The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Game of the God damned year.
I mean, come on. This year had some slight competition, but there was no way that the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima wasn’t going to be my GOTY. It’s not close. This was the sequel to one of the best games I’ve ever played and was at least of equal quality. The only thing holding it back from being obviously better than the original was I had some idea what to expect going in.
Absolutely fucking amazing. Fifty-eleven stars out of five.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Yotei during my scant free time lately— it’s kind of nuts how busy the last couple of weeks have been, now that I think of it– and so far, about ten hours in, it’s at least the equal of Ghost of Tsushima, its predecessor, one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you go look at my review of Tsushima, you’ll notice I keep harping on how amazing the facial animation is– and, yes, I used the same line about Pong, which will keep being relevant until I stop playing video games.
I hit a moment last night that absolutely floored me, to the point where I decided I needed to be done playing for the night because there was no way anything else I was going to do in that session was going to top it. I’m going to dance around some spoilers, but I’ll do my best to be as ambiguous as possible.
There is a moment in the game where a character encounters another character who they believed was dead. And there is a good three or four seconds where you realize what is going on before either of the characters speak, just from the look in the eyes of the character realizing what is going on. Their eyes moisten, just a little bit, and the look that crawls across their face is this amazing and perfectly readable mix of disbelief, joy, relief and shame, and it is quite simply the most complex emotional moment I have ever seen a digital character convey in my entire life.
(To be clear, that’s a random screenshot above. I found some online that were from right around the moment I’m talking about and decided not to use them to avoid even that much of a spoiler.)
And this is just ten hours in. I’m sure there is more to come. That said, Sucker Punch, if you fuckers kill my horse again after what you did to me in Tsushima, we’re gonna have a problem.
I am working on getting every ending on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and doing so either involves 1) playing through the entire game four complete times or 2) doing some fuckery with backing up your saves and, on an Xbox, preventing your game from automatically backing itself up to the cloud while you’re on a backed-up save that you don’t want to be permanent. There’s one ending that actually ends the entire game prematurely, and I wanted to snag that one tonight, but it involves being good enough with a particular boss that you can crush her more or less at will (on it) and making sure you understand exactly how the Xbox Series X’s cloud backup works and when it chooses to back up saves to the cloud. Because if you do it right, you let it back up, beat the game the way you don’t want to keep so you get the achievement, then back out of the game and delete your local save, forcing the game to go back to your previously cloud-backed-up save.
Do this wrong, and you’ve either locked yourself into finishing the game prematurely, meaning you need to play through again to get the other endings (bad) or in a worst case scenario you screw up badly enough to delete your save entirely, meaning that not only do you have to start over again but you have to do it from scratch.
Anyway, I successfully pulled it off, to wit:
Check that completion percentage out, yo.
Anyway, there’s still more game before those last two endings, where I have to do this over again, so I can still screw this up. But at least the most annoying one is out of the way.
The tl;dr: this was so close to perfect, but probably needed another month or so to cook before getting released.
I beat Wuchang: Fallen Feathers last night after 60 or so hours of gameplay, and for the most part, I was really, really happy with it. Most of my gripes are technical, and the things this game does right, it does very right. This is a Soulslike through and through, which is currently my favorite kind of game, and it hits all the buttons: deep combat, wildly variant weapon builds, obscure quest lines, difficult boss combat, and an emphasis on exploration. The exploration is the best part; Wuchang may have the best interconnected world map I’ve ever played, and it’s incredibly rare that you’ll see a path fork off and one of them end a little bit later in a dead end with a treasure in it. Everything loops around and leaves you somewhere, and it was harder to keep a mental map going (note: this is a good thing) than I’ve seen in a game like this in a long time.
There’s three different major things that this game does that distinguish it from a run-of-the-mill Soulslike. First, what the call the Skyborn Might system. All of your spells and some of your combat abilities are based on how many stacks of Skyborn Might you have at any given time. You can have up to five, and spells will cost from one to all five stacks and weapon abilities generally cost between one and three. Skyborn Might is earned mostly by perfectly-timed dodges, although most weapons have at least one other way you can earn it and there are different items that can add to Skyborn Might as well. One that I kept equipped for most of the game automatically generated Skyborn Might on kills, which came in really handy. Skyborn Might deteriorates over time if you don’t use it, which was good and bad– it encourages you to use your abilities, on one hand, but on the other I felt like it deteriorated too fast, and I’d have liked some way to slow down that deterioration, whether it was a more permanent item or a consumable.
