4cr Plays - Faraday Protocol (Switch)

Faraday Protocol is a first-person puzzle game centered around an archeologist, Raug Zeekon, from the planet Cunor. Raug has been sent to investigate a mysterious signal. Shortly after arriving at a set of mysterious pyramids - called OPIS - Raug stumbles on the “Bia Tool” - a gun that can absorb and expel energy. He must use this tool to navigate a series of increasingly-complex circuit-based puzzles and to uncover the secrets of the OPIS complex.

I sat down with the Switch version of Faraday Protocol. Read on for my impressions.

Although I led in with a description of the plot of Faraday Protocol, the story isn’t all that detailed or important. It is mainly there to serve as the connective tissue for the game itself, which consists of a series of puzzle rooms connected together as part of archaeologist Raug’s exploration of an alien temple complex.

As I mentioned, Faraday Protocol is a first-person puzzle game. Like in a first-person shooter, the camera is placed in Raug’s head, and you navigate the environment from his viewpoint. However, rather than using your “gun” to shoot enemies, you use it to interact with your immediate environment in order to open a path forward to the next area.

This gun, the “Bia Tool” is able to absorb energy from small statues - essentially batteries - and redistribute that energy into other statues. This energy can come in two colors, orange and blue, and is mostly used to power items in each room. This energy can open doors, move platforms, and activate increasingly-complex Rube Goldberg machines. Often, solving puzzles is not a matter of activating a single switch, but in triggering sequences of small steps that ultimately allow you to open the final door in an area.

You can think of these puzzles as circuits that you need to complete by manipulating them one piece at a time. In some cases, this is quite literal - the “blue” energy can be used as a chain that connects two sockets, creating an actual circuit. In others, this is more of a figurative circuit - moving energy through a series of connecting gates, small puzzles that you complete in sequence.

In some ways, Faraday Protocol is very reminiscent of Portal. A game where the mechanics of a shooter are used as a means of interacting with a complex environment. Like Portal, your enjoyment of Faraday Protocol will largely come down to how much you enjoy engaging with these environmental puzzles. The puzzles get quite complex, eventually spanning down several rooms and hallways. The game can get quite difficult in places, but it’s also quite clever and feels very satisfying when you finally pull at enough threads to solve the later puzzles.

Faraday Protocol is not an incredibly long game. I think it took me about five hours to complete. This felt about right. Any longer, and I think it would have begun to outstay its welcome. This is also not a game I would recommend binging through. I ended up enjoying it in small, 20ish minute chunks. Essentially, I would complete one puzzle at a time and stop if I found myself scratching my head too much. Several times, I found myself slightly overwhelmed, put the game down, and came back later to immediately solve a puzzle.

The art direction in Faraday Protocol is quite interesting. The art style itself is fairly realistic, but the setting you explore heavily blends elements of ancient Egyptian art and an Art Deco retro-futurism. The pyramids are filled with black and gold hallways, with huge statues and pillars. It’s a cool look. In some ways, I wish that the developers had gone even more over-the-top - perhaps something a little more stylized and less realistic - but it works well at providing you with an interesting environment to explore.

I played through the game on Switch, entirely in portable mode. It worked well. Looking at screenshots of the game on other systems, it is clear that the Switch version is missing some detail and some of the visual effects, but it still looks fine. The controls work well, and I didn’t have any major difficulties with interacting with even small items in the environments. I also didn’t have any major performance issues that I noticed.

If you are interested in a new puzzle game for the Switch to tease your brain, Faraday Protocol is worth considering. It presents some interesting mechanics and satisfying puzzles, and is about the right length to allow its core mechanics to shine without overstaying its welcome.

A copy of the game was provided for this review.

Official Webpage

Nintendo eShop

4cr Plays - Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space (Switch)

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Sam & Max series - point & click adventure games about a canine detective and his best pal, a megalomaniacal rabbity thing. I played the original, part of the legendary LucasArts lineup of the 90s, over and over again. Then, when Telltale Games brought back the duo as the stars of three “seasons” of episodic games, the episodes became part of a ritual where my future wife and I would sit around a CRT computer screen on Friday nights and play through them. I have really fond memories of playing each episode as they came out.

After Telltale closed down a couple of years back, a group of former developers - under the banner of Skunkape Games - bought the rights to the original games. These developers have been working to release all three seasons on modern systems, with a huge range of improvements to the controls, graphics, and audio. The remastered first season, Sam & Max Save the World, was release last winter - where it made the first winter of lockdown a tiny bit more bearable.

Now, one year later, the second season - Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space - has been released on PC, Xbox, and Switch. I have spent some time with the Switch release. Read on for my impressions.

Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is a “point and click” adventure game. What this means, essentially, is that you progress through a story by solving puzzles embedded in an environment that you explore. That is - you point at things on the screen and click on them to interact with them. Your character has an inventory of items, and can use those items as part of manipulating your environment to progress.

In this type of game, the puzzles are the core focus of the gameplay. Timing isn’t particularly precise or important, and you don’t need to memorize button combos. Instead, the goal is to get you to stop and think - to reason using the tools at your disposal. One of my favorite examples of the type of puzzles and logic in this genre comes from the first season of Sam & Max. Early in the game, a rat in your office has stolen your phone and won’t return it until you offer up Swiss cheese. Max has filled the closet with cheese. This would be great, except that it isn’t Swiss cheese. Fortunately, your inventory holds the solution - Sam’s revolver! Swiss cheese has holes, a gun can make holes, perfect! You need to think a little outside of the box, and put on your Looney Tunes brain. However, if you can get into the right mindset, the solutions tend to click into place.

The story of Sam & Max revolves around the titular duo of "freelance police" - self-deputized crimefighters dedicated to solving mysteries and filling their wallets with sweet, sweet cash. Sam is a dog in a trench coat, and Max is a long-eared psychopath. Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is presented as a season of six episodes, much like a TV show. Initially, each tells its own short story. Our detectives face off against Santa Claus, investigate a giant volcano, and meet a sketchy vampire. However, each case begins to tie together, before concluding in the dramatic season finale.

As you can imagine from that description, Sam & Max is fully tongue-in-cheek - a surreal comedy that blends a bit of Looney Tunes, a bit of Calvin and Hobbes, and a touch of Far Side. It is a world where animals and humans freely interact and it isn’t particularly weird to shoot the cheese with a gun. It is delightfully hilarious. Even today, I feel compelled to click on every single item just to see how it was described and every single dialogue option. Few games have comedy writing this sharp and hilarious, and this game is worth experiencing just for the script.

Each episode lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. Back in 2007, one episode was released every 1-2 months. As a result, it was a pretty novel way to play a game. Rather than it being your focus over a week or two, you would play it in these bite-size chunks. For many games, this kind of format doesn’t make much sense. However, here, it worked well. It created a unique pace, and kept the game from becoming boring or overstaying its welcome. As I mentioned, I used to have a bit of a ritual with Telltale’s games, where I would play through a new episode on a Friday evening with my girlfriend (and future wife) around the old computer.

The remaster presents you with all of the episodes at once, so you don’t have to space each episode out. However, I absolutely recommend that you do. It’s a different and refreshing pace compared to games that you just binge. You don’t need to wait a month between episodes, but it was fun to play an episode every week or so in the remaster.

If you played this season of Sam & Max back in the day - and your brain actually functions, unlike mine - you might be wondering what has changed in the remaster. The obvious thing is a redesigned control scheme for playing with a gamepad instead of a keyboard and mouse. The driving and shooting, in particular, have been tweaked.

The original game was not designed for controllers from the start, but the new controls feel fairly natural. I have been playing on the Switch, and haven’t missed the mouse-based interface of the original release. How it works now is that you walk through the environment with the left stick, and use the right stick to target different objects for interaction. Rather than hunting for an object, you can use the right stick to switch between all of the nearby options. This works well, and nicely deals with a common adventure game problem of having to hunt for more interaction targets.

Accessibility options have also been added, including the ability to skip driving minigames and a toggle to turn off lighting effects that could trigger seizures.

There have also been many improvements in terms of graphics and audio. In addition to the resolution being increased, the assets have been scaled up, and dynamic lighting and shadows have been added. The character models have been tweaked, based on input from Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell’s feedback. Visual effects have been added that were not possible in the Telltale engine back in 2007, including falling snow at the North Pole. The camera angles, character acting, and choreography have also all been adjusted by cinematic artists. The game looks nice, thanks to the visual overhaul. I have played on the Switch, and have had no issues - the game runs well and looks nice on either the TV or the tablet.

