Tag: ps5

#REVIEW: Well Dweller (2026, PS5)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games2 Comments

So, remember Crypt Custodian? The guy (guy! one single developer!) who created that just released his next game, Well Dweller. In Crypt Custodian you played a ghost cat who literally cleaned up the afterlife. In Well Dweller you play one of the very last birds alive, who is trying to rescue his family from a wicked queen who killed all the rest of the birds to make a pretty dress. He fights with a matchstick.

The games share a lot of DNA; they’re both Metroidvanias with mild platforming elements; Crypt Custodian is top-down and Well Dweller is a side-scroller, but both feature huge, complicated maps, lots of power-ups that allow for a decent amount of build variability (or you can grind up to be able to equip basically everything if you want) and cute stories that occasionally punch you in the gut. I liked this game a lot; it’s short (I got 100% and the Platinum in about twelve hours) and easier than maybe it needed to be but those are the only real weaknesses. Well Dweller also offers occasional moments of incredible creepiness; witness the boss above, and the one below:

Your bird does indeed live at the bottom of a well at the beginning of the game, with the rest of his family, but what the title of the game does not mention is that they live inside of a skull, so these are either very small birds or a very large skull, I’m not sure which. You will also sometimes do things like have a little picnic outside of a rotting corpse:

The corpse will not be commented on by either of the characters, and it will not come to life and attack you. The whole game is like this. It’s nuts.

You already know I love games with heavy exploration elements, and I love Metroidvanias in general, and this really scratched an itch for me. I was especially pleased with the platforming; I generally think of platforming as something I have to get through in a game rather than something I enjoy, and this game doles out its platforming moments in little bite-sized chunks, and in general is not trying to hurt you. There was really only one bit where the platforming got on my nerves, and I’m comfortable calling it a skill issue, and one way or another it was over in a few minutes. There’s definitely nothing in this game that you might have to beat your head against for hours like certain other games. The graphics are pretty, the controls are tight, and the combat is maybe a little limited but still fun. You’re going to pick up some movement skills that will help you out but you’re not really going to pick up any combat techniques beyond swinging your match around and a little firebomb that you can either toss at your enemies or throw into the air and then smack at them, baseball-style, with your matchstick.

At $20, there’s no reason not to pick this one up. Go for it.

I found another Metroidvania

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I haven’t finished it yet, but unless it completely falls apart on me you can expect a positive review of Well Dweller in a few days. Today marks the midpoint of my fall break; I have done precisely two things: 1) read books, and 2) played this game. I did manage to finish the book I was talking about yesterday, and don’t really have much to say about it, but at least I got through it.

Played anything fun lately? I’m about to dive back into this one.

Still going

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Did I end up spending most of my free time this weekend playing Nioh 3 again?

Yes. Yes, I did.

Did I end up beating the DLC?

Yes. Yes, I did.

Did I then realize that they’d added a third difficulty level, and I haven’t beaten the second yet, so I have some work to do before the second DLC comes out?

Sigh. Also yes.

Nioh 3: The gift that keeps on giving.

In which I forgot the rules

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

So I think I mentioned a bit ago that the first Nioh 3 DLC dropped?

I’ve been focusing on reading after work (and, well, lesson plans) and so I just really got a chance to dig into Hell Rising for the first time today. You can pretty much jump straight into the DLC content from wherever you want, so Idid that, and got through the first area without a whole lot of trouble, and most of that was related to not remembering details of the controls and some bad habits that Rise of the Ronin taught me. The controls are mostly the same between the two games, but there are some definite differences and Nioh is much harder and button-mashing will get your ass killed. Unfortunately my main weapon in the game is the talons, which are a super-fast weapon that, well, tends to be button-mashy.

Anyway, I died in a few places where I shouldn’t have, but no big deal. Got to the first boss. Held my own for maybe a minute. And then the fucker one-shotted me, and not with, like, a massive special attack that I didn’t see coming. No, I missed a dodge and he knocked me into next week with a regular sword strike.

I forgot that the DLCs in previous games may have said that they were accessible at a certain level, but what they really meant by that was be this level, but also have completely beaten every available difficulty level of the base game, and be really good at it, because it’s going to get even worse when DLC 2 drops.

