, you’re instantly put back to your most recent checkpoint. There are hints available if you get stuck but I never needed to use them, and the game is not especially long. What it does rather well is give you all the clues you need visually. Other characters don’t really talk (except in cutscenes) so you follow simple speech bubble instructions or look for visual clues in the environment. A lot of the game requires the use of a dog named Walt, to whom you can give instructions like picking up items or pushing levers. And yes, there is a Pet The Dog button.

Good boy.

Valiant Hearts is not a particularly complex or difficult game and its compelling attributes are its story and themes. It manages to tread a fine line between having fun, telling a fictional story and being horrified by the reality of history. The game is broadly historically accurate and even includes real photos and facts from the war, as well as hidden collectible artifacts. But it also focuses on individual feats of bravery, heroism, sacrifice and friendship. Its weakest plot element is probably the fictional villain, Baron Von Dorf, who it uses as a focus of the narrative. The game shows the violence and horror of war without forcing the player to take a part in that violence, which is probably the most appropriate way to make a game about World War 1, and I would say this is well worth playing for anyone who likes history, simple puzzle-adventure games or just looking at lovely animated artwork. It’s a bit emotional too.

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Now Playing: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Not to get all nostalgic or anything, but Mario Kart used to be a game about Mario characters racing go-karts. Technical limitation lent itself to flat surfaces, a small number of karts and relatively simple handling. Over time, the series emerged into three-dimensions, added new types of cars and bikes, added other Nintendo characters, and made the tracks go underwater and through the air. With few exceptions, every iteration has built on the previous one, adding more and more. However much I enjoyed Mario Kart 7 previously, I did yearn for a return to the simple karting days.

To get a speed boost at the start of a race, hit the gas on or immediately after the second light. You’re welcome!

However, Mario Kart 8 takes everything from 7 and adds yet another dimension. This time, each track has an anti-gravity section where your vehicle’s wheels become Back to the Future-style hover thrusters and you can loop upside-down, drive up walls, corkscrew twist and so on, making the track design the craziest it’s ever been. Even the tracks from previous games have had small adjustments to add hover sections here and there, although it’s usually just to send you up a bit of a slope. You would think this would all be disorienting, but when you’re upside-down or driving up a vertical wall, you don’t particularly realise. The camera follows you and the track appears in front of you as normal, so it’s not much different – aside from colliding with other karts giving you a speed boost. As a feature, it’s… underwhelming.

These ghosts are driving me up the wall!

What Mario Kart does particularly well, however, is in making each increase in speed and difficulty seem so natural. At 50cc, the game is a slow race without challenge, but a nice opportunity to look at the views. At 100cc, the game feels a little faster and the other racers more aggressive. Sliding and boosting around corners is fun but the game is still fairly easy. At 150cc, the game seems like the perfect balance of speed, handling and track design. Every turn seems perfectly built to squeeze in your drifts, boosts and jumps. When going up to the new 200cc mode, then, it first seems like the speed has displaced that perfect balance, the game has broken itself and become a slippery disaster at every bend. Only when learning how to ‘drift-brake’, and avoid over-boosting, does the game begin to feel normal yet again and a brand new layer of skill reveals itself. It’s a remarkably good piece of design.

Of the new courses, Cloudtop Cruise is my favourite.

The element of randomness rears its head again in Mario Kart 8. While you can drive perfectly, you are always at the mercy of the other racers and their weapons. A blue shell smashed into you right before you cross the finish line is always an absolute pain and there’s little you can do to avoid it. In Mario Kart 7, you could actually use the lower screen to see when another racer had the blue shell, intentionally drop back into second place and let the new leader take the hit, then accelerate ahead again. There’s no such tactic here, but some items do let you escape the blast if you time them correctly. You can also drag shells and banana peels behind you to stop smaller projectiles from hitting you, but again you have to make sure you’ve got them, which you can’t always guarantee. This randomness is supposed to make multiplayer games more fun and unpredictable, levelling the playing field by giving players at the back better power-ups, but in single-player it can be occasionally frustrating.