The audio in the original version was compressed to limit download sizes. The developers have collected the original voice actors and re-recorded their lines at a higher quality. The soundtrack was also re-recorded using live musicians, and new tracks were added by the original composer, Jared Emerson-Johnson.

It’s an impressive effort. This is a ton of work, when many remasters simply add higher resolutions and widescreen support. It really shows the passion of the developers for their creation, and is worth supporting.

Beyond these tweaks, the game itself still holds up well. The puzzles are clever, but not punishing, and you don’t need an advanced degree to solve them. The writing is still genuinely hilarious, although some of the jokes definitely place the game right in a particular time and place. Both of the remastered seasons of Sam & Max are worth revisiting if you haven’t gone back to them in years or playing now for the first time.

Official Webpage

Nintendo eShop

4cr Plays - Gleylancer (PS4)

We live now in the era of the remaster, where older games are released for new audiences with a fresh coat of paint - often updated to appear sharp on an HD display. Often, this treatment has been applied to games that came out one or two generations ago, bringing early 3D games into the modern era.

Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer is an interesting outlier in this trend. This 1992 shoot-em-up was originally released in Japan for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, and did not make it into other parts of the world until 2008, when it appeared on the Wii Virtual Console. Even then, the surprisingly-long story scenes were in Japanese.

Now, Ratalaika Games has re-released Gleylancer on basically every modern system - translated into English, and with HD visuals.

The plot of Gleylancer follows Ensign Lucia Cabrock after the outbreak of war between humans and an alien fleet in 2025. Lucia’s father is captured by the aliens, and she sets out to rescue him with a hijacked prototype fighter - the titular Gleylancer.

Honestly, the story doesn’t really matter as anything other than mild motivation for the gameplay. Gleylancer is a horizontal shoot-em-up in the vein of something like Fantasy Zone. You can move your ship freely in any direction in a 2D plane, and can attack the enemy ships with your guns. If you get hit, it’s lights out. You can gain a little bit of protection, but to complete the game, you will need fast reflexes.

The Gleylancer can move at four different speeds, as toggled by the player. You can switch between different weapons by picking up pods dropped by enemies. These weapons include a basic gun that fires double blue laser pulses, a weapon that fires twin piercing laser arcs, one that shoots an arc of five purple pulses with good range but low fire rate, one that shoots fireballs, and more.

You can acquire up to two weapons at once. Both will be of the same basic type, with subsequent weapon pick-ups overwriting both. However, you can choose how these two weapons behave. In the normal mode, both fire in the direction the ship is moving (though, they can be locked in a direction with a toggle). In the reverse mode, the guns fire in the opposite direction of ship movement. In search mode, the guns automatically aim at the nearest enemy. In the multi mode, each weapon swivels in a 180 degree arc on the top or bottom of the ship. In the shadow mode, the weapons imitate every motion of the ship at a short delay. Finally, in the roll mode, the weapons spin around the ship at 180 degrees from each other. This gives you a wild, spiral pattern with good coverage of the screen, but low accuracy. This enables quite a bit of customization of how you play, adding some fun and replayability to the game.

Gleylancer is a fairly short game - only 11 stages - but poses a decent challenge. A “rewind” feature allows you to quickly roll back from a mistake, if you want to try the game, but are concerned about it being too difficult.

I’m not a huge connoisseur of the shmup genre. I can’t tell you all of the nuances that separate Gleylancer from other famous shooters. However, I did have some fun playing it. Beyond the gameplay, however, I have to say that Gleylancer is a feast for the eyes and ears. The pixel art in Gleylancer is gorgeous. The ships and monsters are detailed and interesting, and the artwork is crisp and colorful in HD. It looks fantastic. It sounds even better. This game has a killer soundtrack.

If you’re looking for a shooter to play this weekend, Gleylancer is a great way to kill a few hours - and you might find yourself humming the soundtrack even longer.

A copy of the game was provided for this review.

PlayStation Store

Microsoft Store

Nintendo eShop

4cr Plays - Mon Amour (Switch)

In every medium - movies, books, even games - there are those mad geniuses whose names elicit an immediate reaction. Their works aren’t always good, but they are always damn interesting. You’ve probably heard some of these names - Suda51, Swery65, Hideo Kojima.

Yoshiro Kimura doesn’t quite have the same level of fame. Many of his games, with studio Onion Games, have only made it westward in the past few years. None of his games - Moon, Black Bird, Dandy Dungeon - are world-shatteringly great. However, they are always incredibly interesting.

His newest game, Mon Amour, has just launched on Nintendo Switch and Steam. What is it? It’s kind of like Flappy Bird, but with a lot more kissing. It’s a game that I hated at first, but then couldn’t stop. It’s weird as hell, but has a lot of heart. In other words, it’s certainly a Yoshiro Kimura game.

Mon Amour is a fairly minimal game. The mechanics are immediately intuitive, and there are no hour-long cutscenes. There is still a basic story presented as a framing device for what you see on the screen, and it is worth passing along as it does set the mood for what you are about to experience. Three love-starved witches have kidnapped your princess and taken her off to the land of Babastille. Along with her, they have kidnapped all 64 members of her court. It’s up to you to rescue them… with the power of your lips. That’s right. Rather than stomping on a hyperactive turtle, you rescue each lovely lady by kissing them.

Mon Amour is a collection of single-screen stages, where you attempt to fly from the left and plant your lips on the lady waiting to the right. You move to the right by pumping a button to stay airborne, but you must avoid the buildings both above and below you. Hitting either is instant death, unless you have protection.

The current target of your affections is constantly rotating her head the entire time, and when you run into her, she spits out a trail of hearts in the direction she was facing. When you enter the next level, those hearts remain in place, and you can increase your score by collecting some of them while flying towards your new target. The hearts merge together when they touch into a larger heart. The larger the heart - the more points you receive.

There are also explosive fruits that you can run into to remove some of the obstacles from your path, and fruits that give you a single-use shield. In the case of both fruit and hearts, you can either pick them up immediately, or leave them for a little later on. The game is sectioned into stages, and fruit and hearts persist over the different screens in a stage. It is often worth leaving the fruit for a bit to take care of the harder traps that come later in the stage. Likewise, leaving hearts on the screen and trying to shoot more hearts in their direction is worthwhile to get a bigger score bonus.

The women you collect form a sort of health bar. If you take a hit, you lose one of the women. To truly complete the game, you need to collect 64, so you don’t want to lose any of them. However, you still get a score based on how many you have collected before dying or getting to the end of the 50th level.

From this point, there aren’t any major surprises. The levels grow harder - with narrower windows to float through and obstacles to avoid - and the scenery changes, but this is mainly a single-button game about floating into the faces of kidnapped women. It’s weird, but certainly not the weirdest premise in gaming.

This all sounds simple, and it mostly is, but it takes a lot of work to master. The page for the game on the Switch eShop warns that “there is a 99% change you’ll instantly die as soon as you press start”. They aren’t wrong. There is absolutely no introduction, and you will immediately sink to the bottom of the screen and die unless you are fast on the draw. It took me several tries to get the timing down to even get to the first target.

To be honest, I actively disliked the game for the first 20 minutes or so that I played it. It felt awful to just spam the button to stay afloat, and I just didn’t get it. I don’t know what changed, but I started to get a little further and a little further, and then it sort of clicked. I started to have a lot more fun as I internalized the rhythm of the controls.

The mechanics are simple, but being good at this game takes a lot of work. Learning how to direct your momentum, when to pick up hearts and fruits, and how to direct the spurt of new hearts (that’s certainly a phrase) all requires practice. Mon Amour certainly has that addictive quality where you find yourself clicking start for one more round, even when you meant to move on to some other activity.

Mon Amour looks really cool. The pixel art is incredibly charming, and the little characters have a surprising amount of personality. The stages are colorful and varied, and there is this weird dream-like vibe to the whole experience - with blur, swirls, and a psychedelic color palate. The soundtrack also certainly contributes to that vibe. The game blends scat-singing and improvisational jazz as you float across screen after screen. None of these components make all that much sense in isolation, but they do gel in this weirdly-compelling way.

In the end, I’m not completely sure how I feel about Mon Amour. Do I love it? I can’t give an unqualified “yes.” It’s frustrating and not always fun. I mentioned above that I hated it until it clicked. Even after that point, I’ve gone back and forth a little with my opinion on the game. Still, it can be addictive, and there are sessions where I have had a lot of fun. I also love the silliness of the premise, look, and soundtrack. The game is charming as hell.

