Ripples of cause and effect
Knightin’ is a well constructed game about slashing your way through a dungeon. It’s a cute little game that will certainly keep someone entertained for awhile.
The gameplay is rather simple. It plays game viewed from a top down perspective, the player uses the arrow keys to move around. A couple buttons for other actions such as slashing, guarding, and dashing mix things up. The player progresses from room to room going down, deep into the dungeon.
The art in this game is fairly pleasant. It’s well done and crisp. The game elements are very clear from each other and that makes understanding what’s going on a fairly easy endeavour. Good job there.
The feel of the game is also very solid. Anything I wanted to do, I ended up doing because the controls were tight and responsive. The hit boxes were very generous which helped make sure that any mistakes that happened were generally my own fault.
Something that stuck out to me in this game were two things. The first thing were, of all things, QR codes. I wasn’t expecting these and I’m very impressed that the developer put these into the game. However, I think those harmed my experiences with the game. I had no desire to deal with a qr code and I came upon puzzles I knew I had to do that whole thing with. Cool idea, but I personally don’t want to deal with things outside the game.
The second thing was that the game overall was a little bland. Well done, yes, but there was nothing that I haven’t seen before which left me a little uninterested. This game might be great for newcomers to this general structure of games, but for people well-versed it will leave a little to be desired.
A well done game but needs a little bit of spice 6/10
Celeste is a very straightforward platformer. The form of the genre is well represented in this game. However, that doesn’t mean its any run of the mill game. No. In fact, this game has already become one of my favourite games ever created. Where it sits on my list, I don’t know, but it's up there with my personal greats.
The game has a rather rhythmic formula. The player is presented with a screen and their goal is to get to another screen, eventually resulting in finishing the level at some point. The player has 4 actions they can perform. Move, dash, climb, and jump. That in a nutshell is the framework this game works with.
This game takes that framework and pushes it to the absolute limit without ever feeling bloated. There’s so much that this game does. Every level introduces 2-3 new mechanics and then throws them out the window for the next level. What madness. This gives each level a certain focused feel instead of having the effect of each mechanic become diluted if the mechanics were piled on. This also forced the developer to come up with entirely new situations that could not be done had any other previous mechanic come into play. Not to leave the game feeling incomplete, there are instances where this all comes together. Those moments are brief and feel climactic.
The gameplay is top notch. You can feel the experience the developers had with this style of games before. I say this because the game feels tuned with an almost vague precision. Thats a contrary statement, I know. What I mean by that is the movement feels as though it was made to be expressive. To be expressive is to also not be constrained, thus I feel this game wasn’t interested in being constraining in any sense. Which might be a hard statement to make given how the difficulty of the game is seen. Generally, I see a focus on expressiveness a mark of experience from a mastery of form. I know from following these devs that they have a long history in platforming games.
I’m done blathering now.
The music is brilliant. It does a wonderful job bringing out and layering on atmosphere to the game. I was blown away at how often the music can transition in certain levels, and how perfectly they all communicate the theme of the level. Great job.
The art was also great! The effects they used were well done, particles, shaders, nothing felt out of place and only added to my experience. The art was all snapped to be pixel perfect on the screen, which I noticed also effected the gameplay. I think this was a smart choice for this game as being absolutely precise with collisions based on grid based art is always a good way to go for a precise game. This aspect especially shines through on the later levels.
If I had an issue with this game, it would be with the later levels. I know what the developers were going for and I respect their decision as it is well executed for what they intended. However, I personally didn’t enjoy the trial and error aspect that some of these levels took on as you were learning them. Once learned, they were fun execution challenges which were lovely to do because of how good moving feels, but the ramp up to that point was a little painful.
There was also a few secrets that were just a bit to reference-y for my taste. Having to look up something online because the solution was related to another game took me out of the experience a little. This might be fine for people who totally understand what was happening, just not for me.
Celeste is a must play game for anyone who enjoys cutting their teeth on something that will ask of them nothing but their determination and will. Enjoying every moment on the way, death and life, only adds to the texture of this game. 10/10
Onitama by Shimpei Sato, Jun Kondo, and Mariusz Szmerdt
Onitama is a game I often bust out on unsuspecting victims. It takes 30 seconds to explain and instantly turns anyone who plays into a formidable foe you shouldn’t underestimate. I love it.