The blue shell is only given to the racer at the back, so it doesn’t actually help them get ahead, it just helps the racer in second place get ahead.

That’s my only major criticism with the game, however. On the whole, this is a marvellous and fun racing game. The handling is excellent, as are the new tracks, it has a great collection of spruced up old tracks, it runs incredibly smoothly while looking amazing, and this ‘Deluxe’ version has got loads of extras, Zelda, F-Zero and Animal Crossing tracks and characters, battle mode and more. I haven’t quite completed 100% of everything yet, but I’ve got a gold trophy in all Grand Prix events, unlocked Gold Mario and will continue to win more stars and coins in the GP. There are even more tracks available as a paid extra, but I’ll probably wait until next year when they’ve all been released. This is one of those ‘long-tail’ games that will be supported for a while rather than replaced with a sequel – and to be honest, what else could a new Mario Kart game add at this point?

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January games (2022)

I thought I would continue writing about the console and PC games that I’m playing this year, but compile them into longer monthly reviews instead of individual posts. Let’s take a look at what I played (and mostly finished) in January.

Lego City Undercover – PC – 2017 (2013)
Lego games have been a hit since the perfect marriage of Lego and Star Wars in 2005, but for my money, none of the subsequent games have captured that same magic. There’s something special about using little lego lightsabers and moving bricks around with the power of the force, not to mention the adorable way the stories were told through wordless pantomime.

Still, I’ve enjoyed the Lego Batman games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Marvel Superheroes, Pirates and more. Lego City Undercover is the first one I’ve played that isn’t based on an existing franchise – it’s based purely on the Lego City toy line. You play as Chase McCain, an undercover cop who has to take down a villain called Rex Fury. As you play through multiple stages, you gain new ‘costumes’ and can turn into a builder, fireman, robber, farmer, etc. There’s also an open-world city to explore, filled with vehicles, collectibles and smaller tasks.

The city seems quite small at first; it’s only when you start collecting things in it that you realise how dense it is.

Because it doesn’t have any recognisable imagery or scenes to fall back on, Lego City Undercover has to rely on its script, which is very good and genuinely funny, while still being family-friendly. It also riffs on a lot of popular movies, scenes and dialogue in funny ways. I think it shows that Lego games don’t have to be based on existing properties if they’re well-written enough in their own right.

Slap handcuffs on bad guys to stop them. Alternatively, you can just hit them more.

This game was originally a Nintendo Wii U-exclusive before it got released on all formats four years later. This newer version has added a two-player co-op mode (conspicuously absent from the original) although this feels like an afterthought as both players control a version of Chase McCain. I finished the story levels in about ten hours, but the free play and the extra stuff around the city takes a whole lot longer. This is the most ‘stuffed’ Lego game I’ve ever played, and even I had to eventually admit defeat at around the 90% complete mark because it was sucking the life out of me. You can watch my playthrough and freeplay highlights on Youtube, because I recorded the whole thing.

What Remains of Edith Finch – Playstation 4 – 2017
I’ve played a few of these so-called ‘walking simulators‘ recently – first-person games without the shooting, usually focusing on storytelling and exploring spaces. This one is about a girl who returns to an old family mansion to read the stories of her deceased relatives who died in mysterious ways. It’s only a couple of hours long, but it’s excellent and heart-wrenching.

There is a tremendous amount of detail in every scene and it looks incredible.

It’s a strongly ‘directed’ experience, always pushing you towards the next part of the narrative. In fact, you quite literally follow the story as the words and dialogue are integrated into the environment, forming and disappearing in front of you. The lead character, Edith, grew up in this house but was not allowed inside the sealed rooms of her great-aunts, uncles and other relatives after their strange deaths. Conveniently, their rooms have been left undisturbed while the family moved into different rooms and even expanded the house to accommodate new arrivals. As Edith, you access these rooms through long-forgotten secret corridors and compartments, and find diaries, photos and other memorabilia that explain how these people died. Each of them appears to have a supernatural element to it, as though the family is cursed, but whether they’re real or just stories is left up to interpretation. At any rate, they’re quite sad.

