ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

[Integrity]

SONIC MANIA (CHRISTIAN WHITEHEAD, 2017)
Finished: 19/4/24. Playtime: 20.5 hours.

Sonic has treated me weirdly so far as a franchise. It's batting almost exactly .500; I deeply disliked Forces and Generations, largely enjoyed Lost World and Frontiers, and unrelated to this thread had an absolute ball with The Murder Of. None of the four games I've gotten achievements for have benefited from the process of getting achievements for them, so I really probably should stop. But, of course, I won't, in that eternal seeking of the thread that unites what I like and dislike about Sonic, searching for the ones I like in the mix. You've seen all the goddamn Mega Man posts by now.

Mania sits comfortably at the bottom of the list of Sonic games I've played. It fought valiantly with Forces to stay off the bottom for quite a long time before the final zone of the game lost it the war. Even besides that awful final experience, I just never had any fun playing Mania at any point. At its absolute peak, the thrilling heights of my Mania experience, it was just happening at me with minimal friction. At its worst, I was getting actively stuck in stages because of a simple interaction that the game's one-button gameplay doesn't hint at unless you'd known about it from a previous game, like going up the oilfalls. Crucially, though, none of this was ever... fun. At the end of the day, though, I'm almost glad that I did play Mania, because in my experience with the game came a certain amount of revelation as to what about these games, Generations in particular, isn't working for me.

I think that the biggest thing this has shown me about my Sonic experience is that there's a fundamental disconnect between the game that I think Sonic is and the game that Sonic wants me to think Sonic is. It isn't a game of blistering speed and quick reactions to stay on the tightrope to blaze through a stage, it's a game of memorizing upcoming hazards and learning the stage design language deeply enough to predict jumps so that you can maintain that speed. Your ability to go fast is purely stage-based and has next to nothing to do with how well you control Sonic, which I think I touched on a fair bit in the Lost World recap as well but it's more cemented now. Sonic is the maps, the levels; without those, he's just Diddy Kong with fiddlier controls and floatier jumps. Sonic himself is empty. He's simply a vessel through which you are able to project yourself to experience the stages.

So, reversing my thinking, a different problem emerges. I don't think these stages are particularly fun or interesting to explore. If they're not interesting to explore, I have no motivation to seek out alternate paths. If I'm not seeking out alternate paths, I'm not replaying stages. If I'm not replaying stages, I never get to go fast, outside of the (frequent) times that the game autoscrolls you quickly through a series of springs and loops and cannons. It's something I mentioned in the Mega Man 10 recap - it might be a game that feels great to be good at, but the process of getting good at it sucks enough that I never get to the point where I am good at it. "It gets good 20 hours in" can work for an 80-hour RPG, contextually, but it works a lot worse for an 8-hour platformer.

All of that is high-concept and none of it is touching on the real stinkers that Mania lays down. Every stage (12 split into two Acts apiece) ends in a boss fight, and the boss fights almost universally suck, and no two in different ways. Some are opaque, some are boring, some are actually hard; I don't think I enjoyed any of them except for the Puyo Puyo one, which is incredibly random and a total pacebreaker but at least Puyo Puyo is fun. The actually hard ones, including the final boss, truly take the cake. Sonic Mania (2017) cleaves hard to old styles of life management: you have three (and maddeningly game over when the counter goes down to 0 rather than when you lose your 0th life), extra lives are sparse, and if you get a game over you go back to the start of Act 1 of whatever stage you were on. For a good few stages this is a retread of maybe ten minutes, something to grumble about and then get terrain crushed again and lose another life. For the finale, Titanic Monarch Zone, even after the practice of a few game overs it was still a 15-20 minute slog to get back to Eggman and to hope I still had enough lives to give him another real go.