In other words, it is a Yoshiro Kimura game. Flawed, but also something wholly unique, charming, and just interestingly weird. Mon Amour lacks the brilliance of Moon (seriously, check it out). Still, in the end, I recommend checking it out if the gameplay sound fun, or if you’re looking for a unique way to waste a little time.

A copy of the game was provided for this review.

Official Website

Nintendo eShop

Back in the old days - before the NES, before the Game Boy - Nintendo dipped its toes into the home gaming market with the Game & Watch series of handheld systems. Each system contained a single game - possibly with one or two different variants - displayed using the simplest of technologies. Forget high resolution screens. These games had a handful of dots at best. There was no saving a game, no “levels”. Each was something you’d play until you lost, then started over again. 

Many of the Game & Watch games are so simple that they wouldn’t pass muster today, but the systems themselves are cool as heck. They were surprisingly well made, with nice buttons and a great tactile feel. They are bright and fun to look at. They have a certain kind of appeal, even though I’d rather play a Switch game any day. 

The developers at Score Studios understand this appeal. The latest game in their loosely-connected “Piczle” puzzle series is a collection of three games, based on the aesthetics and simplicity - though ratcheted a bit higher in terms of complexity to work as modern games - of the Game & Watch era. 

Piczle Puzzle & Watch Collection presents three logic puzzles as digital versions of long-lost LCD handheld games. All three would not have been possible given the limitations of the actual format, but they are intended to *look* like the games of the period. Each of the three is digitally presented as a loving recreation of the physical units, and the developers have really gone out of their way to recreate the feeling of recieving one of these games for the first time. 

The first time you open any of the three games, you are treated to an unboxing scene, where the box is opened, the handheld is removed, and the manual is skimmed over. At any time, you can manipulate the 3D models of the box, system, and manual as well. While it isn’t quite as fun and tactile as playing with the real thing, it made me really want somebody to turn these into real-life mock-retro systems. 

The first game, Piczle Cross, is the exact sort of Picross-style nonogram puzzle game that has become the signature of Score Studios. If you have never played one of these games before, these are puzzles where you start with an empty grid. Each row and column of the grid has a series of numbers on it. Your goal is, simply, to fill the correct cells in the grid to create an image. You can think of it as a form of “paint-by-numbers”, where you need to identify the right spaces to mark to form a pixel-art painting.The numbers on a row or a column tell you how many spots need to be filled in. If you see a “5″, you know that a five-block sequence will need to be filled, while blocks before and after those five will remain unfilled. To figure out which five need filled, you need to look at the corresponding columns (if you are working on a row) and see if you can match the conditions placed by the numbers on each of those. You will often see multiple numbers, like “2 3″, indicating that there are multiple sequences that will be filled in. In this case, the row would have a sequence of two filled-in blocks, then later, a second sequence of three filled-in blocks. At least one unfilled cell must exist between the two sequences. Again, you need to use the other clues to identify where the two sequences lie in the row.

That’s about all there is to it. Identify the spaces to fill, mark off those you know will not be filled, and try to complete the picture as fast as you can without making any mistakes. In the spirit of simplicity, the puzzles are limited to a 10x10 grid. There are 200 puzzles to work through. In the Game A mode, you are limited to three mistakes. In Game B, you are allowed to work until the image is complete. In both cases, your fastest puzzle time is recorded.

As a nonogram fanatic, this was my favorite of the three games. However, the simplicity also worked against it. The puzzles are a little too easy, and the main difficulty came from the controls. There are two buttons - one to mark a space, and one to note that a space should be empty. However, the buttons were reversed from my expectations, so I kept making mistakes when I got them backwards. This isn’t a huge deal (and is really just my problem), but did trip me up a surprising amount. Basically, this is a solid set of nonogram puzzles, but won’t keep you engaged as long as some of Score Studios’ other releases. 

The second game, Piczle Pattern, gives you a cross-shaped cursor and tasks you with turning all squares in a grid black. If a square within your cursor is already black, it will turn white again. In the core mode, your challenge is to turn the empty grid black in the fewest moves, and your best score is recorded. In the second mode, you are given a randomly generated grid to start with. 

This was the game I spent the least time with. It’s a simple novelty, but gets old after one or two trials. Amusingly, it’s probably the game most possible within the limitations of the actual Game & Watch systems.

The final game, Piczle Loops, presents 72 logic puzzles where you are trying to draw an uninterrupted looping line on a clue based on clues presented on the screen. These clues take the form of numbers indicating the number of sides of that square that have a line in the loop. For example, if you see a “2″, then two of the four sides of that square will form part of the loop. If you see a “0″, then no sides can be part of the loop. Game A presents 36 easy-to-moderate difficulty puzzles, and Game B presents 36 moderate-to-hard puzzles. 

I enjoyed this mode quite a bit, even though I am more biased towards the nonogram puzzles in Piczle Cross. These loop puzzles are surprisingly hard, and even some of the easy puzzles kept me busy for quite a while. The core concept is simple, but it can hook you pretty quickly. I still haven’t finished all of the puzzles in this mode, and can imagine coming back to poke at them some more.

Piczle Puzzle & Watch Collection is a simple, but fun, collection of games created in the spirit of the old Game & Watch handhelds. If you have any affection for that era, the collection is worth picking up for the loving 3D recreations alone, as well as a couple of solid puzzle games. If you’re a nonogram obsessive like I am, this will also give you a quick fix - however, you may want to check out Score Studios’ other releases like Piczle Cross Adventure first. 

This review was based on a copy provided by Score Studios.

Nintendo eShop

I know that this is 2020-brain talking to some extent, but 2006 feels like a lifetime ago. I guess it basically was. My cell phone was just a phone, I had way fewer aches and pains, and Sam & Max Season 1, Episode 1 (later retitled to Sam & Max Save the World) was blasting across my tiny CRT monitor - here to herald in the age of episodic gaming, games presented just like we watched TV!

I had (and still have) a lot of nostalgia for Sam & Max. The original was my first LucasArts adventure game, after I fell in love with (of all things) the Fox Kids cartoon. It sparked a lifelong love of point and click adventure games. It was funny, the puzzles were these beautifully tricky things that you had to chew on a bit to get - especially as a kid - and the 2D art was like playing with an interactive comic book. It was incredible. By 2006, I was so excited to get my hands on a new Sam & Max. It lived up to my hopes too - the game was a blast. It was refreshingly funny, the puzzles were clever, and I even enjoyed the episodic format. It was kind of cool to have a couple of hours of Sam & Max to play on a Friday night every month or so. 

Now, a lifetime away, that first season of Sam & Max is back again. Telltale Games, the developers behind the game, died in a blaze of fiery mismanagement. Episodic gaming never really caught on - although there are a few notable exceptions, like the latest set of Hitman games. We’re all stuck indoors while a global pandemic rages around us, and we’ve gone from joking about terror levels to wondering whether the secret service will have to drag an ex-president out of the White House kicking and screaming. A group of ex-Telltale employees, operating under the banner of Skunkape Games, have managed to secure the rights and assets to Sam & Max Save the World, and have remastered it for release on PC and the Nintendo Switch. 

I loved this game back in 2006, but has it aged well? Will it still be just as much fun, or will it feel like as much of a relic of a bygone era as it sounds like when I describe it? 

Let’s back up for a moment and talk about what this game is. Sam & Max Saves the World is a point and click adventure game. What this means, essentially, is that this is a game where you progress through a story by solving puzzles embedded in an environment that you explore. Your character has an inventory of items, and can use those items as part of manipulating your environment, all in service of advancing the story or opening up new parts of that environment. The “point and click” part of this comes from the traditional method of interaction - using your mouse to click on elements in that environment. 

Adventure games are not about combat or twitch action. Timing isn’t particularly precise or important, and you don’t need to memorize combinations of buttons. Rather, the gameplay is all about the puzzles. To give an example from the opening of Sam & Max Save the World, a rat in your office has stolen your phone and won’t return it until you present some Swiss cheese. How should you handle this? Well, your little buddy, Max, has filled the closet with cheese. Great, right? Not really, as it isn’t Swiss cheese. Fortunately, your inventory holds the solution - Sam’s revolver! Yep - Swiss cheese has holes, a gun can make holes, perfect! Yes, it isn’t exactly realistic, but it makes a certain kind of sense - in as much as Looney Tunes logic can make any kind of sense. If you can get into the right surreal mindset, the solutions tend to click into place.