Subtitles always appear where you’re looking.

Each character’s vignette usually encompasses some new type of gameplay, and how you interact with it is left up to your own experimentation and discovery. I won’t go into any more detail because that would spoil something that is best experienced first-hand. I would love to see more games like this (I know there are a few) and I thoroughly recommend What Remains of Edith Finch, but if you do play it for the first time, maybe have a tissue handy.

Superliminal – Playstation 4 – 2020 (2019)
When Valve Software released Portal in 2007, it set off a wave of copycats – first-person puzzle games set in strange facilities with disembodied voices giving you instructions. At first, Superliminal feels like it desperately wants to be Portal as you progress through test chambers and an emotionless AI congratulates you. But as it progresses, it starts doing its own thing and, by the end, it’s a very different game. It actually started to remind me of The Stanely Parable, with all its repetition through cubicles and weird level design loops. But this uses the pretext that everything is a dream and therefore perception is reality.

Pick up this model house and put it down further away, and it becomes bigger. You will then be smaller when you go inside it. Yes, this will all make perfect sense when you play it!

The puzzles all involve ‘perspective’, whether it’s playing with object sizes or viewing angles or duplication or teleporting – it’s got loads of ideas and it keeps throwing new ones at you. There were a couple of times where I felt the solution was overly fiddly (I’m thinking of a certain room with a keyhole and two movable portals) and the game doesn’t really explain anything if you get stuck, you just have to keep trying things – but it’s really fun and fascinating to just play around with some of these ‘toys’. There’s some really clever stuff going on that I can’t even begin to imagine how they designed it! By the end section, I was lasping (laugh-gasping) every few minutes as each new weird thing happened. Definitely check this out if you liked Portal, The Stanely Parable or just atmospheric and clever first-person games. You can clear it in a long evening too, as I did in the below video.

Untited Goose Game – Nintendo Switch – 2019
“It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.”
I don’t know whether the developers of Untitled Goose Game really like geese, or really hate them. Either way, they perfectly capture the nature of the goose with its nonchalant waddle, aggressive wing-flapping and piercing HONK! As for the name – apparently it was the working title and it just stuck.

Sometimes you have to steal things to create a distraction. Other times, it’s just funny.

If I were to categorise Untitled Goose Game, I would call it’s a stealth-based sandbox puzzle game. It’s set in a small location with a handful of characters who follow a routine and react to scenarios with a degree of predictability that makes them ripe for manipulating. You have to do a series of tasks, often while hiding from people. These can involve stealing their stuff, running off with items of their clothing, or making them fall over… but the more elaborate tasks are even funnier and I won’t spoil them. It’s not a long game but it’s a good one. If you ever wanted to focus your creativity into being incredibly mean to people going about their business, then this will have you cackling with evil delight. Or honking, I suppose.

KING HONK!
#UntitledGooseGame #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/WnuLH5x0Jp

— Daniel James (@danieljames1982) January 18, 2022

One Finger Death Punch 2 – PC – 2019
Back in 2015, I played a delightfully silly fighting game on the Xbox 360 called One Finger Death Punch. The premise was simple: you have one button to attack on the left and another to attack on the right. Hordes of matchstick men martial artists come running towards you from both sides and you have to fend them off by pressing the buttons at the right time, resulting in hilariously violent and brutal kung-fu moves and literally hundreds and casualties per level. Because the game’s art is so abstract, it could get away with that sort of violence and play for laughs, and it was genuinely hilarious.

Hyaah, whaa!! Pow!! Kyaaii! Cha-pow!!