The second is the Madness system. Killing human enemies and dying both generate Madness, and killing nonhuman enemies and various items and locations can decrease it. Increasing your Madness has two major effects: it increases your damage noticeably the higher it is, and it at least supposedly increases how much damage you take, although I went through the whole game without ever feeling like that had caused a death. I never really even noticed it.
On top of that, if you die, you lose a percentage of your currency (Red Mercury as opposed to souls, or blood echoes, or whatever) and that percentage is based on how high your Madness is. If your Madness is less than 100% you can pick your resources up from wherever you died. If it’s at 100%, though? You’re gonna generate a Madness Demon when you go back to get it, and if that Madness Demon kills you, your shit is gone. On the other hand, if you kill the Madness Demon, you get a bunch of other stuff on top of your lost materials, and Madness Demons can be baited into attacking anything, so there are places where generating one on purpose (there are items that raise Madness as well) can be a sound strategic maneuver against an enemy that you can’t find a way to beat. This won’t work on bosses– you can’t generate demons inside a boss arena– but there are occasional more powerful red-eye enemies scattered around, and letting one kill me, generating a demon, then triggering her and running away to watch the two of them fight was fun.
The third is the upgrade system, which runs off of an upgrade tree. Each weapon style (Spear, Greatsword, Axe, Dual Blades, and Longsword, and I spent most of the game in Greatsword) has its own tree but you can go anywhere you want on the tree and you can respec any time at will. Weapon upgrades are also built into the skill tree, and the awesome thing is that 1) any weapon upgrade affects every weapon of that type, even if you get a new one later, and 2) you can respec your weapon upgrades just as easily as your own abilities. So unlike, say, Elden Ring, where if you make a change to your preferred weapon late in the game you’d better hope you have enough upgrade mats available to level that weapon up, if you had a +9 axe and you want to switch to greatsword your greatsword will automatically be +9. In fact, all five of the greatswords you’ve found will be +9, and if you find a sixth that’ll be +9 when you pick it up. In every other Soulslike I’ve played, just because you leveled up Longsword A doesn’t mean Longsword B is improved as well. This is a huge improvement.
The problem is the performance. This game, at least on Xbox (I picked it up here because it’s currently free on Game Pass) is very poorly optimized, and while you can lock the framerate at 60, you’re going to see constant blurriness and focus issues as the game struggles to keep up with itself. I played without the frame rate locked for a little while and the frame drops were so bad I had to switch back. This is on the Series X, mind you, which is supposed to be the beefy one; I can’t imagine what this would play like on the less powerful Series S. There are some balance issues– there’s a huge difficulty spike with a boss about a third of the way through the game, and the game really expects you to use a certain mechanic to beat that boss, only all weapon types don’t have access to that mechanic. As it turned out, I’d started with a Spear build, and the Spear build is the one least capable of managing this boss. I had to respec, and once I did I sailed past her. Now, again, the game encourages painless experimentation, and I could have switched back afterwards, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t object to the idea that certain bosses are weak to certain styles and stronger against others; that’s a staple of the genre– but “you need this type of ability to win here, and this weapon doesn’t have that at all” is a problem.
There’s a few other things; it’s way too easy to fall off of ledges, which is partially a skill issue, and until very recently the icon that shows where you dropped your resources was really hard to see against some level backgrounds and invisible if you were unfortunate enough to die in shallow water, but they’ve patched that problem out in the last couple of weeks. I know Soulslikes aren’t for everybody, and if they aren’t your thing you’ll want to stay away from this, but if they do, and especially if they do and you’re on Game Pass? Hooooooly shit. And it’s only $50 at full price, and it’s a good enough game that I’m considering picking it up for the PS5 anyway. Check it out.
For the record, I did see Fantastic Four: First Steps today, and it was magnificent. Full review coming, probably tomorrow.
I finished Crypt Custodian yesterday, hitting 100% after about fifteen hours of play, although there’s a boss rush mode I’ll need to dip into if I want to get all the trophies, and I’m probably not going to. It’s one of the nicer surprises of the year, because I basically just grabbed it for free from Game Pass based on the image you see up there.
It’s a Metroidvania. You play a cat. You’re dead and a ghost. You’re prevented from entering paradise by a really bossy dead frog (that’s not a joke) and you spend the entire game cleaning up trash with your broom and whacking monsters with it. In classic Metroidvania fashion, you unlock a bunch of abilities over the course of the game that let you go back and get into areas you couldn’t reach before, and while I have no intention of spoiling the ending, it revolves around making 10 friends so that you can invade Paradise and visit your still-living loved ones, and the ending will make you cry a little bit.