The story of Same & Max revolves around the titular duo of “freelance police” - self-deputized crimefighters dedicated to solving mysteries and filling their wallets with sweet, sweet cash. Sam is a dog in a trench coat, and Max is a… rabbity… thing - a long-eared psychopath full of barely-contained insanity. As Sam & Max Save the World opens, a new threat has invaded their neighborhood - former child stars. Someone is brainwashing washed-up celebrities and sending them out for nefarious purposes. It is up to Sam & Max to investigate and get to the root of this conspiracy before the world ends up similarly brainwashed. Along the way, you’ll interact with quite the case of characters, from Bosco - genius inventor, conspiracy nut, and owner of the local (in)convenience store - to Sybil - tattoo artist and psychotherapist. 

As you can imagine from that description, Sam & Max is fully tongue-in-cheek - a surreal comedy full of gleeful sarcasm. It’s a bit Looney Tunes, a bit Calvin and Hobbes, and a touch of Far Side. It is a world where animals and humans freely interact and it isn’t particularly weird to shoot the cheese with a gun. It is delightfully hilarious. Even today, I was constantly cracking up at the conversations, and felt compelled to click on every single item just to see how it was described. Few games have comedy writing this sharp and hilarious, and this game is worth experiencing just for the script. 

Sam & Max Save the World is presented as a season of episodes, much like a TV show. There are six episodes in total in the first season. Each tells its own short story, which ties into the plot stretching across the entire season, before concluding in the dramatic season finale. Each episode lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. When this season first came out back in 2006, it was touted as both a fairly novel new way to present games and a way to stagger the development of a game in a more sustainable manner. The latter didn’t necessarily work out perfectly, but the former resulted in some interesting experiments in game storytelling. An episodic format makes no sense for many types of games, but is something I still kind of appreciate for this kind of game. 

I used to have a bit of a ritual with Telltale’s games, where I would play through a new episode on a Friday evening shortly after getting my copy of it. Since a little time had passed since the last episode, each felt fresh. My mind was ready to dig into that weird adventure game logic again. There is also something that feels nice about being able to get through something, beginning-to-end, in one night. 

The remaster presents you with all of the episodes at once, so you don’t get that imposed, natural spacing between them. However, I still ended up falling into a bit of a ritual with the new release. We’ve gone back into fairly restrictive lockdown again, with a resurgence in coronavirus cases. To avoid going stir-crazy, I’ve played through the season while pedaling on an exercise bike. I haven’t played each episode in a single session, but it still breaks up fairly nicely along scene-breaks. Kind of weird! However, I can definitely recommend doing something similar. Playing through the remaster this way has felt great, and this kind of game is perfect for this kind of activity, as it doesn’t require the incredible precision that more action-heavy games do. 

I’m happy to say that Sam & Max Save the World has held up quite well. A lot of that comes down to the work put into the remaster. Thankfully, the controls have been entirely overhauled - shifting from mouse pointer to compatibility with a controller. This overhaul has been implemented nicely. This doesn’t feel like a game that has been forced to work with a controller, but feels fairly natural. I have been playing on the Switch, and haven’t missed the mouse-based interface of the original release. How it works now is that you walk through the environment with the left stick, and use the right stick to target different objects for interaction. Rather than hunting for an object, you can use the right stick to switch between all of the nearby options. This works well, and nicely deals with a common adventure game problem of having to hunt for more interaction targets. 

The graphics have also been nice updated. Sam & Max Save the World was a relatively low-budget 3D game released almost 15 years ago. It could have looked fairly bad if the only upgrade was a resolution bump. Instead, the assets have been ported to the final version of the Telltale game engine and the animation has been update. The character models have been updated with input from Sam & Max creator and cartoonist, Steve Purcell. Finally, all  of the lighting has been overhauled. As a result, the game looks far nicer than it originally did. You can still tell that this is an older game, but it isn’t an eyesore. It’s colorful, and the style is nice and cartoony. It hasn’t aged quite as elegantly as the original 2D Sam & Max, but the updates have done quite a lot. 

One aspect where you can really see the age of the game is in the writing. Many of the jokes directly reference the pop culture and events of the time, especially the little references you see in the environment. The bathrooms have a “terror color” sign, there are questions about weapons of mass destruction, Oprah is referenced quite a bit. I don’t necessarily think this is a negative. I definitely noticed how much of the humor is dated, but a lot of it is still pretty funny - and there are plenty of timeless lines beyond the dated references. However, younger games may not get as much out of the release. It’s an interesting challenge for comedy-based games, especially. I think this is the first remaster that I’ve played where the age of the script mattered, and it isn’t something you can address by updating some character models. I also don’t know if it is a problem, exactly, but it does place some potential bounds on the age of the audience that will understand all of the jokes and references. 

I was relieved to see how well Sam & Max Save the World has held up. The writing is genuinely hilarious, the puzzles are clever without being punishingly hard, and the control and graphical upgrades have done a nice job of keeping the game from feeling too dated. The episodic format keeps the pacing brisk, and enables flexibility in how you play through the full game. I definitely recommend checking it out. I have played on the Switch, and have had no issues - the game runs well and looks nice on either the TV or the tablet. 

Sam & Max feels like a series that leaves and returns in different eras of my life. The original was an important part of my childhood, the Telltale games landed while I was in college, and this remaster (and the upcoming VR game) are here in my mid-30s. It has been fun to think about just how much has changed between each reemergence of the franchise. I wonder what the world will look like the next time Sam & Max return. Hopefully, it won’t be quite as long of a wait next time. 

Official Website

Nintendo eShop

Ruiner, a cyberpunk-themed action game from Polish studio Reikon Games (published by Devolver Digital), was first released back in 2017. I completely missed out on it at the time, but a Nintendo Switch version was released a few weeks back. 

As a big fan of the genre - Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time - I thought I should give it a try. Read on for my impressions.

Ruiner opens in the year 2091 in the filthy streets of the city of Rengkok. Our protagonist is an unidentified masked man who has been brainwashed and sent to assassinate the mysterious head of the Heaven mega-corporation by a hacker named Wizard. Before you can throw your life away in the attempt, you are freed by another hacker, “Her”. Together, you and Her will attempt to resuce your brother from Heaven and take down the “Boss”. 

Ruiner is advertised as being created “in the spirit of cult cyberpunk anime”. There is a lot of truth to that. The game is a lavish cyberpunk playground. From the neon drenched street of Rengkok to the industrial wastelands where killer robots are assembled, you will explore a bunch of intricately detailed environments ripped straight from Ghost in the ShellorBlade Runner. The characters you meet - hackers, oracles, and killer assassins - come right from the same. However, what Ruiner really reminded me of was old Judge Dredd comics. The tone of the entire game is a little too-edgy-to-take-seriously. It’s over the top, full of flashing signs telling you to murder or that you have NO WAY OUT. The conversations you engage in are so self-serious that you can tell the developers had their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. 

As a result, the game is a delight from the presentation standpoint. The story, while fairly minimal, would make a great 80s comic book. It’s flashy, violent, and over the top, as is the entire art direction. Everything drips in neon and desperation, and in motion it just works. The character designs are memorable and fun too. There is also a surprising amount of lore and backstory behind the setting as well, found largely through ambient conversations and observations made in the world. 

That tone - flashy, fast, and violent - is directly fuelled by the core gameplay. Ruiner is an action game, where you take down waves of enemies while pushing forward through the level. You can use melee attacks or shoot, while dashing all around the room to avoid enemy attacks. As you take down enemies, you can collect their weapons. There is a huge variety of both melee and ranged weapons that you can employ. On the melee side, you have everything from short swords - speedy, but with a limited striking range - to devastating heavy maces - hugely damaging, but slow. 

Likewise, there is a massive range of different ranged weapons to choose from. You get your standard pistols and shotguns, of course, but can also find things like flamethrowers or laser beams. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. A pistol is fast and has a nice range, but doesn’t do the most damage. The laser guns tend to be very powerful, but need to charge up before you can get a shot off. 

You won’t get much of a chance to get bored, however, if you don’t like the weapon you grabbed. Melee weapons have limited endurance, while ranged weapons have limited ammo. Once out, that weapon is gone, and you need to grab another. Fortunately, you never have to wait long, as enemies drop weapons like candy. As a nice bonus, when you clear a big room, you often get the chance to convert the remaining weapons into experience and a new, bigger gun. 

As your level increases, you can also put points into special abilities. There is a pretty big range of these, and each can be strengthened by investing additional points - adding new features or more power. The most basic of these is your dash. This is also the one you will use the most. As you put points into the dash, you will be able to move increasingly further before running out of energy. You can also get abilities to do things like create a stationary wall to hide behind, surround yourself in a temporary forcefield, or stun the enemies around you. At any time, you can choose to remove points and respend them, allowing adaptation to the current situation you find yourself in.