That's another anecdotal thing that really gave me the shits during Mania: terrain crushes. I don't know if I'm just not used to the old ways of Sonic or if Mania leans into this more heavily than most, but any time a single pixel of Sonic's hitbox is pinched on opposite sides by moving gubbinz, he will die instantly. This happened to me more times than the sum of all bosses, and possibly more than the sum of all other deaths in the game, and so many of them are just dickish. There's spikes that pop up from the floor in Titanic Monarch Zone to catch you unawares, but in one or two of the placements, the top of the spikes to the ceiling is less than a Sonic tall, so you take damage and then instantly get terrain crushed. There's plenty of times across many stages where you have to swap between alternating platforms, and a little mental or control latency means Sonic gets clipped by the edge of the next one, and that's a death. A big shoutout goes to the magnetic halls in Flying Battery Zone - I came up to a certain hall for the first time and jumped over the spike ball in my way just as the magnetism turned on, and the ball terrain crushed me against the ceiling. I came back up to it the second time, waited for the magnetism to turn on so it would hit the ceiling, laughed at the cheap gotcha, and then went under it. The magnetism, it turns out, cycles off and on. The next spike ball fell on and terrain crushed me. This was both the most frustrating and most prolific way for me to die, and probably contributed more than any other single element to my lack of enjoyment of Sonic Mania.

The other major element is that, for a momentum-based platformer, Sonic's wielding of physics and momentum is gently deplorable. The biggest point of contention I have here has to do with the many, many backwards-facing springs you're supposed to sprint into during many sections of the game. Back in the Ishin! review, I made a comment about the sorcery of how RGG's camera transitions into stores and shit, where you'd have an unnoticable grace period to adjust the direction you were running so that Kiryu didn't run into a fixed camera area outside a Don Quixote and then instantly turn and run back out of the store because the camera flipped. Ishin! didn't have that input protection, so Ryoma would run into a camera transition, pivot on a dime because he's not on tank controls, and run straight back out. Sonic works the same as Ryoma here. You'll be holding left to gain speed (gotta go fast!) up and around a loop, and you'll shit out of the loop into a spring facing to the right because that's how the stage is constructed for you to go. If you're holding left after you hit the spring for any amount of time at all, Sonic will skid to a halt and lose enormous amounts of momentum. Without anticipation to let go of the buttons so you can properly transition at the spring, a shitload of the time you'll just hit a spring and either skid to a halt or, worse, burn off the speed you need to get up a slope, and then just have to meekly turn around and go back to the spring to try again. It's annoying and, worst, it's constant. This is a multiple-times-every-single-stage occurrence, not a once in a while thing.

Not that the once in a while things are less crappy. There's a few instances, notably a boss you chase who fires missiles at you and the entirety of Mirage Saloon Zone Act 1, where Sonic is running forward at all times and his jump becomes fixed, not added, velocity. The Mirage Saloon Zone version is funny, because every time you jump you move steadily to the left, but the aforementioned boss is stupid obvious because you come to a full stop at the apex of your jump even if you're continuing to hold right. It makes a long and dull boss into a long, dull, and frustrating boss. Maybe it's the engineer in me talking, in which case I need to shut up, but I feel like these kinds of things - handling momentum sort-of properly - should be the absolute first thing you nail down when making a game whose entire mission statement is using momentum to go fast. On the other hand, maybe that isn't the game's mission statement at all. Maybe people are here because they like slow exploration and finding places to do what amounts to physics exploits to laugh at them. Who knows.

To move on to the achievements, and to continue to harp on Mania for pettier shit, I'm baffled by the wealth of content in this game that's completely ignored by the achievement set. None of the Sonic games I've played have had what I would call a "good" set of achievements, with Frontiers coming maybe the closest, but Mania misses on such a strange pair of levels that I'm left scratching my head. Let's wax philosophical for a moment, if you don't mind.