I play these games for the exploration, right? This is the map:
Or, if you prefer a slightly more abstract, right-click-for-much-larger version, you can have this one:
Don’t worry about the Chinese, the words don’t matter. The point is the map is ridiculously large, and the different areas are wildly different, some with environmental challenges (one area reverses its polarity every time you dash, making walls and floors either appear or reappear along with roughly half of the enemies at any time) and some that just look cool. There’s rainy forests and castles and tombs and enormous retail backrooms and an amusement park. You can teleport to save spots at any time and there’s no penalty for dying, and you can even unlock a power-up late in the game that prevents missed jumps from hurting you, so there’s a strong incentive to just pick a direction and go. Your power-ups can be equipped using little upgrade spheres that can be found or purchased, so there’s an element of switching back and forth between them depending on what you need to do– I found myself with an exploration build and a boss fight build after a while, for example– although by the end of the game you can find enough of the spheres that you can equip nearly everything you need, and you might be able to buy as many spheres as you want; the one vendor doesn’t seem to run out of them.
So, yeah. Games like this are why Game Pass is worth the money; this game is delightful and everyone should play it, whether they have to pay for it or not, but if you can get it for free then you really have no excuse. Give it a shot.
You should play this game, regardless of how much time I spend dwelling on its mistakes in this review. Despite the … uh … let’s go with unwieldy name (“Clair Obscur” just means “light dark” in French, which is not better) this is a smart, tremendously well put-together game with a great story and impressive game mechanics that stumbles in an equally impressive fashion at the end. It’s turn-based, which is normally a sign for me to stay far away from a game, but it manages to throw in a few mechanics that depend on timing and skill anyway– your characters can parry or dodge attacks and there are a couple of other special attacks that you can avoid in specific ways as well. Dodge everything and you won’t take any damage; parrying successfully can lead to automatic counter-attacks. If people haven’t started doing no-damage or even no-attack runs on this game yet, they will be soon.
But the most impressive thing about Expedition 33 is its story, and I’m not telling you a damn thing about it other than the game is set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic France, except it’s not, and even the reason it’s not really set in post-apocalyptic France is a whopper of a spoiler, so I’m not going to say anything about it. Usually when a game is set specifically in a non-English-speaking culture I’ll do the audio in that language, but there are a couple of big names in the English voice acting team and I’d recommend you stick with that.
There were at least two times in this game where story developments knocked me flat on my ass. Prior to playing this, the most jaw-dropping moment I’d ever encountered in a video game’s story was the “would you kindly” moment in Bioshock, which came out in 2007. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, find something that can play Bioshock and get on that. Right now.)
At any rate, the Bioshock moment held a record for 18 years. The first moment in Expedition 33 held its record until the second moment. The game’s story is going to rip your heart out and stomp on it, more than once. Be prepared for that.
On a technical level, it’s one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played, particularly in its renditions of the game’s people. Everyone looks great, and the facial expressions especially are masterfully done. There’s a moment in the final battle where I think the game really wants you to notice someone having second thoughts without drawing direct attention to it, and it’s just incredibly well-done. The characters are memorable, and Esquie, who is a giant sentient balloon-thing who basically acts as transportation for your group, is probably the most adorable character I’ve ever seen in a video game before.
Here’s the problem, though: The game has three acts, and the story is effectively over at the end of Act 2. All you have to do at that point is go beat the main boss, and the game tells you exactly where to go to find that person. You are probably already leveled up enough to be able to get the job done, too. But there is a huge amount of content left– you’re no more than 50% of the way through the available locations and the handful of collection objectives the game has cannot be completed before the end of Act 2. The problem is, with no story left to get you to go anywhere, you’re either just grinding until you get bored or kind of flailing about because suddenly most of the “new” areas are way too tough for you. And that’s a damn shame. I ended up beating the game because I didn’t want to play anymore, and that’s not how this game should have ended. On top of that, because of the amount of extra stuff I’d done and some fiddling with optimizing my characters, when I finally got to the final boss I beat the shit out of him because he was scaled to be able to fight him right after completing Act 2. The climactic battle of this great game was over in no time because I was so overpowered– and had I maxed out my character’s available levels (I wasn’t even close) it would have been so much worse. I hadn’t even found the best available weapons for two of my five, and the ones I had weren’t fully leveled up. I never even found the materials necessary to hit max level on weapons, and beating the boss before that happens is nuts.