The combat in Ruiner is exhilarating. It gives you a lot of tools to employ without overwhelming you all at once. It encourages - even requires - some experimentation to get right without dying. Yet, at the same time, it never gets frustratingly difficult. The combat is not cheap - it just requires some mastery. The entire time, it feels great to control. I loved dashing from enemy to enemy, cutting them down - all while firing shots off to keep the other enemies at bay. In a way, it feels quite a lot like Hotline Miami - another Devolver Digital game - with a bit more of a melee focus.

Ruiner is not a particularly long game. I completed it - having also completed most of the sidequests - in about six hours. While I wouldn’t have minded a few more levels to really dive into what the combat system had to offer, I also appreciate a game that is well-paced and doesn’t overstay its welcome. 

As mentioned before, I played the new Nintendo Switch version of Ruiner. I did not run into any issues. It ran smoothly on the Switch. I played through the majority of the game in portable mode, which worked well, as I tended to play one or two levels at a time between other things I was doing. This is a game that would work well on either the tablet itself or a TV, so you can choose based on how you feel at the time. The controls are comfortable on the joy cons, so I didn’t end up having any particular complaints. 

Ruiner came as a fun surprise. I missed out on the game when it first came out, and wasn’t even all that interested when a copy of it arrived in my inbox. I’m really glad I gave it a try. It is a kinetic, ultra-violent, tongue-in-cheek take on the cyberpunk genre with a well-polished and really enjoyable combat system. I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

A copy of Ruiner was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Official Webpage

The Almost Gone opens with you, our protagonist, alone in a dreamlike version of your bedroom where everything is - somehow - so close to correct while also being so very, very wrong. The doors are locked, the windows show a black void, tree roots are bursting through the walls, and you can’t help but feel a lurking dread behind every door. You realize that something is wrong, very wrong, and that the path forward requires understanding what happened to you and your family. Isolated and alone, you are pushed forward by a promise - that safety lies in the treehouse. Getting there will prove to be quite the journey, requiring that you solve some dastardly puzzles and uncover the disturbing secrets hidden by each member of your family. 

The game takes place over five acts, each in a different location. Each stage is split into a series of rooms, portrayed as little dioramas that you can rotate to view from different angles. Essentially, The Almost Gone is a point-and-click adventure game. To move forward, you need to solve increasingly elaborate puzzles, generally to get the key to a locked door. Solving puzzles requires examining the environment - each room - from different angles in search of clues. In some cases, you are looking over objects for things like the number that forms part of a locker combination. In other cases, you are trying to collect items, like a cup for a water dispenser. 

As you solve these puzzles, you will come across objects that spark a memory from the protagonist or notes left behind by, for instance, a family member. Through the environmental storytelling, you slowly uncover hints about what happened to you, and the history of your broken family. I should warn you that The Almost Gone is not a happy game. It definitely deals with topics like suicide, abuse, and mental health. However, the core story - by Belgian author Joost Vandecasteele - never fails to be intriguing. 

The Almost Gone is a very interesting little game. It is absolutely beautiful - a treat to look at. The art direction is weird and surreal - presenting a muted and dreamlike world. I loved looking over each and every little diorama. As I mentioned, the story is also quite interesting. The core idea of presenting the game as a series of little connected dioramas is also fresh and clever. There is a lot to like here.

At the same time, I didn’t always enjoy *playing* The Almost Gone. The puzzles are fairly basic. Most of your time, instead, goes into the “pixel hunt” that so many point-and-clicks are famous for. Especially on the Switch’s tiny screen, it is not obvious what you can interact with in the environment, and you will spend a lot of time looking for just one more tiny clue. That said, I don’t think this should stop you from checking the game out if you’re curious. The presentation aspects of the game are well worth experiencing, and the game itself does not overstay its welcome. 

I played through The Almost Gone on the Switch. In general, this feels like it should be a good platform for this type of game - an adventure-puzzle sort of affair. However, on the tablet screen, everything is just a bit too small. The font is kind of hard to read, and the fine details of the little rooms are not quite as obvious. It may just be my old eyes, but I definitely felt a lot happier when I switched to the TV. This is not a technically demanding game, so it should play smoothly on any device you can get it on. I would just recommend putting it on a big screen when you dive in. 

Overall, The Almost Gone is a fascinating, short game - maybe a couple of hours long. It is visually striking and tells an interesting story. I got a little tired of clicking on everything for clues - a better indication of what you can click on would have improved the experience without making it too easy - but I still would recommend sinking an evening into it.

A copy of The Almost Gone was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Official Website

I am a nonogram fanatic. I don’t know what exactly it is about the things, but I just can’t get enough of the little draw-by-numbers puzzles. Few games suck me in as intensely as a good Picross(or the indie equivalent). 

In the past, I thought I was more-or-less alone in this. Nonogram games were few and far between. I even found myself hunting down ROMs of Picross games released for the Satellaview broadcast service for the Super Famicom just go get my fix! Now, on the Switch, there are so many nonogram games coming out that I have actually found myself falling slightly behind! 

The latest twist are games that wed nonograms with a broader gameplay structure torn from another genre. The ingenious Murder by Numbers combined nonograms with a visual novel revolving around solving crimes. The recent PictoQuest merged nonograms with RPG mechanics. Now, we have Piczle Cross Adventure, which places the puzzles within a story-driven 2D adventure. 

If you have never solved a nonogram puzzle before, let me explain the concept. You start with an empty grid. Each row and column of the grid has a series of numbers on it. Your goal is to fill the correct cells in the grid to create an image. You can think of it as a form of “paint-by-numbers”, where you need to identify the right spaces to mark for form a pixel-art painting.

The numbers on a row or a column tell you how many spots need to be filled in. If you see a “5″, you know that a five-block sequence will need to be filled, while blocks before and after those five will remain unfilled. To figure out which five need filled, you need to look at the corresponding columns (if you are working on a row) and see if you can match the conditions placed by the numbers on each of those. You will often see multiple numbers, like “2 3″, indicating that there are multiple sequences that will be filled in. In this case, the row would have a sequence of two filled-in blocks, then later, a second sequence of three filled-in blocks. At least one unfilled cell must exist between the two sequences. Again, you need to use the other clues to identify where the two sequences lie in the row.

That’s about all there is to it. Identify the spaces to fill, mark off those you know will not be filled, and try to complete the picture as fast as you can without making any mistakes. As pictures get larger, this becomes a tougher task. Even as a novice, you can probably complete 5x5 or 10x10 puzzles without breaking a sweat. As the puzzles grow, you may find it a little harder to keep track of everything. Still, try not to panic. A great thing about nonograms is that you should never have to make a blind guess. There is always enough information to unravel the next spot - it just may take some searching to identify it.

Piczle Cross Adventure presents its puzzles in a classic form, without additions like multiple colors or layers that have been used in other recent games. This is not a complaint, however, as the puzzles are well-designed. I’ve had a lot of fun chiseling my way through the game, and it has a lot of great little challenges in it. The primary enhancement on standard puzzles in Piczle Cross Adventure is that some larger pictures are broken up into a series of smaller puzzles. As you complete the individual small puzzles, you reveal that larger picture. In these cases, it may pay off to keep each surrounding piece in mind, as they will offer clues on where the borders of your current piece lie. 

The most unique aspect of Piczle Cross Adventure is the inclusion of a massive overworld and story to guide your puzzle solving. The story revolves around the evil Mona Chromatic, who has unleashed the pixel-powered robot under_SCORE on the world in an attempt to rob it of its color. Score-chan, pet/companion(?) Gig, and Professor Matrix - the ostensible “protagonists” of the previous Piczle games - have set out to restore the zapped items and put the world together again. 

This story is mainly a way to guide you from puzzle to puzzle. Each item is restored by completing a puzzle representing it. The overworld, presented in a 2D overhead Zelda-like manner, is broken up into a series of regions. Each region has a number of items to restore. Often, you will find that your progress is gated until you find a particular item from a different region. For instance, a fallen tree might block your progress in one direction until you restore a chainsaw in a different area and bring it back to clear the path. 

Exploration of the overworld is not particularly deep. Other than unlocking items for simple puzzles, there isn’t a ton to do. You get XP for completing puzzles, but levelling up doesn’t really grant new abilities - beyond opening up more difficult puzzles. Still, it is a pretty compelling twist on the standard formula. Some puzzles are well-hidden, inside trash cans or behind trees. Hunting down every puzzle and filling in that section on your overworld map is an addictive process. The story and exploration give a nice feeling of progress as you work your way through. 