I didn’t think the idea had legs to sustain an entire game, let alone a sequel, but the developer released another one in 2019, predictably called One Finger Death Punch 2. Honestly, it’s been so long that I can’t really tell what’s new with this one. I think some of the enemy types are different and the game structure was altered, but essentially it’s more of the same. It’s not a game you would want to sit and play for hours, but as an occasional break, it makes for a perfect arcadey unwinding session. Smacking stickmen about is cathartic, and the game has a snappy rhythm to it that is not far removed from the sort of music games I used to play a lot of. You can really get ‘in the zone’, although I tend to find that I stop seeing the fighting animations and just see the attack bars at the bottom, which sort of defeats the object. Nevertheless, this is a fun game and worth checking out.

And that’s everything I’ve played and finished in January. I’ve got some longer games on the back-burner so February will no doubt be a quieter month. Let me know if you’ve enjoyed this longer format blog, check out my YouTube channel, and if you’ve got any game recommendations, I’m all ears.

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Now Playing: Super Mario Odyssey

Super Mario Odyssey has a lot to live up to. It follows a lineage that began with Mario 64 and continued with Mario Sunshine and Mario Galaxy (all of which were re-released for the Switch recently). This is Nintendo’s mainline 3D Mario title, its flagship production to shift consoles and keep its mascot in the top spot. Let’s just say it has some big shoes to fill… or in this case, some big hats.

New Donk City was featured heavily in the promotional material but is just one of eighteen Kingdoms in the game.

Odyssey was released in 2017, so I’m a little late to the party, but good things come to those who wait and thankfully it’s pretty bloody great! Every Mario title has some interesting or inventive new mechanic and in Odyssey it’s ‘Cappy’, a hat that Mario can throw at enemies and some objects to ‘inhabit’ them and take on their abilities. From Goombas to dinosaurs, cutlery and statues, everything Mario can inhabit has some unique ability that plays into the design of the levels. This allows the levels to be quite open and large, while still offering specific challenges around them.

These checkpoint flags provide shortcuts around each Kingdom.

Mario is nimble and fun to control, the levels are beautifully designed, it’s full of imagination and variety, the environments are gorgeous and it’s the kind of game you can just sit and play and not realise the hours have flown by. You can leave each Kingdom once you’ve found enough Power Moons for your airship, or you can stick around and collect some more. And there are a lot to collect, that’s for sure.

Mario and Cappy’s airship, the Odyssey.

Some design modernisations have slipped in, such as the removal of the ‘lives’ system. Some will probably welcome this as it’s long been seen as an archaic throwback to Mario’s older games. Instead, when you die, you lose a few coins – which is a fair penalty because coins are now needed to buy things like hints, costumes and even Power Moons themselves.

There are 8-bit retro sections built directly into the levels.

This leads to my main criticism of the game: the amount of Power Moons seems ludicrous. There are (apparently) a grand total of 999, though you need significantly less than that to see the ending of the game. However, if you’re somewhat obsessive and want to get them all, this will mean doing the same or similar challenges multiple times in each Kingdom, repeating boss fights, or just finding the damn things lying around, buried in the ground or sold in shops. In previous games, there was something special about finding a Star, Shine or whatever. The Moons in Odyssey are just too numerous to feel special and it feels kind of cynical and cheap. A focus on quality over quantity would have done the game a world of good. My other criticism would be about the suitability of motion controls when playing in handheld mode, but they’re usually optional and therefore pretty minor.

The bosses are really good fun and well-animated.

Overall, then? Odyssey is better than Sunshine but not as good as Galaxy. A fine entry in the series nevertheless but I’m still waiting for a ‘Universe’ to knock my socks off. My final tally (at the point of giving up) was 533 moons and I got through the (final?) Darker Side level by the skin of my teeth. Fun times!

