hippochippies

Author: Zach Davis

  • Games of the Month – September 2017

    Games of the Month – September 2017

    So uh, wow. Right?

    This end-of-year-rush isn’t showing any signs of slowing, and it’s great! 2017 has been a wild year for games. I’m super pumped to see everybody’s end of year lists, because outside of, say, Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda, I’m not sure what’s going to fill out the average Top 10. I’m fairly certain where mine’s headed thanks to a handful of wonderful surprises, (including one of the decade’s best platformers and one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time) but this year’s been such a smorgasbord of releases it’s hard to nail anything down for certain. And there’s still plenty more on the Horizon. But… let’s wrap September up so we can truck through Wolfenstein, The Evil Within 2, Mario, Assassin’s Creed’s potentially good soft reboot, and more. Jeez, there’s a lot to do.

     

    1. Cuphead

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    Cuphead isn’t a game without issues. The platforming stages aren’t great. Too many of the bosses have cheap, unavoidable attacks leading to unnecessary trial and error. The discussion around the game has become so toxic that I feel like I need to distance myself from the worst of its fans. But still, I find myself wanting to return to its beautiful, brutal world again and again.

    Though I don’t feel difficulty balance is among its strongest suits, Cuphead does do a lot of things well. It recaptures the feeling of facing off against a foe in a game like Mega Man or Duck Tales while amping up the scale tenfold. You’re still just a tiny dude with a peashooter, but now the boss battle is against a screen filling monstrosity with four or five forms. It makes an excellent case for boss-rush platformers… and if we don’t see a half-dozen riffs on this in the next couple of years I’ll be disappointed. And I’ve only barely mentioned the art, but oh man, that art. I would pay more money than I should for another handful of boss fights just to see what these brilliant artists would draw. Watching the bosses reel from an attack and change into an entirely different beast made each fight exciting, and I could never wait to see what was going to pop from the screen next. Remember when that boss girl was a blimp, then angels, then the MOON? Yeah, that was wild.

     

    2. Gloomy Room

    Grab Google translate on your phone to translate a bit of Japanese text, and get ready for the spookiest ten minutes of your life. Though the Gloomy Room demo isn’t the most complex room escape around, thanks to some stellar sound design and clever scares, it’s one of the most terrifying.

    SPOILER: Kill some time in the first room if you escape too quickly and don’t get the hype. The part after the bathroom is pretty meh, so the first main scare is what you’re looking for here. Or just watch the first ten minutes or so of this.

     

    3. SteamWorld Dig 2

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    …I bet the first one of these was really good too! This is my first entry into the SteamWorld series and it was a good one. Half Metroidvania and half grindy Skinner box, it somehow lands right in the middle and works well. Complete with surprisingly solid platforming challenges and more skills and upgrades than you can shake your Level 5 Flaming Pickaxe at, this one’s an early contender for best indie on the Switch.

     

    Honorable Mentions:

    Danganronpa V3: I bet if I had gotten further than the first chapter by now it would be much higher on this list. But hey, that first chapter was a trip, huh?

    Golf Story: Again, a lot of stuff came out this month! My first couple of hours with Golf Story were good. I hope to have many more.

    The Tomatoes are OK: Weird, surreal, and spooky. Me likey.

    Metroid: Samus Returns: I haven’t enjoyed it as much as the hype surrounding it might have suggested, but it’s not bad by any means. The combat is satisfying, the upgrades come quick, and the pace is mostly solid. But, man, I do not enjoy killing the same boss 20 times in a row. Why did anyone think that was a cool premise?

    Destiny 2: It’s more of what the first one was but slightly different! Yeah!

  • Games of the Month – August 2017

    Games of the Month – August 2017

    We’re hitting that point in the year where it’s just games, games, and more games. It’s great! For the rest of 2017 I assume I’ll have plenty to play and write about. In just the next week or so we’ll have Cuphead and Danganronpa V3, a couple of games I’m dying to devote a ton of time to. And October? Wolfenstein, The Evil Within 2, and Mario? Jeez. This year rules. Well, for games at least.

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  • This Strange Realm Of Mine – Doom of the Poet

    This Strange Realm Of Mine – Doom of the Poet

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    Phew. This one’s a doozy, huh?

    Have you ever wanted to play a game about dissecting consciousness that starts off under the guise of a Doom clone? Me either! But I’m glad I did.

    This Strange Realm Of Mine’s Steam page describes it as “a First Person Shooter mixed with poetry and psychological horror.” but I’m not sure even that prepares you for what you’re in for. You’ll start off shooting at spooky monsters through some dark corridors with nothing but a pistol and a torch, solving a few simple (but well done!) puzzles. After escaping, you’re dumped into The Limbo Tavern and are told that there is still work to do.

    This tavern is where you’ll spend your time in between each of the game’s stages. NPCs eventually gather here as it becomes a haven for those lost, and you’ll get to know these people before jumping back into These Strange Realms. Where you jump back into, though, is what makes @Encaved‘s latest project so unique.