I have not beaten every available difficulty of the base game. I platinumed the initial difficulty level, but New Game +? It is to laugh.

I, uh, have some work to do.

#REVIEW: Rise of the Ronin (PS5, 2024)

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

Freakin’ finally.

Allow me to tell you a story about the game Rise of the Ronin. It came out in March of 2024, and was by the same people who make the Nioh games, easily my favorite game franchise of all time that doesn’t have the word Souls in the name. Maybe even then. I was excited about it. I bought it. I didn’t get to it immediately, because I was playing something else. But then I played it a little bit. Maybe the first ten percent or so.

And then Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree came out on June 21, and I was done with Rise of the Ronin. And it sat on my PS5 for literally two years, being ignored and making me feel guilty. I even deleted it and reinstalled it a couple of times, intending to get to it and never actually doing it. And finally, this summer, I had the combination of a wild hair up my ass and nothing new coming out and I finally deleted my old save file and started afresh.

70 hours later, I Platinumed the Goddamned thing, and then I deleted it from my PS5, never to be reinstalled again.

I’m very tempted to say “the end.”

This is an open-world samurai game, clearly a test run for Nioh 3 and honestly not terribly far removed from Elden Ring or any of the other Soulslikes that are more or less all I play nowadays, so you’d think it would be right up my alley. And in a lot of ways, it was! Lots of different weapons, multiple stances for every weapon, customizable special moves, all the stuff I like.

Two fatal flaws: 1) it was way too easy, and 2) every single mission and I mean every single mission boiled down to “go here, and kill all the humans.” Human enemies came in two flavors: Little Guys and Big Guys. There were also dogs and pigs occasionally– and, bizarrely, sometimes you’d get sent to take out a local outlaw and the outlaw would be a pig with a name. One of the big side missions was pacifying unruly parts of the countryside, by– you guessed it– going there and killing everyone. Sometimes everyone there would be a dog or a pig. I have no explanation. It didn’t happen often, but I’m not making this up. Enemy variety was practically negligible, and even bosses were all more or less the same fight– sometimes literally so, because for some reason Team Ninja really resists actually killing people in boss fights, so they were forever escaping and threatening you with more of the same later.

Dude, we have fought five times and I have whipped your ass all five times. Next time run the fuck away.

I have a serious weakness for games with big overworld maps with lots of icons on them, I admit it. But there needs to be some fucking variety in what you’re doing, and everything in this game got to feeling very, very samey after a while, and “samey” combined with “easy” isn’t a great mix. I think the toughest boss in the game took me two tries? Maybe three. I almost never died, and when I did it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. The customizable martial arts moves? I never used them, and even the stance-switching, which was supposed to have a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going on with the stances your enemies used (helpfully indicated by an icon showing whether your stance was the effective one or not) was something I didn’t really bother learning until very, very late in the game. Button mashing would get you through 90% of the game so long as you paid a little bit of attention to your stamina.

So, yeah: sadly, the major achievement of having beaten Rise of the Ronin is that I don’t have to think about Rise of the Ronin anymore, and I suppose I should be grateful that Team Ninja learned some lessons from this game and applied them to Nioh 3, which was a vastly superior game.

And speaking of Nioh 3 and DLC, guess what dropped in the last couple of weeks? So I’m going to go do that for a while now.

#REVIEW: Enotria: The Last Song (PS5, 2024)

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

I wasn’t expecting to actually beat Enotria: The Last Song last night when I posted about needing to play video games, but beat it I did; I had beaten a late-game pair of bosses before putting the controller down the last time I had played, and the game made it clear quickly that the next place I was headed was going to be the game’s last destination. I’m going to jump straight to the chase and say this is a solid 7/10 as a game, with the caveat that a couple of the problems I had with it are potentially fixable.

The basics: Enotria is a Soulslike, which remains my current favorite genre of video game; these types of games are apparently never going to get old for me. The conceits with this one are as follows: 1) It’s sunny sometimes, and in fact one of the first things you’ll do is wander through a field of sunflowers, so it’s not quite as bleak as the genre usually gets; and 2) your builds are controlled by wearing different masks; the whole game is built around acting, and you’ll collect masks from boss enemies and mask shards from basic enemies that can eventually be built into masks. They basically take the place of your armor; if you put on a particular mask you take on the entire appearance of whatever you’re wearing the mask of. It’s pretty, there’s a lot of different weapons and magic to play with, the combat is solid; no complaints of any kind there, really.