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Now Playing: INSIDE

Indie developer Playdead’s successor to LIMBO follows in a very similar vein to that monochrome puzzle/platformer. You play as a young boy in a strange place, but instead of this being the afterlife, it’s a rather more bleak reality, in which grown-ups and dogs are chasing you, people are being herded into trucks and then… well, I don’t want to spoil it. I had no idea what the game was about going into it and that’s the best way to experience it. It’s 3 – 4 hours of absolute magnificence, going from rural forests, through farms to factories and beyond. It’s haunting, evocative, moody, the soundtrack/soundscape is incredible. It’s genuinely the most strikingly beautiful game I think I’ve ever seen. Forget Unreal Engine, this is absolute art.

There are some stealth sections but they’re basic and just a matter of timing.

As in most puzzle-platformers, you generally walk from left to right on a 2D plane, but INSIDE uses 3D graphics to build its world and uses that extra depth to great effect, often using the background as the source of a pursuer or showing some important information or storytelling. Like LIMBO before it, the controls are very simple but very intuitive and tactile. You learn through play and experimentation, with no dialogue, cutscenes, tutorials, on-screen prompts or anything else to take you out of its world. The game doesn’t linger on any particular puzzle mechanic for long, it doesn’t drag an idea out to breaking point. It teaches you what you can do and then gradually changes things up. There is a little trial-and-error, learning through dying and repeating sections in the style of games like Another World, but these usually give you some warning and there’s no real punishment for getting killed.

So much of the story is told through the environment. These outskirts remind me of Half-Life 2. Bleak, unsettling and mysterious.

To say the game gets kinda weird at the end would be an understatement… but it’s so, so good. You really just have to play it without any preconception, preferably with the lights off and headphones on. Playdead have a style and formula that has me hooked, and I will definitely be checking out whatever they come up with next. INSIDE may just be the best game I have played this year.

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Playing all the Dooms – Part 2

Doom 64

No, I didn’t just skip 61 Doom games. Doom 64 was the first and only Doom game made for the Nintendo 64 console back in 1997. I had always assumed that this was simply an N64 port of Doom (much like the PlayStation, Saturn and other console ports), but it’s actually a brand new game, developed specifically for the console, and can be considered a sequel to Doom II.

Many of the enemies look like they’re made from plasticine.

Firstly, it looks very different. The garish colours and pixel art from the previous games are gone. Doom 64 is dark and moody, its enemies grotesque CGI rendered sprites, its lighting and sound effects dynamic and atmospheric, and the tone of the game is more of a horror or sci-fi horror that actually feels closer to Doom 3 (more on that later). There’s almost no music, either, just loads of eerie soundscapes.

Doom 64 uses coloured lighting to differentiate areas and create mood.

All of the enemies and weapons are brought back but updated, and the guns in particular now sound incredible – the chaingun feels like it’s trying to rip a hole in the universe and everything reverberates based on the type of room you’re in. My only complaint is that the reload animations are so poor they seem like they’re missing.

These big fellas make a lovely noise when you shoot them.

Doom 64 is a little bit easier, at least on the default difficulty setting, and most of my deaths came from boobytraps and pits, often quite unfairly. You can save anywhere and I strongly recommend it. Maybe it’s different on the higher difficulties, but you don’t get overwhelmed or surrounded quite so often, at least not until the final level, which is… just ridiculous.

I like the plasma gun.

Overall, this is another uncomplicated and satisfying shooter. Depsite some technical issues on the Switch, it feels very ‘solid’, has a nice feel to control and shooting hell demons into bloody pulps is strangely satisfying. It doesn’t really push the series forward, this is still not a proper 3D game as it uses 2D maps with elevation but no up or down aiming. Basically, it just feels like Doom in a moody new style. Things wouldn’t move on properly for a few years yet…

Doom 3

Ah, Doom 3. Back in 2004, this was at the absolute cutting edge of computer game graphics. Games hadn’t really made use of realtime lighting, shadows, bump and specular mapping in the way this game did. It needed a decent PC at the time, but it looked incredible.

Early enemies are little more than shuffling zombies.

