Tag: indie games

#REVIEW: Nine Sols (PS5, 2024)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

The tl;dr verdict: 7/10, but I think it’s my fault.

On paper, I should have absolutely loved this game. Nine Sols is a combination of a Metroidvania and a Soulslike– two of my favorite genres– with a combat system that is basically a 2D version of Sekiro bolted onto it. The level design is great (although the ability to leave markers on the map would have been greatly appreciated,) the enemy design and overall graphics are wonderful, and the bosses are basically perfect, the kind of boss design where you get utterly annihilated in the first five or six fights and then it slowly starts to click and by the time you win it’s because you can see into the future.

So how come I turned the difficulty down to “infant” 2/3 of the way through the game and rushed through the back part as quickly as I could?

The storytelling is interesting in this game, and I can easily imagine it being someone’s favorite part of the game. The story is deep and twisty-turns and has a fascinating fusion of future-inflected Taoism with high technology and weapons like spears and swords and bows, and the relationships between the main characters are awesome– I haven’t seen an exploration of fatherhood, albeit unintentional fatherhood, done this well in a game since The Last of Us, and the story motifs of revenge and regret and colonialism are all done really well.

But, man, the main character is a dick, and after a while I really got tired of Yi. He’s a scientist in a religious culture, which is cool, and he’s kind of an irascible ass, which is cool– Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite characters, remember, and her main personality type is “impatient asshole”– but he’s got this weird dismissive, arrogant atheism about him that somehow managed to make him a turn-off to me, an arrogant atheist. Combine that with no voice acting at all, meaning that I was fast-forwarding through massive amounts of dialogue all the time, a very rare opportunity to choose a dialogue option that I almost always missed because I was hammering a button to get past the word bubbles (and which, 95% of the time, made no difference at all, and 5% of the time chose the ending for you) and a general predilection for pontificating and meandering philosophizing, and … ugh. I lost patience with it after a while, and again, I can absolutely see someone else really digging the story in this game, but I just wanted to be done with it after a while.

I spent 34 hours with this, picking up 30 of the 36 trophies along the way (a second play through is required to 100% if you’re not savescumming, and turning down the difficulty lost me one of the trophies as well) and I think if it had been a 25 hour game I’d have been singing its praises from the firmament. It just wore out its welcome after a while, and once it did even some of its strengths turned against it– if I’m getting tired of a game and just want to finish it and move on, the boss design that is one of the greatest things about it becomes a problem, because I don’t want to spend an hour or two (or more like four, looking at you, Lady Ethereal) learning a boss’s patterns. I want to turn my attack power through the ceiling and three-shot the final boss in the game. Which I did.

So, yeah, ultimately this was a game that I should have really enjoyed that I didn’t, but if you feel like this sounds like your type of thing, I’d follow that instinct anyway, and if you’re a story person, it’s definitely worth a look, especially at $30.

#REVIEW: The Last Faith (PS5, 2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

The TL;DR version: perfectly cromulent.

The slightly longer version: The Last Faith is a mix of my two favorite genres, as a Soulslike and a Metroidvania, of much the same ilk as Blasphemous and Blasphemous II, with which it also shares a weirdly religious background, a relatively incomprehensible story, and pixelated art design. And, to be completely honest, I could end this review right here by saying that if you liked Blasphemous II, you should pick this up, and expect a game that is about 85% as good. Which is a compliment! Both of those were good games. This is not quite as good– it’s easier, for starters, and it’s a little too fond of instadeath spikes in obnoxious locations (although part of that was my fault, for not figuring out a way across an obstacle in a really annoying place) and the graphics aren’t as good. Your inventory can be really rough, for example:

Okay, a few of those are obviously guns, but if I told you that the item that’s highlighted is a grenade launcher, more or less, would you have any idea? Can you tell that the item next to it is a bow? What about the one above that? Or the one to the left of what is pretty clearly a minigun?

The spell icons aren’t super clear either, and this isn’t the worst example of the inventory screen, but you get the idea. I don’t complain about graphics often, but even for something with retro graphics this game can be pretty muddy. Combat is excellent and the variety of weapons available is pretty good– superior to both Blasphemous games, so long as we’re making comparisons, although I never really got into the guns very much and I’m not convinced a gun build is really viable since bullets are limited. Control is snappy and sharp, though, especially on some of the later bosses where dodging a barrage of lightning bolts is going to depend on near-pixel-perfect positioning (say that four times fast) and without good controls that would have been hellaciously annoying and frankly a little unfair. Fair is a critical component of a good Soulslike, of course: if you can find lots of videos of people beating a boss without being hit when you can’t get a quarter of the way through its health bar without getting melted, chances are it’s a pretty good Soulslike. Soulslikes love bosses who are hard until you figure them out and then become trivial. This game does that quite well.

One slightly less fortunate aspect of Soulslikes that it brings with it is super obscure side quests, unfortunately, including one that I wasn’t able to finish because it just abruptly became unavailable on me. I was two achievements away from Platinum on this game; one of them was for that side quest and another was for fifty parries, a mechanic I never used, as this is very much a dodge-and-jump game and if I was standing still and close enough to parry something that was attacking me I was doing it wrong. I’m probably not going to do another playthrough just to collect those two trophies and the Platinum. I might, you never know, but probably not.

But yeah– we’ll call it an 8/10, easily, and at $24.99 for full price for about a 25-30 hour game depending on your skill level and willingness to do some farming (progression was pretty quick one way or another, although I don’t think I actually lost any … uh … nycrux, whatever that is, to deaths during the game, and if you’re dying a lot YMMV) you’re getting pretty good value for your money if you like these genres. I finished the game at 98% completion before hitting the final boss and I assume that last 2% is probably related to the quest I missed as I’m pretty damn sure I hit the whole map.

Check it out.