Here’s the problem: the game starts by asking you to pick a difficulty level, which is the least-Soulslikey part of the whole thing– these games pick a difficulty, usually “brutal,” and you learn to adapt to it or you don’t. The two difficulty levels are “Story” and “Soulslike,” which … okay, “Story” difficulty is usually a shorthand for baby mode, but “Soulslike” sounds like hard mode, and the game doesn’t really give you any details, but a quick Google search made me think that “Story” was the base difficulty, so I went with that.(*)

Y’all, Story difficulty is crazy easy. There is a particular bridge at about the 2/3 part of the game that is broken in two places, and the jump is just a little bit harder than it looks like it should be– in a game with really no platforming to speak of, I almost wonder if the devs just missed how on-point you had to be to make the jump. I died more on those two bits of bridge than the entire rest of the game put together. No boss beat me more than twice, and I never once in the entire game died before recovering my stuff. I beat the final boss on my first try. There were bosses that I ran into by accident and low on heals and beat on my first try. Now, an easy Soulslike isn’t automatically a bad thing! The game’s still fun; there’s something to say about being a badass, obviously, and not every game has to involve beating your head against a wall. But I’d suggest if you’re used to these games, go with Soulslike mode to start.

Second, the game has a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going with the elements. Enemies can be linked with certain elements, and if they are, they’re supposed to be immune to their element and weak to another. I say supposed to be because I never once found myself unable to hurt an enemy, no matter what weapons I was using. The elements all have Italian names and each element can proc a different effect if you get hit with enough of it, and those have different names too. Unlike most games, where, just for example, poison might slowly kill you and freeze might slow you down, the elemental effects have positive and negative side effects that, to be honest, I never bothered to memorize. The paper-rock-scissors thing is on the screen at all times and I never paid any attention to it. The game goes so far as to provide you with three different roles– effectively different builds that you can hot-swap between at will– with the idea that you might use each one to specialize in different elements. I never kept more than one active. There was no reason to.

It is, of course, entirely possible that this was because of Story mode, but … are you really gonna take out this big of a part of your gameplay for the kiddo mode in your game? Because it really seems like that’s what they did unless the whole thing is just broken from the jump. All I know is, I never paid attention to half of the subsystems the game uses. The game does have a New Game + mode, but I don’t know if that bumps you up to Soulslike difficulty or is just Story with spongier enemies or what. I might do a second run at some point to see what the other difficulty is like. I’d like to eventually platinum this, and I missed a bunch of story-related trophies on the first pass.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this is currently free through Playstation Plus, and it’s definitely worth recommending as a free game. Just start it at Soulslike, and hope that it forces you to learn the game’s systems a little bit better and doesn’t let you just go Big Hammer Goes Bonk or Fast Sword Goes Brrrrrr through the whole game. Or do that! Like I said, easy is fun sometimes.

(*) Do not allow yourself to be fooled; just because they called the difficulty “Story” does not mean that the story is going to make any sense(**). But you’re not playing these games for the story, are you? I hope not.

(**) Another missed opportunity; the game has a ton of little lore things you pick up all over the place, but unless you decide to invest the time to stop playing the game and read them– and I mean it when I say there are a ton of them– you’re not going to have any idea at all what the hell is going on.

I can’t review video games if I don’t play them

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I am taking today off both from blogging and the World Cup, and I’m going to play video games instead. There are a bunch of matches tomorrow I want to watch, and I will legitimately have to stay up late if I want to see the US play, but there’s really nothing going on today that I feel like I absolutely need to see. My PS5 misses me, and Enotria: The Last Song has been quite fun so far. I think I’m a bit away from beating it, though, so I gotta put some time in. Holler at me if Scotland-Brazil gets super interesting in the next half hour or so, will ya?

#REVIEW: Pragmata (PS5)

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

Ooooofffffff.

I started Pragmata a little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.

This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.

I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:

It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.

The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.

And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.

My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.