Essentially a reboot, Doom 3 puts you in the shoes of the mute marine who arrives on a Mars research facility to find that all Hell has broken loose – literally. It’s a very different game from the old style ones, in feel, tone and pacing. There’s more story and build-up. This is a slow-paced survival horror where you rarely fight more than one or two monsters at a time. It’s not especially difficult (at least not on the default setting) however it is tough to play for long periods due to how relentlessly bleak and stressful it is.

Finding dead people’s PDAs can reveal emails and audio logs containing codes to open weapon lockers, as well as providing backstory and a creepy tone.

This is, unfortunately, not a particularly fun game. The thrill of blasting hell demons is diminished by the realities of early 2000s shooter design. Not only do you have to reload your weapon and recharge your torch, but the aiming is very twitchy (at least on the Switch version, which does not have the gyroscopic aim-assistance the previous games have). I lost count of the number of times I accidentally crouched when trying to run away, got stuck against a bit of scenery or couldn’t climb a ladder properly. Things were simpler in the older games. It’s not that I think slow-paced horror games shouldn’t exist, but maybe Doom shouldn’t have been one. Around the same time as this originally came out for PC, other games like Serious Sam and Painkiller were doing Doom-style shooters better. Faster, lots of enemies, shorter levels and no nonsense thrills. Even at the time, I found Doom 3 disappointing.

Enemies will often teleport in front of you… or behind you.

One of the less popular design decisions in the original 2004 release was that you could not use the torch at the same time as using a gun, and given how ridiculously dark everything is, you had to decide whether to see where you’re going or prepare for an attack, but not both. It was an interesting idea to increase tension but annoying as hell. This was changed in the ‘BFG Edition’ (on which the Switch version is based) so now you can use the torch at any time, but it still requires recharging every few seconds.

This guy’s back, and he’s still annoying.

I don’t get on well with scary games at the best of times, so this was always going to be an uphill struggle. At least I actually finished the main campaign this time, having abandoned the PC version years prior. There’s also an expansion included called Resurrection of Evil, but I simply didn’t enjoy Doom 3 enough to want to play it. I may play the two recent-ish sequels and complete the set at some point, but for now I’m done with Doom. Onto nicer things…

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Now Playing: Sonic Mania (Plus!)

It seems like so long ago that the very idea of a Sega mascot appearing on a Nintendo console was pure fantasy, because they seem like such a natural fit now. I’ve actually played Sonic Mania several times on the PC, but the idea of portable classic Sonic was too appealing to pass up during the latest Nintendo Switch eShop sale, so… here I am again.

If you don’t know what Sonic Mania is, it’s basically the sequel to Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) that we should have got in 1995 or thereabouts, except it came out in 2017 after a slew of abysmal Sonic sequels and spin-offs. After some talented Sonic modders calling themselves ‘Taxman’ and ‘Stealth’ successfully pitched their rebuilt classic Sonic games to Sega for release on smart devices, Sega let them take a shot at a brand new game. Well, mostly brand new – of its twelve zones, four of them are completely original, while the other eight are old zones given a lick of paint and brand new layouts. Sonic Mania takes the series’ classic 2D platforming gameplay, jazzes it up with prettier pixel art (and Saturn-esque 3D bits) and presents a convincing continuation of the Megadrive and MegaCD classic franchise, as if it’s been dug out of a lost archive. These folks understand Sonic inside out, and it shows.

Elemental shields now interact with the environment, such as this fire shield setting a wooden spiked pole ablaze.

I’ve always enjoyed the simplicity of classic Sonic. No life bars, no weapons or multiple buttons to worry about – just collect rings to stay alive and throw yourself around courses made of loops and slopes and traps, picking up speed wherever possible. Seek out special stages and you can win magical emeralds, seven of which combine to give you superpowers. In previous games, it was fairly easy to access these special stages, but Sonic Mania really forces you to fight against the natural flow of the levels, force yourself backwards to search every nook and cranny for a secret room or a breakable wall that you would otherwise miss. I’ve been through this game several times and I still forget where the giant rings are located!