Loosely, I think, a "good" set of achievements for a game should accomplish one (or both) of two things: show off that you've experienced the breadth of a game's content, or show off that you've gotten really quite good at a game. There's exceptions, absolutely, but I'd say a good set at least accomplishes one of those two. Yakuza is a good series to look at for the former and easy to point to. A typical game in the series will have its achievement set based around finding everything in Kamurocho (and outlying cities), doing all the side quests, catching all the fish, etc. Even the bad achievement sets, like Ishin!'s and Lost Judgment's, are bad because of the content contained therein and less because of the achievements themselves. To the latter, you might look at a Call of Duty or any one of many other shooters. With no need to polish up my own skills, Call of Duty 4 took me fewer than 12 hours to crank out 100% on in a single Veteran run, and collection achievements were deeply deprioritized.

Most games won't focus exclusively on one of these, but will rather have a mixed approach that skews towards one or the other. Something like Dark Souls has a completionist bent to it, set on getting you to experience all the content, but experiencing all the content is itself quite difficult to do. Super Algebrawl has achievements that can be earned in the alternate mode, but isn't particularly concerned with you experiencing it explicitly. The meat of it is to finish the main game on the top difficulty.

This all sounds pretty banal, but the reason I bring it up is that Sonic Mania is neither focused on being comprehensive or focused on you beating the challenge, and leaves an absolutely bonkers wealth of content on the table. To wit, Mania has five different characters to take through the main campaign (six if you count Sonic+Tails separately), each of which can get two different endings (did / did not get all seven emeralds), and a separate campaign under Encore mode. All of this is distilled into a single "get any ending" achievement, as well as one to get the seven Chaos Emeralds but you don't have to refight Eggman with them or anything, you can just get them in the postgame stage selection. It's neither a check on your breadth or depth of knowledge of the game, and there's nothing beyond it. Each stage has a single achievement associated, but most of them are just finding a secret interaction in the stage. That's it. That's fourteen of the eighteen achievements, and fifteen and sixteen are just "spin a checkpoint post really fast" and "get the hidden item boxes at the end of a stage", which I'm told is a Sonic 3 & Knuckles reference that I would never have figured out without a guide.

Then, on the other hand, Mania is completely comprehensive about one element of the game. When you touch a checkpoint post with at least 25 rings, you can go to a bonus stage where you have to tag blue orbs to make them red, and if you tag them in certain patterns they turn into rings to be collected. If you tag a red orb, you're kicked out. You get a gold medal for turning all possible blue orbs into rings, collecting those rings, and then collecting the rest of the blue orbs. There are thirty-two of these stages. There are two achievements for getting all silver and all gold medals in all thirty-two of these. Sonic Mania is a game with a ton of ways to play through it and, if followed like a roadmap, the achievements have you pick a single one and shrug about it, and instead asks you to shove your nose deep into and require comprehensive mastery of a kinda-shitty minigame that goes on too long and does not at all beg master of it. It's baffling, genuinely. It's even stranger to me than Möbius Front '83's achievement set of "beat the campaign on normal difficulty" and "win 100 rounds of cribbage solitaire". I don't understand why the decision was made to weight the achievements in this way, and it bothers me that I don't understand.

To add onto that, late in the writing process, is Collect 'Em All. The final boss of World 11 is, for whatever reason, a gachapon machine. Collect 'Em All asks for you to spawn all eight possible critters from that boss without killing any of them before killing all of them. This is one of the worst bosses I have ever seen in games, as a concept, because he literally does nothing if you never press his gachapon trigger. You can stand under him, idle, for ten minutes, and the stage will just end with a timeout as he does nothing. So you have to jump into him to spawn the gacha children! This is further muddied by the fact that they take three forms, and one of those three forms suicides on you to do damage. Sorry if he decided to randomly spawn an Amy and you got hit by her, achievement is over. This is one of the worst achievements, on one of the worst bosses, that I've done for this thread.

At the end of Mania, I can genuinely say, without reservation, that I did not like the game one bit. What's worst, at the end, is that I still cannot reconcile what it is that other people see in it. I still don't get it. I want to look at my experiences and go "yeah, I thought it was bad, but", but I don't see the but. This isn't a situation where I didn't enjoy the game, like Duke 3D, this is a situation where I don't see what's there to be enjoyed outside of a basic test of skill and pretty pictures whizzing by, and that's far more annoying to have experienced. Anyway, happy Apink day.