As I mentioned, I played Piczle Cross Adventure on Switch. It is also available on Steam. I’d personally chose every time to play this kind of game on a portable system, so I’d recommend getting the Switch version. It looks nice on the tablet - though, I had to turn off the fake overscan. It also makes nice use of the HD rumble on the Switch. This is the kind of game that benefits from portability and being able to play a few puzzles in bed before you sleep. 

Overall, I really enjoyed Piczle Cross Adventure. If you like nonogram puzzles, the ones in this game are really well designed. I also enjoyed exploring the overworld, trying to hunt down those last few obscure puzzles. If you’re looking for that next puzzle fix, this is definitely a game to look into.

A copy of Piczle Cross Adventure was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Steam

Dungeon of the Endless first launched on PC way back in 2014. At the time, rouge-likes were certainly a Thing, as were tower defense games. However, the unholy union of the two was fresh, and the game found a devoted audience. Now, in 2020, Dungeon of the Endless has been brought to the PS4 and the Switch. 

After nearly six years - and after seemingly thousands of rouge-likes - how does it fare? Does it hold up after all of this time? Read on for my impressions of the Switch version.

Before I go into the specifics on Dungeon of the Endless, it’s worth backing up for a moment to lay out the terminology. For the uninitiated, a “tower defense” game implies a game based around protection of some kind of object or location. Traditionally, you build defenses around this object, then see if your defenses were enough to stop wave after wave of enemies - generally offering a chance to rebuild and shore up defenses between waves. The exact definition of a rouge-like varies a little more, but usually refers to a game where you explore a large space one room at a time, and must survive the dangers in each room. Generally, the space you explore is randomly generated each time you enter, so if you die, the layout will change on the next visit. You will die. You will die a lot. A hallmark of the genre is its difficulty. Generally, death earns you something that will benefit you in the next life, so strategic death becomes an element of the gameplay. Over time, you master the mechanics and build the skills to survive to the end, but this takes trial, error, and error again. 

OK. With me? Great.

There is not really much of a story to speak of in Dungeon of the Endless, but here is the basic framing device. Hundreds of criminals have been shipped to the Auriga system on a prison ship. On arrival, a hidden defense system has activated, blowing the prison ship into scrap. However, each holding cell was equipped as an escape pod. The prisoners find themselves alive, though a bit battered. However, they are far from safe. They have found themselves in a sub-sub-sub-….-sub-basement of a structure built by the Endless, the original inhabitants of Auriga Prime. The facility’s security systems have activated, and you have mere moments to prepare. You must survive, escape the facility, and keep your power generator intact the entire time.

In Dungeon of the Endless, you create a team of heroes - criminals that survived the crash, as well as their guards - each with their own abilities and weaknesses. At the start, a small selection are available, and you can unlock more as you go along. At first, it doesn’t really matter who you pick - I mostly just chose those who looked cool. Over time, however, you can start to see how they complement each other. 

A crystalline power generator has survived the crash, and if you want to survive, you need to keep it limping along. You also need food to heal your wounds and keep moving, as well as “dust” to power rooms that you explore. You must manage and expand your resources, all while protecting the crystal and finding your way from floor to floor. 

Each floor is randomly generated. When you enter a new room, it will be dark and unpowered, likely to be full of enemies. Once you take care of those enemies, you can choose to expend some of your dust to power the room. This stops new enemies from appearing in that room, and lets you make use of the contents of the room. In some rooms, you can build machines that generate additional resources, as well as defense turrets and other structures. Dust, however, is a very finite resource. You will not be able to power rooms at all times. This means that you need to make decisions about which rooms to power, and which to leave dark. You must be very careful, as dark rooms will pump out new enemies - who will make a beeline for your crystal. It is important to make sure your crystal is relatively safe at all times, so that you have the freedom to explore without constant backtracking to defend the crystal. You can split your team, but this will make survival much harder. You can build defense turrets, but these are not limitless in their defense capacity. It’s important to strike a balance between exploration of the floor, protection of the crystal, and which rooms you keep powered. 

This is not simple. Dungeon of the Endless is not a kind and forgiving game. It is brutal, especially at the start. If you can deal with that, it gets better over time. As you make progress, you open up new technologies. Of course, you also discover new dangers. It’s a tough game. It can be rewarding, but it can also be quite frustrating. 

My initial experience with the game was awful. As a warning - it does NOT explain its mechanics automatically. I nearly quit after my first run, when the game felt completely indecipherable. However, after poking around in the options, I found the tutorial. Go straight to that! The tutorial should have been presented front and center on the first run. It made my life much better! 

Dungeon of the Endless is a decent-looking game. The art direction is a simple, pixellated approach. It’s nothing special, but is colorful and looks nice enough. I opted to play entirely in portable mode, and would recommend it as a portable game. It feels like something you should play in short bursts. Overall, I had no major issues on the Switch. I’ve seen some complaints about crashes, but did not run into any during my time with the game.

Overall, I liked Dungeon of the Endless well enough. It hasn’t sucked me in like some rouge-likes do, and tends a little too far in the difficult direction for my current level of patience and/or sanity. However, the core gameplay is pretty solid, and the combination of exploration and defense still feels creative today. If you’re a big fan of either the rouge-like or tower defense genres, you may want to consider giving it a try.

A copy of Dungeon of the Endless was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Official Website

The developers of Ara Fell: Enhanced Edition promise something grand in their description of the game on the Nintendo eShop - a sweeping adventure combining the best of Japanese and western RPGs while blazing a new path forwards. I sat down with the game, recently released on the Switch, to put it through its paces.

While it doesn’t really deliver on the lavish prose in the game’s store page, Ara Fell is a charming throwback to 16-bit era JRPGs that is nicely paced and applies a few refreshing twists on the traditional gameplay of the genre. Read on for my impressions.

Here’s the basic idea - long ago, a bunch of elves cast a spell intended to keep the floating world of Ara Fell from falling from the sky. However, this merely set events in motion for a delayed cataclysm. Flash forward to the present day, when a young archer named Lita is exploring a cave with her friend Adrian. She picks up a magic ring and inadvertently slips it on her finger. This act embroils her in a war between the elves, humans, and the evil vampires. Lita becomes the champion of the elves - the last hope of Ara Fell. 

Ultimately, the story isn’t particularly deep. Your basic fantasy tropes are all present. However, the characters do have a simple charm to them. Lita and her interactions with others are cute, and do a reasonable job of guiding you through the world map.

Almost from the start, that world map is wide open to you. Few direct roadblocks exist to prevent exploration, other than the fact that enemies will wipe you out if you wander into the right area. The world itself is not huge, but the openness is a little intimidating at first. Even your home town feels large when you see all of the entrances you can wander through and all of the people wandering around. It is all quite manageable however, and soon you find yourself poking at every wall and looking for secrets to discover. 

You have a number of tools at your disposal to explore that map. You can crawl through holes, swim through ponds, and jump over gaps. Bombs can open walls. Each area has hidden secrets that you could overlook, so you are encouraged to explore thoroughly

No individual puzzle is particularly hard. This is not like having to burn one specific bush in a field - but the little secrets keep the game somewhat fresh. That exploration is rewarded deeply - one of the biggest strengths of Ara Fell. There are a lot of optional quests to encourage you to spend more time in different areas. 

Much of the game revolves around crafting. You don’t buy equipment like you would in a standard RPG. Instead, you craft new gear using parts found around the map. You can also upgrade this equipment. Many items can also be created through crafting. The overall crafting system is simple - purchase recipes, select the desired item from a menu, hold down a button to craft - but it works well. You can also learn new abilities or upgrade abilities by finding hidden items around the world. 

Combat is mostly a standard turn-based affair. You can attack, defend, use items, or use magic spells - which cost precious MP. However, unlike in many JRPGs, your MP regenerates during combat. If you can stay alive a little longer, you may be able to pull off the right attack to turn the tide of battle. Similarly, at the end of a battle, your health and magic are restored. This shifts the strategy in battle in interesting ways. You don’t need to play the long game - preserving your health or magic for future combat - but you still need to survive through the present conflict and leave some of your items intact for future battles. 

Surviving combat earns your experience points. When you level up, you get 10 points to distribute across your four main stats - damage, constitution, speed, and wisdom. It is up to you how you want to distribute those points, allowing you to mold the four core characters to your desires - although each has their natural tendencies. 