The pacing in this game is really unforgivable, and it’s amazing to me that no one caught it in play testing. All they would have had to do is move some of the major story beats back a bit, or given Esquie the ability to fly earlier in the game– he gets it automatically at the end of Act 2, but again, if you want, the game is effectively over at that point. And it’s a damn shame to be thinking that a game is a shoo-in for Game of the Year for the first two acts and then beat it because you’re bored five or six hours later.
So yeah: mostly successful, and hugely successful at what it’s good at, but with that one huge caveat you should be aware of. Play it anyway.
This game made me, for the first time in quite a while, want to turn my YouTube channel back on.
I’m still not quite done with Khazan, thus the lack of a review yet. I’ve beaten it, and I want to get through New Game+ before I put it away, but I wanted a palate cleanser, something that wasn’t combat-focused and that didn’t brag about being difficult. Something chill, for lack of a better word.
How about a puzzle game about translation? How much more directly up my God damn alley could a puzzle game about linguistics possibly be? It’s unimaginable.
Here’s the premise of Chants of Sennaar: you’re the … person, of indeterminate gender and no name, in the faceless hood up there. You’re exploring what is effectively the Tower of Babel, which is occupied by five different groups of people, each of whom speak a different language. Your job is to 1) get to the top of the tower, 2) learn everybody’s languages on the way up there, and 3) get everybody to talk to each other. There’s a bit more of a story to it than that, but it’s a little on the obscure side, and gets downright weird towards the end of the game. That’s good enough as a gist.
Each language has 42 glyphs associated with it, and follows different rules as far as subject-verb order, plural marking, and other things like that. Sometimes the meaning of a glyph can be intuited by what it looks like, and one language lays glyphs on top of one another in a really neat way that, once you figure out what’s going on, lets you create glyphs correctly that you’ve never seen. Your avatar keeps pretty good notes, and glyphs are marked in your journal as you discover them while you explore. You can add your own notes to any glyph, and if you think you know what something means but haven’t proven it yet, your assumed translation will show up in a different font when you’re trying to read something, so that you can see what you’re still guessing at versus what you’ve definitely successfully translated.
(What will happen is every so often your notebook will have a page that will have three to five pictures on it, and if you match glyphs successfully to the pictures, it’ll confirm the meaning and translate that glyph automatically from then on. This will happen even if your guess at the meaning was wildly wrong. It does mean that it’s possible to brute-force your way through some translations, and there were definitely times where I was certain I knew three of the four glyphs and wasn’t sure about the remaining one, and just worked through my unknown glyphs until I got the right one.)
You will also occasionally find Rosetta Stone-style texts that will have the same thing written in more than one language, which can help you figure out new glyphs if you’ve already completed one of the two languages. This is where different word orders and different pluralization rules can really mess with your head, though, and there are two languages that use markers to make an entire sentence negative, which can also be fun. I loved this shit, y’all.
There are some non-language-related puzzles here and there, but they’re rare and generally not hugely challenging and the occasional very light stealth section; they weren’t difficult (and not very punitive when you screwed up) but I found myself kind of resenting them after a while just because they kept me from the stuff I was interested in. You’ll eventually unlock teleporters between the different levels, and you’ll be able to translate entire conversations between different groups that will cause the residents to start cooperating with each other and sometimes change things about some of the areas. These were my favorite parts, honestly.
Graphics and audio do their job; my wife commented at one point that she found the sound of my character walking around to be really satisfying, for whatever that might be worth, and the different areas are really visually distinct from one another, from a forbidding fortress area to a science lab to mines to a really futuristic area toward the very top of the tower. This took me nine hours to play through for $15, and I got a Platinum trophy out of it. I did have to consult a guide once, where I couldn’t figure out how to move forward and it turned out that I’d been meant to pick up an object that I didn’t realize I could interact with. That was it, so it really hit that sweet spot where some careful thinking could always get me past whatever obstacle had been thrown in my way.
This isn’t for everyone, I realize, but for me at least it was a hell of a game, and at just $15 you should definitely grab it if puzzlers are your thing.
You were supposed to get a review of a book series today, but my PS5 ate my entire afternoon and it’s about to eat the rest of my evening and possibly the next couple of weeks– I was playing Chants of Sennar all afternoon, which is a puzzle game based on translating glyphs, and now they’ve gone and released a surprise demo for Nioh 3.
The game doesn’t come out until 2026, and this is an alpha build, supposedly, but … I’m gonna go away now. For a while. Maybe I’ll finish that third book tonight and maybe I won’t. The boy’s on me to play Nightreign with him and I officially don’t have time for anygoddamnthing now other than Nioh 3.
So, yeah. Nice knowing y’all. I’m going to go abandon all my earthly responsibilities for a while.
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