[Armchair General]

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

That's another anecdotal thing that really gave me the shits during Mania: terrain crushes. I don't know if I'm just not used to the old ways of Sonic or if Mania leans into this more heavily than most, but any time a single pixel of Sonic's hitbox is pinched on opposite sides by moving gubbinz, he will die instantly.

I never really had this as an problem. But then again,  I only played through this once or twice.

 

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

There's spikes that pop up from the floor in Titanic Monarch Zone to catch you unawares, but in one or two of the placements, the top of the spikes to the ceiling is less than a Sonic tall, so you take damage and then instantly get terrain crushed

Except for that one.

 

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

A big shoutout goes to the magnetic halls in Flying Battery Zone

And that one, lmao

 

[AlexArtsHere]

Might have to pull the trigger on gifting you Superstars a after all, if only to get this off the bottom of your list…of course, there’s also the possibility that you end up thinking that game is peak, causing me to tear my hair out before abandoning civilisation to live as a hermit with only a painted blue coconut for company.

All joking aside…of course, I’ve expressed similar sentiments on the Discord server, but it absolutely breaks my heart that this is what your time with one of my favourite games ever ended up being, perhaps in part because I’m as incapable of understanding your feelings on Mania as you are of understanding the love for it. I don’t want to undercut my own review of Mania in however many years from now, nor try to debate somebody else’s individual experience with a piece of media, but now that you’ve delivered the final post, I would like to briefly lay out my own stall on why I love the game (and Sonic games in general) so much:

I think the design of Sonic games, and the classics in particular, is a uniquely and deeply fascinating subject (shocking, I know). When dissecting the design of Mario, for example, I feel like there’s a very methodical structure to things, to the point that the discussion of 2D Mario’s teaching by serial escalation borders on cliche in YouTube videos on the topic by now. Mario can, I think, largely be characterised by everything but Mario himself. Not that the handling of Mario is unimportant, but the meat of his level design is in how challenged are permutated upon. You learn a gimmick and then go through a series of subversions and escalations. There’s, in the vast majority of scenarios, between one and a small handful of correct ways to approach any given challenge. And I don’t think that’s bad in the slightest, it’s not without good reason that Mario, to this day, remains the face of gaming. He’s pure, utilitarian quality.

Meanwhile, I think 2D Sonic (specifically the classics and Advance games) has a well of depth and nuance in their design that’s born out of the fact that levels are more focused on being courses that facilitate exploration of the gameplay avatar itself. Gameplay is a relationship between Sonic’s ability and handling and the levels to be overcome by the leveraging of those intrinsic assets, particularly to take advantage of sophisticated and nuanced terrain, and I find that a lot more liberating personally.

With that, there are different design considerations to be taken into account, chief among those being how to introduce challenges and conflict into levels. Sonic needs to be slowed down organically so as not to blindside players when an enemy appears, yet that must also be balanced with level design that facilitates largely unchecked use of Sonic’s speed, where the challenge is instead to be able to perceive and react to divergent routes, assuming you want to stay on particular paths, either to set a record or seek out particular goodies (though going with the flow is an equally valid choice).

To get to the point, I think Mania does this the best the series ever has, working with the benefit of 25 years of analysis and refinement both within official releases and a multitude of fan projects (which is how much of the Mania team got to where they are today). There’s a keen awareness of when to go and when to stop, pumping the brakes with leading level design to subtly alert players to danger ahead. Beyond that, I think levels are built in such a way that flow is built and maintained not only in the moment, but between a multitude of intricate paths that provide frequent opportunities for switching. All this in a one of the best presented games in the pantheon with absolutely gorgeous pixel art and animation, visual design and theming that doesn’t miss a beat and a phenomenal soundtrack that’s bangers from start to finish. There are flaws, as with every game, and I will talk about them when my time with the game comes, but in fairness you didn’t mention the one thing from Mania that you enjoyed, being the special stages!