The gameplay is simple, each player has 5 pieces, one being a king. Each player also has 2 cards, with one being left on the side, that tells them how to move any of their pieces. Once a card is used to move a piece, the player swaps it with the card on the side. The first player to capture the others king or make it to the other kings starting point wins.
Ahhhh, just writing out the rules impresses me. The amount of possibilities this game has contained in its very simplistic rules set is mind melting.
The game has a feeling of martial arts all throughout its bones. When facing your opponent, you are constantly waiting and setting yourself up for the perfect moment. Nothing in this game is stagnant, so as long as you are ready, an opportunity to take advantage of will come. This sense of fluidness comes from the constantly shifting movement cards. Your choices of movement will never be the same turn to turn. This creates a sense of awareness about flaws in the opponents formations based on how they are adapting.
Thats what I love. The winner of the game comes from how unhinged a player is from any particular strategy. That a sense of feeling things out generally comes out on top.
The art is also perfectly suited to the mechanics. The game takes on a eastern martial arts temple aesthetic that conforms to bring out an atmosphere of serious levity out of the game. The cards are wonderfully rendered, each with a clear representation of what they can do, and flavour text to give it some punch.
I absolutely love this game, however some of the cards are a little questionable, but the fact that the cards are constantly rotating keeps those aspects from being unfair or ruining the push/pull feeling the game has.
The biggest complaint I have about the game is that it’s almost impossible to learn from game to game. You learn a general sense of the game yes, but the cards are dealt from a large pool of possible movement cards. This keeps the game fresh, but overarching strategies are impossible to construct. This is both is greatest strength and weakness depending on how you look at it. I have other games of the same vain that I sometimes choose over this game due to this aspect.
Good game, play it if you can. 9/10
Zen pond life is a very chill experience. Nothing really that it compels you to accomplish, but you end up doing some things anyway out of curiosity.
You play as a little bee that flies around a pond. There are lily pads you can fly over to get flowers to bloom. The game page asks you to breathe as you do this.
Games like this are hard to pull off. Experiences that are about coming back to yourself, meditative things. The main thing I find in a lot of these games is that they have an exterior that is hard to get pass in order to lose yourself through the experience. The gameplay or the presentation is lacking in such a way that it’s hard to not pay attention to it.
This game specifically has an issue with both for me. Controlling the be is a little bit too finicky for my taste. It functions well enough but I never felt I had enough control. The art also didn’t do much for me. It was fine, but I just didn’t get much from it.
However, I do think that the game as a good atmosphere to it. The music and general sense of direction the game gives come together to relax me, as much as I still wasn’t immersed.
The text, I feel, should have gone away. It was a little distracting.
I didn’t want to play this game very long, but I was relaxed by the end of it. 3/10
Ripples of systems and experiences
Something I've been thinking about is a way of looking at games for the creator and the consumer that reduce games to a tapestry of time that is seen as its experienced. This has to do with the idea of any one action setting in motion ripples that reverberate throughout the rest of the game.
A good example to illustrate my point would be to think of a old story about a chinese farmer. His donkey died one day, his friends said to him "What a tragedy". He replied "We will see". The next day, someone taking pity on him, donated to him a stallion. "What luck!" his friends said. "We will see". The next day, his son fell off the horse while riding it and broke his leg. "What a terrible occurrence" said the friends. "We will see". The next day a military conscription passed his son over due to the broken leg. "Wonderful, you are blessed." "We will see"
I think you see where this is going.
The idea is that any one action has consequences in which one is unable to know until those consequences materialize in lived experience. This, applied to games, allows for me to think of the value of a game not to be about any particular thing I accomplish, either through playing or making. Rather, it comes from seeing the various results of my actions unfold as they happen. Good or bad. Experiencing is the point, not any particular outcome.
What's the point of this? Nothing really, just another point of view I think is interesting.
Comments
Post a Comment