The Special Stages combine elements from all previous games and are really good.

The trifecta of playable characters, distinct in blue, orange and red, make their return to the base version of Sonic Mania, while a relatively obscure armadillo and flying squirrel pad the roster to five for the game’s ‘Plus’ expansion pack. Mighty and Ray offer some minor differences in gameplay – the former is resistant to spikes and most projectiles when curled into a ball (essentially offering a ‘slightly easier’ mode), while the latter offers a more skillful flight capability. Other than that, they’re not much different from playing as Sonic or Tails. On the other hand, Knuckles has new routes, bosses and secrets open to him, making his path through the game different enough to be worth an extra go.

Encore mode starts with an expanded Angel Island intro level and a couple of new characters to rescue.

The ‘Plus’ expansion (downloadable add-on content) also added a new mode to make use of those extra characters. In the new ‘Encore’ mode, you play as all five characters, two at a time, switching to the next in the queue if/when one dies. The levels are remixed to make them harder, as are the Special Stages. It’s a more challenging and ultimately more interesting way to play the game when the regular levels have become stale and repetitive.

Of the four new zones, Mirage Saloon is my favourite.

I really like Sonic Mania and consider it a very strong entry in the series, with some aspects becoming my favourites (such as its special stages and ‘super’ music). However, on the whole, it isn’t different enough or epic enough to surpass what I consider to be the high point (1994’s Sonic 3 & Knuckles – or, more accurately, the fan-patched version known as Sonic 3 Complete) – it is a little too reliant on nostalgia and fan service and doesn’t take things in a particularly new direction. It’s more of a ‘greatest hits’ collection, with some new bits in it. Beautifully done, of course, but a brand new top-to-bottom game would have been preferable.

This boss fight was added in a patch – the original version was not very good.

It’s a curious one, though, because it came out around the time that fans expected a Sonic 3 remake to be released – there was a working prototype and it looked great, but Sega didn’t pick it up (for various reasons). So then Sonic Mania happened and there’s loads of bits and pieces from Sonic 3 scattered throughout it – not least of which its substantial Blue Spheres bonus stages, but the opening section is Angel Island, the Stardust Speedway level has multiple accoutrements from the Marble Garden Zone, and Press Garden Act 2 is frozen over like the Ice Cap Zone, weirdly. Well, whatever the reason, it looks like Sonic 3 is coming back in remastered form after all, as part of next year’s Origins Collection – which, obviously, I’m going to have to purchase on at least two systems.

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Now Playing: The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Everyone told me it was good, and they weren’t kidding.

Wake up, Link!

Nintendo has been rather conservative with their much-loved Zelda franchise, ever since Ocarina of Time reinvented it in 3D in 1998 (and I’ve played pretty much all of them). Breath of the Wild is the first since then that I can genuinely say feels like a generational leap, a much needed ‘breath’ of fresh air. This is an open-world game where the open world isn’t smoke and mirrors. Sprawling landscapes and distant landmarks aren’t just segmented arenas with bitmaps pasted onto the walls, these mountains and castles and hills in the distance are actually there, part of a fully modelled environment that you can actually explore in its entirety. And you can climb everything, even things that you assume you shouldn’t climb. Take shortcuts, try to break the game, do what you want – and live with the consequences. It takes it all in its stride and gives you more.

That smoking Death Mountain in the distance isn’t just a static image pasted onto an invisible wall, it’s a fully modelled and integrated part of an utterly enormous map.

For me, this game feels like an attempt to replicate the open-ness and ‘work it out yourself’ feel of the original Legend of Zelda on the NES – it doesn’t hold your hand, it lets you tackle the quest in any order you want, it rewards experimentation, and the sense of discovery is natural and rewarding. It also lets you fail in a way Nintendo games often don’t – it feels more like an RPG in that your equipment has numerical values and you could just blunder into situations you aren’t prepared for, battered by monsters far stronger than you, or confronted with landscapes you lack the stamina to climb.

