One of those lingering bad mood, stressed out, all for no particular reason sorts of days. I feel like I left work on Friday feeling like I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do this weekend, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. Making things worse, I finally got around to starting Tails of Iron 2 on the PS5 after really enjoying the original game and so far I am not having any fun. I remember the first one being difficult as hell but I don’t remember losing every single fight three or four times before I got through it, so either I’ve gotten worse at video games, this game is a lot harder, or shit’s gotten wildly unfair, which might be what I’m leaning towards.
Anyway, arglebargle whine complain whine cry. Tell me about something fun you did recently.
Okay, so this time it’s really-really the first day of spring, the calendar says so, so instead of 70 degrees and beautiful like it’s been who knows how many days recently, we had fucking snow. Again. And there’s more expected later this week.
That said? This wasn’t a bad day at all. Work was productive– actual teaching happened in all of my classes, which is always nice, especially after how messy yesterday was. I bought tickets to a Counting Crows show in June, meaning that I’ll be seeing both the Counting Crows and Weird Al Yankovic at the same facility within three weeks this summer, and to be honest I can’t decide which show I’m more excited about. I’m seeing Weird Al with my family and the Crows with one of my oldest friends, which is going to be super cool.
And then I came home and since I got tomorrow’s planning done at work (!!!) I had time to shoot some Nazis. This poor bastard up here got killed with a grenade, dropped neatly at his feet from a bush a dozen meters away, and blew up both him and his friend. He ragdolled into the barbed wire, which I find incredibly hilarious for some reason. I never found the other dude’s body, which I assume was blown directly to Hell.
There’s probably something really creepy about how relaxing I find WWII-based sniper games; there is something incredibly cathartic about blowing a Nazi’s face off (in high-definition, bullet-cam, slow-motion detail) from 300 meters away with no one the wiser about where you were or where the bullet came from. It’s okay, see, not because it’s a video game, but because Nazis aren’t human beings.
I really shoulda booby-trapped that guy’s body, though. Maybe I’ll go back. I left a trail of destruction behind me so who knows if there’s even anyone alive to find him (no one heard the grenade) but they’d cut back to it if something happened. It would be worth it. There are always more grenades, right?
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.
I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.
(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)
Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.
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.
Well, this was an unexpected little bit of awesome.
I don’t know what caused Carrion to catch my eye– I mean, it was on sale for $5, and still is until tomorrow, but that’s usually not enough– but if somehow you happen to be the reason I found this fun little game I need to thank you. Carrion is a pixel-art Metroidvania and a “reverse horror game,” where instead of playing the intrepid scientist or lone soldier trying to kill the horror that wants to eat you, you play the monster. Your goal is to escape the giant facility you’re imprisoned inside, and if you happen to eat every living thing inside it along the way, more the better. You are, effectively, playing a shoggoth; a giant Lovecraftian creature made of flesh and teeth and eyes and tentacles, and over the game you acquire powers ranging from defensive spikes (which I don’t think I ever used, come to think of it) to different movement abilities to growing protective chitin to just getting real, real big and terrifying.
It is gross, in a pixelated sort of way, and your attacks can literally rip your enemies in half. I encourage eating every little part of them, but if you rip someone in half and then just eat their head I think you get the same benefits (health and size upgrades) you get from eating the whole body, so if you decide to toss the legs across the screen, go ahead:
Most screens end up covered in blood after a while, because even your non-offensive moves will cause your shoggoth to leave blood behind; if you smash through a door it won’t actually affect your health but you will leave bloodstains behind.
Your various enemies range from unarmed humans, who will hide and cower, to unarmored people carrying handguns to shotgun- and flamethrower-toting soldiers to the occasional drone and mech. Nothing ever respawns, which led to what at first I thought of as a cheap tactic when facing a ton of enemies– run into an area (your monster moves crazy fast most of the time,) rip someone, anyone in half, and then dart back out before the three guys with flamethrowers and the one guard with a shield and machine gun can kill you. Head to the nearest save point (you basically make your way through areas by unlocking all the save zones, at which point you can get to the next area) and save, which gives you your health back, then rinse and repeat.