Anyway, while I respect your opinion, I nevertheless hope that someday, with a few years of distance and a different perspective via my own writings-to-come on the game, you’ll be able to appreciate Mania, even if you never fully resonate with it.

[Integrity]

11 minutes ago, AlexArtsHere said:

but in fairness you didn’t mention the one thing from Mania that you enjoyed, being the special stages!

it sounds like he's being sarcastic but he isn't, i did actually enjoy the little ufo chaser game lmao

[Integrity]

PRODEUS (BOUNDING BOX, 2022)

Finished: 27/4/24. Playtime: 17.8 hours.

There's a fairly-memetic scene from the classical American anime ザ・シンプソンズ in which the lead character and father of the household, ホーマー, is presented with a volley of information that whiplashes his opinion from good to bad to good to bad until he short-circuits out and has to be prompted with how he feels. This is really similar to how I felt about Prodeus. Prodeus does a lot of things really exceptionally well and then just fumbles the last step of their implementation. It has a problem with being really derivative, and when it finally does break out it shines. It's a weird game.

Prodeus is a deeply thrown-back boomer shooter that cleaves more to type than many. A lot of reviews call it a Doom (2016) themed .wad made entirely in Doom 2 (1994) and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment, though it does enough to make it obvious why the game wasn't just written for idTech 1. That said, though, when I say it cleaves to Doom 2, I mean it. The weapon progression for the first half of the game is nearly identical, stages are designed from a similar playbook, and the enemies are quite literal behavioral clones introduced in almost the same order as they were in Doom 2. Except for the Archvile, thank fuck, although the final demon is visually fairly similar. The game's fairly pretty, if brown, and gorey in a fun way, and the weapons do handle quite nicely and feel good to shoot, though your max ammo count is tiny and doesn't ever get much bigger so you do have to rotate to "whatever has ammo" a lot of the time.

Then, something weird happens. Occasionally during your battles with the forces of Chaos, you get incursions from the forces of Order, and they're hostile to both you and the demons. The AI is simplistic, but works out so that any battle royale with all three factions present is going to have a few guys gunning for you and most of the rest gutting each other in a deeply satisfying way that these shooters almost never land this well. At about the halfway point of the game, you get to the end of the Realm of Chaos or whatever (the game tries to have a plot but I didn't care sorry) and invade the Realm of Order, and shit goes off the rails. See, not only have you busted down the dimensional door and as such there's a lot more interplay in fights between Order and Chaos, but the stage design has shifted tremendously. Gone are the industrial wastelands and Martian reds of the almost-cringily Doom levels of the Realm of Chaos, replaced with sterile whites and greys and stages that shift and reorient themselves as you progress, making actual labyrinths that are disorienting to just the right degree without actually being frustrating to navigate. As soon as it stops being derivative, the map design starts being really good.

On the other hand, I've withheld a crucial bit of information here: the forces of Order are all exactly the same as the forces of Chaos except blue and ethereal and way more boring to look at, absolutely pounded chock-full of hit points, and with more and more accurate projectiles to spam at you. It kind of tries to line them up as "identical but one's more quality-focused and one's more quantity-focused", but this pattern of game just doesn't work well for the former - hell, look at the gentle shellacking I gave to Quake 2 versus its predecessor. When you're in Order-centered stages, rather than mixed ones, you just have to play a lot more carefully, and about half of your arsenal simply does not do enough damage to be worth considering. At about the two-thirds point of the game, I literally went into the menu and unbound the keys to equip all but five of my 13-odd guns, because the other options didn't cut the mustard anymore. As the variety in combat went up, my options for dealing with it went sharply down.