Ara Fell is a fantastic looking game. A lot of indie games opt for a 16-bit pixel art style, but Ara Fell stands out for its fantastic use of color and how detailed its maps are. The character designs are cute, and I appreciate how the developers adjust facial expressions in the portraits to help the conversations land home. 

Ultimately, Ara Fell is a short experience - probably 10-15 hours. Frankly, I think that is about right. Most RPGs are vastly bloated, far outstaying their welcome. A bite-sized RPG like Ara Fell is a welcome change of pace. Ara Fell is nothing revolutionary, but it is a nice, pleasant RPG to cleanse your palate between larger games. It looks nice, and is a good game to play a few minutes at a time before bed. If you’re looking for a nice, bite-sized JRPG for your Switch, it’s worth a try.

A copy of Ara Fell: Enhanced Edition was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Official Webpage

I attended high school in the United States at the beginning of this century - what feels like an eternity ago at this point. The early 2000s felt like a great time to be an anime fan, and we were discovering new series to obsess over left and right. In the midst of this, the woman who I would eventually get married to came in one day in a huge, fluffy dress. Seeing her in cosplay was not really all that unusual, but I had no idea who it was that she was dressed as. It turns out that this fluffy dress belonged to a character named “Iris Chateaubriand”, and that this would be my first - and, to this point, one of my few - interactions with the Sakura Wars series. I fell in love immediately with the core premise - a theater troupe fighting demons with steam-powered mecha in early 20th-century Tokyo. 

Although I enjoyed the anime, I kind of forgot about Sakura Wars over time. Vaguely, I remembered that the TV show was based on a series of games, but none of those games made it to the US. To this date, the only game in the series to get localized was the fifth entry, which was released with little fanfare on the PS2 and Wii. I ended up missing out on it. 

Flash forward to early 2020, where I learned that a new Sakura Wars game was launching on the PS4 and that it would be coming to the west. The new entry, simply titled Sakura Wars, acts as a soft reboot for the series with a new cast and redesigned gameplay. Given my long-standing interest in the series, there was no way that I was going to miss out on trying it out. 

How does it fare? Read on for my impressions.

Sakura Wars takes place in an alternate steampunk version of 1940′s Tokyo. This version of our world is constantly under attack by vicious demons, and the only hope for the citizens are teams of warriors who fight the demons using powerful mech suits. Tokyo was formerly protected by the famous Imperial Combat Revue. Stationed out of Tokyo’s Imperial Theater, the Revue would pull double duty protecting Tokyo in their mech suits and entertaining the masses as a roving theater troupe. 

Unfortunately, the original Tokyo Combat Revue disappeared following a cataclysmic event. In their place, the rookie Flower Division has been tasked with bringing hope to Tokyo. They have an uphill battle ahead of them - they’re broke, barely able to hold their own in combat, and completely unable to hold their own on the stage. Your character, Seijuro Kamiyama has been put in charge of getting the Flower Division into shape, just in time for the Combat Revue World Games. 

As Seijuro, you must inspire the ladies of the Flower Division. Sakura Amamiya hopes to follow in the footsteps of her idol, the Imperial Combat Revue’s Sakura Shinguji. Hatsuho Shinonome is a brash shrine maiden who just wants to protect her home city. Azami Mochizuki is a mysterious - and mostly baffling - teenage ninja. Clarisa Snowflake (yes, really) is a bookworm from Luxembourg with a dark secret. Finally, Anastasia Palma is a star of the stage, whose confidence and talent may be the key to getting the troupe ready for the stage. Together - along with commander-in-chief Sumire Kanzaki - your troupe may be the last hope of the Tokyo public. 

Honestly, I love the core premise of the series. The idea of having to simultaneously manage a theater - putting on shows, racking up ticket sales - and fight demons in deadly mech combat is delightful. It’s cheesy, but kind of unironically marvelous. In my mind, I’ve built up this vision of Sakura Wars as some kind of merger of Fire Emblem withThe Producers - the Mel Brooks musical about a couple of crooks using the stage to swindle a bunch of investors out of their cash. That game could be incredible. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite what the game actually is, but the core idea of the Sakura Wars series is rife with potential for a great game. 

The actual game is mostly a visual novel with occasional Dynasty Warriors-style combat. The game is split into a series of chapters - treated basically as TV episodes, complete with intros and “next time” segments. Each episode mostly consists of working your way through story scenes - conversations with the characters - interrupted by occasional combat scenes. 

Most of the game takes place as conversations between the characters that either advance the core story or just build the relationships between the characters. You can navigate in 3D through the theater building and a few select locations in Tokyo, and can initiate conversations with the characters that you run into.  Scenes marked with green exclamation points continue the core plot - and are required. There are also tons of optional scenes, marked with blue exclamation marks. You can, of course, plow through the main plot. However, the optional scenes really flesh out the cast, and give each character their own arc. 

During the story scenes, you mostly just read dialogue. At times, you can choose a response. In general, there’s really only one right answer, and it’s usually pretty obvious. You can basically boil the conversations down to the right answer, the stupid answer, and the creepy pervert answer. For instance, one of the girls might wail in despair, and you might be asked to choose one of the following: “We can get through it together”, “We’re all going to die”, and “We’ll only survive if I can grab your ass”. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but that example isn’t too far off from the actual game. 

Choosing the right answer is important in these conversations, as those answers can increase or decrease the level of trust that the girls have in you. If you can get the level of trust high enough, you can unlock new conversations - marked with hearts on the map. Eventually, these conversations will allow you to romance the girl of your choice. 

My feelings on the visual novel portion of the game are mixed. The positive side first - the core story is cheesy, but I found myself enjoying it. It’s fun, but charmingly endearing. There is a lot of melodrama, but the cast is kind of enjoyable. You can’t help but cheer a little for this merry band of absolute weirdos. I dig the setting and the core premise, and actually kind of enjoy seeing the cast interact. The writing is not what you’d really call good, but I can enjoy it on the level where I like things like 90′s X-Mencomics. It’s over the top, colorful melodrama. 

Unfortunately, the pacing is often quite bad. The actual split between visual novel and mech combat is probably about 90% to 10%. The visual novel sequences feel like they stretch on forever, and a large part of that is how those sequences are set up. Between conversations, you walk through the theater and a couple of spots in Tokyo in a 3D space. However, the walking controls do not feel particularly great, movement is weirdly imprecise and neither the walking or running speeds feel quite right. Since there is almost nothing to do in those 3D environments - the only “gameplay” other than conversations is finding hidden portraits, called “bromides” - walking through the exact same hallways over and over again gets tedious quickly. The visual novel portions feel padded. Many of the pacing problems would be dramatically improved just by letting you click on rooms on a 2D map. 

The other part that really turned me off was the romance segments. Unless you’re dating pigeons, ala Hatoful Boyfriend, I’m just not a fan of dating sims. I know - seriously, I know - that dating elements are core to the Sakura Wars series. I knew coming in that romance was a part of the game. I’m fine with the existence of dating sims, and fans of the genre are more than welcome to enjoy those kind of games. They just aren’t my thing. 

Even knowing that there would be dating elements, I didn’t expect to feel so creepy taking part in them. I actually like the dating scenes in games like Persona 5, where they are just cute little dates. Here, the scenes are first-person sequences where you have to click on objects to answer questions or advance the conversation with the girl in question. This is fine when you’re clicking on a book to give Claris advice on what kind of script to write. It is somewhat less fine when Claris has fallen on top of you and you’re clicking on her lips to try to kiss her or when she is bent over in front of you and you are prompted to click on her ass. 

Basically, these are scenes where a bunch of impressionable teenagers get into quasi-sexual situations with you, their 20-year-old boss. You’re basically encouraged to poke and prod these women, and it is really off-putting in a way that I didn’t really expect. I should stress that these scenes are optional - though necessary to get the “full experience” - but they were really not something I enjoyed, and I wonder if they are more of a detriment for the series than a benefit. For me, they certainly decreased by enjoyment of the overall game. 

As I mentioned earlier, the story is occasionally interrupted for a fight scene. The battles play out as a simple brawler - in line with a game like Dynasty Warriors - Your mech can jump, dodge, and unleash combinations of light and heavy attacks. When your SP meter fills, you can unleash powerful special moves. You can also perform team attacks with the women in the troupe. Most of the time, there are two mechs on the battlefield. You can switch between them freely, and the other will be controlled by an AI. Each mech has their own skills. For instance, Sakura is focused on quick sword attacks, while Claris can perform ranged attacks. 