    If you’re wanting to go in blind, I suggest you stop reading here. If not, well, it’s about to get weird.

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    I had expected that first stage to set a precedent for what’s to come. Nope, not at all. The next stage is familiar enough, you find out that you have to bust into a gang of rat’s headquarters to get to your next objective. After you start popping off rat heads in the alley is where the game shows a bit of its hand. Graffiti is painted all over the walls of these streets that the rats call home. You follow the story of them coming up with a name for their gang, how they feel bad about picking on certain members of the group a little too much, and more. This fleshes these characters out… but only after you’ve smeared that flesh all over the walls with your handgun. Once you break into their tower it feels like a page was taken directly out of the Hotline Miami handbook. You brutally take down scores of these people as you climb higher into their base, eventually finding their boss and, if you choose, splattering his brains all over his room after you get what you want.

    And that’s just level 2.

    Each time you complete a mission, you head back into your safe haven, have a chat with everyone hanging around, and then head back out to see what could possibly be next. And trust me when I say I don’t think you’ll be able to guess. You’ll go through Minecraft parodies, explorations of social anxiety, and entire genre-shifts. I was glued to my screen as I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning just to see what they might have come up with next.

    This game sounds perfect right? Uh, well…

    If you’ve played the game already or paid attention to the word “poetry” in the game’s description, you might notice that I’ve neglected to mention a pretty core tenant of the game. That’s because I think a bunch of it isn’t any good.

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    This isn’t to say that the writing is a total loss, though. There are bright spots in the dialogue that legitimately hit points of shocking poignancy, but they come in between literal name-checks of Rick and Morty characters (it’s a good show with some bad fans) and 2deep4u discussions of religion. Those aforementioned discussions coming from a guy sitting in a cell with some Suicide Squad level of “deep thoughts” scribbled all over the walls. There are moments in the game’s story where I couldn’t figure out if the developer was making fun of people like this, or actually was one of them.

    These instances of annoying writing are luckily limited to only about two of the game’s characters, and the rest of the cast is allowed to have some surprisingly thoughtful expression. One of my favorite characters is a girl who fights against her anxieties to be an optimist, and shares some personal stories with you along the way.

    Personal is a word I keep coming back to when trying to describe this game. For better or worse, This Strange Realm Of Mine feels like a deeply personal work of an artist. It just happens to be really fun to play.

    If you’re ready to jump into someone else’s mind and shoot some monsters, check out This Strange Realm Of Mine on the game’s Steam page.

  • The Tomatoes are OK (But You Might Not Be)

    The Tomatoes are OK (But You Might Not Be)

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    So I went into The Tomatoes are OK knowing… not really much of anything at all. I hit the strange landing page after hearing that it was little unnerving, and jumped straight in. I suggest you do the same.

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  • Dead Horizon is My New Favorite Video Game Western

    Dead Horizon is My New Favorite Video Game Western

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    Every once in a while I stumble across a tiny game that I know I’ll remember for as long as I keep doing this. Remember Crawlies? I do… I still think about it a couple times a month. Level 2: The Virus Master? Yup. 2017’s excellent Baba Is You? That’s a hard one to get out of your head.

    Let’s add @Matthewmritter‘s latest, Dead Horizon, to that list. I’m a sucker for Westerns, and this is right up your alley if you’ve ever romanticized the hat-wearin’, gun-totin’ cynicism of moseyin’ from saloon to saloon.

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    Dead Horizon is probably the most satisfying 10 minutes you’ll spend with a game this week. You’ll end the lives of several villains and possible heroes, point ‘n click your way through to the end of a well written narrative, and and remember the sweet sweet aesthetics of the Super Nintendo era complete with appropriately beautiful art and music. All of that in ten minutes. If you’re as much of a proponent of short games as I am, Dead Horizon is a godsend of an example.

    There’s not a whole lot more that I’m willing to spoil, because the barrier to entry is so small. If you have a computer that can download a 50mb game and a few minutes of free time… I can’t think of anything else lately that I can recommend more than Dead Horizon.

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    Even if Westerns aren’t typically your thing, Dead Horizon is totally free and I urge you to give it a shot. It’s a surprisingly strong piece of art made my a tiny team of people, and they aren’t charging a dime. Check it out on the game’s itch.io page, and support this kind of talent if you want to see more of it.

  • Cat Bird! – A Hearty Helping of HAL

    Cat Bird! – A Hearty Helping of HAL

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    After playing a couple dozen hours of something like Dark Souls or Hellblade, if you’re like me, you want to balance that out with something light, happy, and not-at-all soul-crushing. Games like Kirby and BOXBOY! are prime examples of games that exude joy. HAL Laboratory is a company filled with people who make magic fit onto a cartridge, and with Ryan Carag’s latest, now we have a tiny ball of HAL inspiration that fits in a tiny app on your phone. Cat Bird! is here! (more…)