All this is tied into an upgrade system that's nothing short of insane. There's a shop that you can visit from the overworld to spend your hard-earned ore, which is generally hidden in secrets and such across maps, expecting about 5-8 per level. The idea is, one presumes, that you spend money on the guns that suit you best, but the shop is tiered. You have to buy all of each tier to unlock the next, so you're going to spend 30 of your ores on the super shotgun and the plasma rifle so that you can buy, for instance, the double jump and airdash, one or both of which are required to get about a fourth of the ores in the game. Then you can get the bandolier, increasing your ammo capacity to a still-not-enough about 150%, and then you start getting the best guns in the game, which are transparently just the best guns in the game no contest. Getting through those later Order stages without the Swarmer or the chaos revolver sounds like an exercise in pure misery, but because I had them, I ended up going toe-to-toe bullshit-for-bullshit with the forces of Order and having a lovely time. The game would be far better served to cut back on the shop's impact.

The shop especially led to a weird sense of progression for me. I was getting 2-5 ores per map as I was going, which meant that by the time I got out of the Realm of Chaos I only had the super shotgun and the plasma rifle and was closing in on getting the double jump. By this point, stages were absolutely being designed as though I'd gotten the double jump, and I kept seeing ores that I could have gotten with it floating just out of reach, and I had to make a decision: I figured that I should just accept Prodeus' shop as a bad handicap on the game, roll back to the first map, pull up a secrets guide, and replay the first half of the game and get all the ores as I went. I'm glad I did, even though it was demoralizing at the time, and I strongly recommend you pull up a secrets guide (there's a fantastic screenshots-only one on Steam) to walk along as you go.

But the real problem is that, despite all this weight dragging it down, despite all the balls-out derivation from Doom 2, I still can't just say Prodeus isn't great. The core movement and gunplay feels astonishingly good outside of one or two flop weapons, and when it's firing on all cylinders, it's nearly as good a modern arena shooter as games like Doom '16. I think therein lies the core of what bothers me still at the end of Prodeus: its faith in the design principles of boomer shooter classics get deeply in the way of what could have been a genuinely exceptional modern FPS, so even when it's good one can't help but feel like it could have been so much more. I'd love to see this dev team throw off the shackles of the past and do something completely their own, because all of the elements of the FPS of the Year 2024 are right there in Prodeus. It just needed more confidence in itself. It also needed a UX consultant, because good God, going from splash screen root menu to your last campaign save on the overworld is, I shit you not, eight clicks.

The achievements are just about as steady as they go. Beat the game, any difficulty, and do it with 100% completion, here defined as complete every stage with all secrets, with all kills, and without dying; all can be accomplished in as few or as many runs at the stages as you need. While none of the three completion metrics necessarily need to be done together, a fair number of maps have enemies that spawn to contest you getting a specific secret, so getting all secrets and all kills tends to go hand-in-hand. There's a pretty standard variety of "kill by x" ones, such as environmental kills and gibs and "friendly fire" kills, the last of which being made a lot easier when you get to the stages where the enemies actively fight each other. After that, there's two pairs of challenge run achievements. The first pair is to complete a level 100% on Ultra Hard and to complete a level without dying on Hardest; doing the former necessarily demands the latter. You can crank the difficulty up on a completed save and walk back to any map you like to get this done with your endgame kit. The second pair is to complete a level without taking damage and to complete a level without killing anyone. You can do these separate, but with the mobility upgrades you can do the first map (on an easier difficulty, again on the same save, if you like) super fast with some clever parkour and get them together. I did both these pairs as I felt like it, one somewhere during the Order world and the other right after finishing the campaign, and ended up with 29/30 with pretty organic play as long as you consider the secrets guide to be organic.

Thirtieth from thirty is to kill 10,000 enemies. A massive, I mean huge as hell, map might have 200 or so guys on it. Running the whole campaign about 1.5 times on difficulty 4 from 6, plus a handful of stage reruns to get 100% Kills I had missed due to areas I couldn't backtrack to or rerunning the time trials to get to par time for more ore, plus the challenge runs, etc. got me to around 6,000. There's no way to track this exactly in-game, but someone's made a community map that gives you a minigun and a hallway of zombies (it is called Minigun Hallway) that gives 454 kills per clear. I kept a loose tally of the clears I did and it came out to around 4,000 extra kills over the course of about 40 minutes. Not the worst grind achievement in games, but still a little souring.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Whoever designed Minigun Hallway deserves some community service hours, at least.

