Recent reviews by GetBeaned

With the Souls-like genre being as saturated as it is, it’s pretty hard to stand out. Plenty of them stick rigidly to the foundations set by FromSoft: dark fantasy worlds filled with nightmarish beasts, oversized and unwieldy weapons, and an often oppressive lack of handholding. Void Sols isn’t unique in the sense it contains many of these elements, but through its minimalist, dimly lit, two dimensional world, it forges a wholly original identity, one which is inviting to both Souls neophytes and FromSoft veterans, one which takes the very essence of the genre and with a heavy shove brings it right to the fore, and one which has so much flair, polish, and - surprisingly - character that I pray to any and all gods that it doesn’t get lost in the endless, rapidly shifting conveyor belt of Souls-like releases.

From the off, there’s something weird about Void Sols. That being that you’re a triangle. A literal 2D triangle: three sides, solid white outline, pitch black innards. Triangle. Stuck in a prison cell, a little scene plays out with shocking degree of humanisation for what are just shapes gliding around. A guard (also a sort of triangle) urges our neighbouring prisoner (I’ll have you guess what they look like) out of the cell, where they’re met with a much larger guard, sword in hand (side?), ready to strike them down. The panicked movements of the captive, the hulking, angular design of the executioner, and the stifling amount of darkness creates a rather vivid image. Void Sols’ minimalist approach is far from the aesthetic of a pretentious indie platformer. Its intent is clear, and as I quickly discovered, the result is marvellous. Akin to the 2012 rogue-lite Teleglitch, Void Sols plays with light in a way which both builds a fantastically moody and eerie atmosphere, and also makes for interesting encounters and traversal. Enemies can be hidden behind barrels, tables, and chairs, with the dim flickers of a wall-mounted torch providing just the few precise light beams needed to expose their location. Void Sols is filled with environments best described as harsh. Yes, that does in one sense hark back to Souls convention where the world must be in peril, destroyed, or otherwise in a pretty crappy condition, though in another sense it directly describes how Void Sols’ minimalist art direction creates rooms and terrains made up primarily of straight lines; cold walls are painted with a single brushstroke and hidden rooms are only partially revealed by thin slithers of light.

Which isn’t to say Void Sols is devoid of detail. Outside areas in particular - while still masked in darkness - have clearly identifiable landmarks, adding to the atmosphere of this half alien, half mundane world. Leaving the prison, we’re met with the blue-hued outdoors, where the floor is covered in snow while falling, wispy snowflakes drift across the screen. Campfires appear sporadically, as do huts, houses, and barns, some with half open doors, allowing the inside embers emanating from fireplaces to sputter out. Enemies are just as shapely (literally) as our triangle protagonist, but seeing them in motion gives them a fair degree of recognisable personality: trappers launch nets, skinny hounds launch themselves, frogs leap and lash their tongues etc. There’s something very human about the world of Void Sols, in spite of its geometric aesthetic and increasingly zany late game. It helps that Void Sols lets us absorb all this rich atmosphere in near silence, with music only ever playing during boss fights. The crackles of burning wood, croaking of frogs, steps in snow, and thwacks of a hammer meeting an anvil (hello Andre!) are isolated, ringing, echoing, and brought to the forefront, and completely sucked me into this world. It’s a perfect example of “less is more”, which considering the art style only further proves how intentionally well designed this all is.

To take a long step back, I suppose we should talk about what will be the meat of the pie for many: the gameplay. As per every Souls-like, it’s a bit tough, though my prior comments on its accessibility weren’t false. Hits with our primary weapon are split into normal and special attacks. We can hold a secondary weapon; something to cast fire, block blows, or shoot arrows for example. We have an artifact slot which give buffs when a specific action is made, and a relic slot which give more reliable, constant boons. Part of Void Sols’ accessibility comes from allowing complete player freedom. All four stats can be modified whenever at a rest point, and thus changing builds is as simple as swapping out our weapon and moving the stats around a bit. As a oongaboonga strength enjoyer, I naturally found a cozy marriage with the pickaxe, a weapon which rewards slow accurate strikes over the quicker slashes of the base sword. It also does hefty “stance” damage, a player-transparent bar similar to health which when depleted stuns the enemy for some time. Other weapons like the dagger or scythe have their place, though my rudimentary caveman brain is not it. More broadly speaking, the combat’s rather grand. Even in this flat world, it feels very Souls-like, in the sense every enemy, big or small, proves some sort of threat. While on paper attacking is no more than choosing a heavy or light swing, enemy variety leads to some nice diverse arenas, with plenty of foes proving to be worthy, enjoyable challenges, and as per every Souls game, some which gnaw at the very essence of my sanity.