While you aren’t explicitly prevented from going anywhere after the Great Plateau, some areas are much easier to explore when you have the means to survive the climate.

This is an enormous game – the size of the map is mind-bogglingly huge – yet, it feels like a cohesive whole, like a genuine wilderness with varied climates that fit together believably. Wondering how to survive the elements as I pass through different climates, getting nearer and nearer to the ominous Hyrule Castle as I pass back and forth doing other quests, knowing that I will eventually be returning there for the endgame. Wondering how to reach each Sheikah Tower as I map out paths through mountains and over hills, or try to avoid enemy camps. Remarkably, it’s possible to bypass most of this and go straight to the end (although good luck with that), which for a Nintendo game is pretty ‘wild’.

The four Divine Beasts act as the game’s main ‘dungeons’, complete with boss fights, while the much smaller Shrines scattered throughout the world present single-room challenges.

If I had any criticism, it’s that the sheer number of side quests is overwhelming and they’re often not very rewarding (“I climbed all the way up this mountain and all I got was this lousy rupee”). The Shrines are great, the Divine Beasts are excellent (think Shadow of the Colossus, but even bigger), and the plot is surprisingly touching (a little voice acting can improve the franchise – who knew?), but it’s not a game I would like to play through again from scratch. The idea of starting over and doing all of that again is not appealing. I got a little bit addicted by the end just trying to mop up my quest log and find as many clothing ingredients as I could, which started to make the game feel like a chore. I also had to resort to Google a few times to find things that I simply would never have found without help, such is the sheer scale of the map, and although I definitely didn’t find everything, it still took me over nintey hours!

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Now Playing: Animal Crossing New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released at an opportune moment in history. With many people stuck indoors and a global pandemic raging, the chance to escape to a make-believe tropical island that you can share with your friends was absolutely ideal. It’s no wonder the game sold so well!

KK Slider returns to entertain the islanders.

I didn’t start playing this one until a few months after it had been released, so I missed the buzz of the spring seasons and playing alongside the early-adopters – but I’ve played a few Animal Crossing games before, so I knew what to expect and that this would be a slow-burner. Like all Animal Crossing games, you’ll want to play for short sessions over a long period of time. It’s easy to run out of things to do early on, get bored and frustrated and give up – but it’s the ideal game to dip into, complete daily activities and make some creative choices.

Halloween was one of the first seasonal activities we got to enjoy.

The biggest change in New Horizons (aside from the tropical island location) is the ability to display any items outdoors. This has opened up boundless possibilities for island decoration and has led to some incredibly creative feats. Personally, I like to keep the rustic island aesthetic intact, but we have adorned our tropical paradise with plenty of fun things outdoors like cafés, classrooms, gyms, cinemas, campsites and swimming pools. There are loads of other new features, many of which are so small but so natural that you forget they weren’t in the previous games. And yet, in other ways, Animal Crossing is a series that evolves painfully slowly across the generations and can still feel archaic and awkward at times.

This is Bones. He is the cutest little thing ever.

I can’t honestly say I’ve ‘finished’ the game, because there’s still pieces of art left undonated to the museum, I haven’t got all the golden tools yet, and my Nook Achievements list still has plenty of blank spaces. However, it’s been nearly a year since I set up camp on this island and I’ve done almost everything I wanted to. I’ve bought everything I wanted, made my ideal house interior, done loads of events, had an in-game birthday party, watched fireworks, saw all the seasons roll around and curated a cute bunch of villagers. I’ve also completed my bug collection and am one fish away from a full Critterpedia list, thanks to some recent obsessive trips to other islands. I will still dip into it and dabble on special occasions, but I will wrap up my regularly daily play sessions before it starts to become more of a chore than a charm.

Love is…

For now, you can see a recent island tour video I put together.

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