[Integrity]

real

[Integrity]

NEVER ALONE (KISIMA INGITCHUNA) (UPPER ONE, 2014)

Finished: 2/5/24. Playtime: 4.8 hours.

I think this is the first time I'm posting about a game after someone else in this thread did.

On 9/21/2023 at 7:20 AM, lenticular said:

This is a bit of an odd one. Ostensibly, it's a puzzle platformer with optional co-op. Think of something like Trine or Lego Star Wars. There are different characters with different abilities and you need to use both sets of abilities to solve the game's puzzles, which you do either by playing co-op or by playing single player and switching back and forth between which character you're controlling. In this case, the two characters are an arctic fox (who is good at climbing and has the ability to control spirits) and a girl called Nuna (who is good at having hands).

Except that that's not really the main point of the game. The main point is that the game is actually about Iñupiat (native Alaskan) people, their culture, and their stories. The story is based on an Iñupiat story and has an Iñupiaq language narrator (with English subtitles), some of the art is based on Iñupiat art, and as you play through the game, you unlock "cultural insights" which are basically just short videos of interviews with Iñupiat people, talking about their lives, culture, etc. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call it edutainment, but it is definitely leaning in that direction.

The basic gameplay is mostly fine if unremarkable. There are definitely moments of indie jank that can be frustrating to deal with. For instance, in single player, the computer will control the character you aren't using at any given moment, and typically just follow along behind you. Except that sometimes they will miss the most basic jump and instead plummet to their death. Fortunately, checkpoints are pretty damn regular, which kept the frustration to a fairly low level. But in purely mechanical terms, I couldn't really recommend the game. It's not bad, but it isn't particularly good either.

But, ultimately, if you're buying this game because you're excited about tight platforming and intricate puzzles then you are absolutely doing it wrong. This is not a mechanics game. This is a vibes game. If you're playing this, you're doing it because you're interested in Iñupiat people and culture, or because you really dig the Arctic setting, or because you love the art style (which I saw someone compare to Studio Ghibli, which I think is overselling things but not absurd), or because you think that Nuna and fox are really cute. And if you go into it with that mindset and are willing to put up with a bit of jank and frustration, then it's a charming and really quite good game.

Achievements are pretty straightforward. They're a combination of progress achievements that are impossible to miss as you play the game, and achievements which you get for finding and unlocking the cultural insights throughout the game. These vary from "pretty much impossible to miss" to "kind of out of the way, but not too hard to find if you look for them". My overall play time includes one full play through in 2015 and then another full play through in 2023 to get 100% achievements, so the "real" completion time is probably about half of what it took me overall.

Which is awesome, because I genuinely have very little to add to this post, minus the personal stuff like "one playthrough in 2015". This is exactly how it landed for me - certainly no barnstormer of a game, but competently made; Fox is occasionally suicidal; as a nearly-edutainment cultural piece, I'm very glad it exists and I'm very glad that I played it. There's a sequel coming! I'm interested to see what they do with it.

[Integrity]

oh shit

On 10/20/2022 at 6:07 PM, Integrity said:

Since I'm at 81 now (and growing!),

Quote

ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

we did it boys we've officially doubled

[lenticular]

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

I think this is the first time I'm posting about a game after someone else in this thread did.

I think that I also did We Love Katamari before you, didn't I? But our opinions were pretty different on that one (I liked it more than you did). Regardless, I'm glad that you played this and glad you had a similar sort of experience with it to what I did. I've been spending the last decade on and off recommending it to people and having nobody listen to me, so it's good to actually see someone else playing it for once. I did see the sequel announced recently, which I was not expecting at all. Will definitely be interesting to see what they do with it.

[Integrity]

oh yeah you're right, good call. totally blanked that one

 

the SECOND time i've posted about a game after someone else did!