It felt cheap until I realized that it was exactly how monster movies work a lot of the time. The monster shows up, kills somebody, then disappears for a few minutes until coming back and killing someone else. The fact that there were generally multiple ways to approach any given zone full of food enemies just made this even better. Of course I can come back at full strength! Did any of the monsters in the Alien movies ever limp? Obviously not. This is a monster movie. My job is to terrorize motherfuckers, not to get killed.
Oh, and you can also smash through a door, then grab the door and beat the hell out of something with it. The way to beat drones is to grab them and bash them into other things, like walls, and floors, and civilians, until they’re broken. It’s a blast.
I had a lot of fun with this, obviously, but there were a few points where the game got in its own way. To start, at the maximum size, your monster can get tricky to control. Check this screenshot out:
You tell me: which end of that thing is the front? Is it going clockwise around that block in the middle or counterclockwise? At maximum size, you can easily stretch most of the way across the screen, or bunch up into a big blob, and this leads to occasional control hiccups, especially when trying to squeeze into small holes or (especially) flip switches at maximum size. There are a couple of places where you need to squeeze into an elevator and flip a switch just outside the elevator to move it, and hitting the switch with a tentacle was more annoying than it should have been. The most frustrating part of the game was a sequence where you needed to be at full size (abilities are tied to the size of your monster, which … was not my favorite design choice) in order to grow armor that would keep a little exploding harpoon-thing from one-shotting you, but the harpoon-thing respawned, and it respawned faster than your armor ability, so if you didn’t get your entire body past the radius of where the harpoon would shoot at you, you could survive the first shot and then get killed by the second one before you could do anything about it. Most of the time, though, traversal was a lot of fun; you can basically move in any direction at any time, as the beast just flings out tentacles and pulls you toward wherever you want to go.
If you have a PS5, there’s literally no reason not to grab this right now while it’s $5. If you like Metroidvanias, it’s maybe a little short, at 5-6 hours, for the full $20 price, but I suspect it’ll be on sale again soon, and even if it’s a little short for the price it’ll be a good time.
I was all ready to write a big long post about the best video games of 2024. Then I thought about it for a while.
Turns out … there weren’t that many, really? At least by my standards? And that’s really surprising, to be honest. I spend a fair amount of time playing video games, as all of you know, although my rabid devotion to reading certainly stole a lot of time this year that might have been spent on playing games in previous years. This year has been a lot of either mediocrity or “Oh, that was fun, I guess” types of games without much staying power.
One way or another Shadow of the Erdtree is Game of the Year.
But … man.
I basically went through all of 2024 and didn’t touch my Xbox. Check this out:
Unpacking is a cute little thing but is entertaining for a couple of hours. Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff that I played with my son for a little while, and that’s already a year ago. Of the four games left, the only one I liked (and, frankly, the only one I played for more than a couple of hourswas Lies of P, and I’m pretty sure that was in 2023.
I played zero Switch games in 2024.
My PS5 game list is a little more robust, but still, it’s really nothing to write home about. I’m having fun with Cult of the Lamb right now, and I downloaded Carrion earlier today because I was curious and it was five bucks. Neither are 2024 games. Baldur’s Gate III left me cold and I never finished it, quitting after Act II. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back. Lords of the Fallen was fun and kept stepping on its dick. There have been tons of updates since I beat it, so I might go back at some point, but I spent at least 20% of the time I was playing it absolutely hating it. I played through The Surge; the sequel was a vast improvement. I still haven’t finished Rise of the Ronin because Shadow of the Erdtree got in the way. Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Black Myth: Wukong were the only challengers to Shadow for my personal GOTY, and really, neither of them were very close. BM:W is definitely the best full game of the year, but Erdtree is a better game.
I know there was a recent expansion for BM:W, and there’s supposedly big DLC coming, so I’ll probably go back to it at some point. I need to play through at least part of Veilguard again if I want the platinum. I’ll probably do it eventually.
As far as the rest of the actual GOTY candidates … well, I’ve played the ones I’m going to play. Deckbuilders hold no attraction for me, so Balatro is out. I want nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series, much less the remakes. Metaphor: ReFantazio has too stupid of a name for me to even look into it, and I refuse to admit that Astro Bot is even a real game. The whole series is a marketing gimmick. It might be a good game; I just don’t care. And it takes a lot to get me into a platformer anyway. I definitely enjoy one once in a while but they’re rare.
I wasn’t expecting this post to end with “Blech,” but … blech.