The combat is functional, but nothing special. Again, the actual controls leave a little to be desired. Movement feels imprecise - for instance, you can jump quickly upward, but you can’t cover much ground by trying to jump forward. This is fine in pure combat, but the light platforming required of you can get annoying. 

In some ways, this game has the biggest gap between potential and execution of many that I’ve played recently. I’m really bummed out by how negative this review sounds. I really like parts of this game. The characters are kind of charming, the story is fun. The game looks nice for the most part - the core art direction is mostly great. I really like a lot of the character designs, even if the characters are oversexualized (gravity-defying breasts aren’t really necessary). The character animation is also a little weird - people move in ways that don’t look all that natural. Again, though, I think the game mostly looks really nice. The art style is great, the costume design is fun, and the setting itself is awesome. The soundtrack is also fantastic, and I’ve found myself humming a few of the tracks from it at random times. 

However, the pacing isn’t great. The game feels slow, bloated, and heavily padded. The combat feels like an afterthought, and comes rarely enough that is somehow simultaneously both a welcome break and kind of annoying. In a way, I feel like the developers are afraid of fully committing to this being a visual novel - or, at least, that they had a time or budget crisis. They should have either cut out the portions where you cross the same 3D hallways endlessly, or given you more to do during those sections. They should have either improved the combat scenes (and given you more of them) or just removed them entirely. Either committing to this being a visual novel or improving the non-visual novel elements could have made this a great game. The result they ended up with is kind of infuriating. 

The end product is really hard to evaluate. I don’t hate it, but I don’t really love it either. There are a lot of individual elements that I enjoyed, but the product as a whole does not come together in a cohesive manner. In the end, I do hope that the series itself continues. I feel like something special can come from the core concept. Will you enjoy it? It may help to know what to expect coming in. If you’re interesting in the core concept, like visual novels, and are more into dating sim elements than I am, then this may be up your alley. It is a charming game with a nice colorful art direction and a catchy soundtrack. Just be prepared for shallow combat, slow pacing, and some questionable sexual elements. 

A copy of Sakura Wars was provided for this review.

Official Website

The Switch has become a great platform for narrative Science Fiction games. Quarantine Circular, Subsurface Circular, NeoCab, In Other Waters, and a number of other fantastic little releases have allowed players to explore heady themes like automation, the nature and ethics of AI, and the rocky relationship between privacy and the convenience of technology. CAN ANDROIDS PRAY is the latest addition to the genre, presenting a “sitcom-length” conversation between two mech pilots as they await their imminent death. 

CAN ANDROIDS PRAY is a weird game to “review”. That “sitcom-length” claim is completely true - it is only about 20 minutes long. There isn’t a lot of gameplay to really discuss. It is exactly what I mentioned above. It’s a conversation between two mech pilots who have been caught in an explosion chasing an enemy mech. Their suits are disabled, and they are waiting for their death - either through a fuel tank explosion or breathing poisoned air. Your main role is to steer the conversation, dictating how their last moments play out. The can choose how one of the pilots responds to the other’s questions - that’s about it. 

That’s about all there is to it. CAN ANDROIDS PRAY is a 20-minute conversation where you can choose responses for one of the two participants. Your choices change the dialogue, adding some replay value, but the end outcome is basically the same.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. CAN ANDROIDS PRAY is still a fascinating experience. The writing is fantastic. You can feel the pain, rage, and - finally -acceptance in the other pilot. It is bleak, but also utterly fascinating. The detail and world building presented in the 20 minutes is also fairly interesting. During this conversation, the prospect that one or both of the pilots are not human at all is dropped right into the forefront. A large number of the mechs are actually piloted by AI, and no one knows what they actually are. Ultimately, however, the end result is the same - death awaits both human and AI. 

CAN ANDROIDS PRAY is an interesting short story about acceptance of death, religion and feelings on what comes after, and how those feelings change given the existence and prominent use of artificial intelligence. The visual elements are minimal, but effective - as is the ambient soundtrack. 

It definitely isn’t a game for everyone, or even really a “game” as we generally define it. Yet, it is kind of fascinating and certainly worth experiencing for those interested in existentialist Science Fiction. Is it worth $2.99? Overall, I think so. I’ve certainly spent that much on far worse things, and many lengthier games have left me with far less to stew over after completing them. 

A copy of CAN ANDROIDS PRAY was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

itch.io

After falling in love with both Neo Cab andThe Stillness of the Wind last year, indie “label” Fellow Traveller has become a name that I pay quite a bit of attention to. Their latest game, from developer Jump Over the Age, is In Other Waters  - a minimalist adventure about a xenobiologist and her AI suit exploring the ocean of an alien world. 

I sat down this week with the Switch version of In Other Waters. Read on for my impressions.

In Other Waters follows Ellery Vas, a xenobiologist, as she explores planet Gliese 677Cc in search of her missing partner. She arrives at the planet to an abandoned base and a strange, antiquated AI-driven diving suit. Together, Ellery and the AI explore this strange world, teeming with undiscovered species and mysteries abound. 

Your assumption at this point is probably that you play as Ellery, and that the role of the AI is to be a sounding board for your thoughts and actions. In a bit of a reversal, you are actually the AI. You make the crucial decisions, and Ellery reacts to your actions - as well as making suggestions of her own on your next actions. 

Rather than exploring a visually rich 3D space, as you might in many games, you actually view the world as an AI might - as a map and a set of instrument panels. Visually, In Other Waters keeps things quite minimal. Your interface is an overhead map of the area, with a box focusing on your current area. You also have panels representing the instruments that you have access to, as well as your oxygen and power levels. Gameplay in In Other Waters is a repeating loop where you enter a new focus area, scan your surroundings, perform actions, and move. You can almost think of it as something akin to taking a turn in a board game. 

Scanning reveals your surroundings. It highlights spots on the map that you can either move to or scan further for more details. Generally, the items you can scan for more details are living creatures. Gliese 677Cc is filled with underwater alien life - the first discovery of extraterrestrial live in history - and Ellery is eager to understand these strange new species. As you scan lifeforms, you make new observations and come closer to being able to understand and categorize these species. This process of discovery yields new conversations between Ellery and the AI, and it is really interesting to see this world unfold before your eyes. 

In many areas, you can also take samples from the environment. These samples are also important for scientific discovery. They also give you additional options. For instance, you can use some of the materials to power your ship in a pinch, while others can clear a path for you that had previously been blocked. You have a limited inventory, so management of samples can be quite important. 

When you’re ready, then, you can move on to the next point of interest on the map and scan again. You manage your exploration from a central base, from which you can travel to previously-visited retrieval stations. In each dive, you build on your previous dives - exploring new areas and further expanding your exploration of previously-visited areas. Each time, you expand your knowledge of Gliese 677Cc and build on the relationship between Ellery and the AI. Back at the base, you can plan for your next dive by studying samples and reading Ellery’s journals. 

In Other Waters is basically a point-and-click adventure game. You explore an  environment, click on objects of interest, and solve puzzles to move on to the next piece of the story. However, its presentation is unlike any other adventure game I’ve played. It’s nothing but a map, tool panels, and text - no walking through a space, no concrete depictions of what you are looking at. It’s a fascinating choice, and it actually really works. Your impression of this alien world is left to your imagination, based on the observations recorded in text by Ellery. Like a good book, this allows - in some ways - a richer impression than would be allowed under the typical budget of an indie game. I don’t think that weird minimalist map-based interfaces should be a thing every game emulates, but Jump Over the Age really pulled it off here. 

It helps that the writing is great. The dialogue feels natural, and conversations feel well-paced with your exploration of the environment. The conversations are, naturally, a bit one sided. Your responses are limited to yes or no answers, as well as the actions you take following those conversations. Still, the game manages to leave you feeling like you have a relationship, and that this relationship is something that strengthens over time. That’s impressive. 

I played In Other Waters on the Switch. It is also available on PC. The Switch is, overall, a nice platform for this sort of game. The minimal interface works well on the tablet screen. However, the physical controls are also a bit unintuitive and take quite a lot to get used to. There are also touchscreen controls, which feel a little less clunky. I ultimately ended up using a combination of both physical and touch controls, which worked fairly well. None of this is a dealbreaker, but be prepared for a little bit of confusion as your start the game.

In Other Waters tells an intriguing story in a refreshing way. It’s a well-written exploration of the nature of life and the relationship between humans and their environment, presented through maps, text, and instrument panels. If you want to escape quarantine and explore a new world, I’d recommend checking this out.

A copy of In Other Waters was provided for this review. 

Official Website

Nintendo eShop