While you could feasibly walk away from Void Sols with the opinion that its stripped back combat is merely perfunctory, where I believe it truly excels is where many of its peers flounder, and in my experience is often only truly mastered by the progenitors themselves: exploration. It’s two fold too. Once we arrive at the village, it clear it acts as a hub of sorts, where several other areas link back to, with many being accessible at one time. One area dominated by a frigid climate so vicious the wind actively damages is still able to be explored with enough skill and planning, though exploring other areas can make that task a lot easier. Weapons, talismans, and artefacts are spread across the world, not only in these distinct areas, but also in nooks and crannies, shrouded in darkness, shrivelled behind barrels, or tucked away into crevices. Mustering the courage to dive into the gloom, having the wits to smack the barrels broken, and explosives to break the rocks asunder reveals these treasures and is thoroughly rewarding. Shortcuts and save points are additionally found this way, making the game easier and less frustrating on death. It’s evidence that developers Finite Reflection Studios understands that what makes a Souls game brilliant isn’t only restricted to bonking beasts with a bat, that everything in between matters just as much.

I don’t often play games the year they come out. Financially it makes sense to prioritise stuff like food and rent and other silly stuff like that, and logically it makes sense to delve into the many hundreds of games sat unplayed in my library spanning several decades. Though when I played Void Sols’ demo on a whim during the Next Fest, I knew this was something I was willing to break all the rules for. To loop back, it’s an utter gem I’m worried will be missed by many in a genre so oversaturated it’s borderline a meme, though I hope my review does something in the way of expressing how much I think people should play this. My only regret is my inability to stamp this as my game of the year. Sorry, Finite Reflection Studios, but the draw of Balatro is inescapable.

I don’t think there’s a single piece to The Witcher that impresses a sense of mastery. Combat attempts to replicate the swift elegance of Geralt’s slashes and pirouettes, but fettered to the Aurora Engine, it plays out with more or less the same grace as the Star Wars Kid. The lofty aims of the narrative being told, retreading the themes and moral dilemmas of the books, often fall short in execution, be it with passionless voice performances, elongated questlines, or simply hokey moment-to-moment dialogue. The alchemy system, the famed Witcher tonics and narcotics, are abundant and varied, yet rarely does the game encourage their production, with the journal in equal part to blame, which in theory slowly expands your knowledge of monsters and their “unique” weaknesses, though they all fall into using the silver sword utilising one of two stances. The Witcher is a flawed game, seemingly gasping for a higher budget and more technological prowess, and yet despite nothing clicking into place how it should, it’s absolutely worth a play.

We take control of Geralt a few years after the events of the books, struck with blinding, near total amnesia. His fairytale feats are lost to him, people he held close foreign, and even concepts such as his Witcher brews and the monsters he’s slain are lost in the ether. It’s a naff conceit to be frank, though it’s apparent that its use here is a way to introduce people to the world of the Witcher who haven’t invested time into the novels. He’s a blank slate, where beasties such as bruxas, drowners, and strigas blend into one until we research their existence, which in fairness is a neat idea. Slowly over the course of the game, we build up an expansive repertoire of tomes and manuals detailing how to most effectively face each foe, along with a growing collection of potions to concoct, and an ever growing journal detailing characters, locations, and concepts which serve to aid Geralt in remembering who he was.

Like I said, it’s a bit lazy, but effective. Combat is perfunctory, and hits that middling standard in part due to how knowledge influences encounters, at least to start with. Using the Aurora Engine - which to my knowledge is only used elsewhere by the Neverwinter Nights games - it’s not exactly a well oiled machine. Geralt employs different “styles”: strong, fast, and group, and deciding which one to use requires either intuition or erudition of the enemies corresponding journal page. It’s something better in concept, and in practise you can most often employ the strategy of using the strong style against big, lumbering meatbags, the fast style against spindly agile sorts, and the group style when outnumbered by anything. This goes some way to describing the limitations of the journal integration, as it quickly becomes redundant as enemies begin to blend into these easily identifiable groups. Many journal pages offer other information, ranging from lore descriptions to the more functional tactical advice, though again, the game’s broader flat difficulty doesn’t necessitate engaging with it. Many monsters will be weak to certain blade coatings for example, though still succumb to the silver sword in a flash even without one applied, thus not really serving any purpose in this form.

At a more birds eye perspective, the combat - while clearly chained to the stilted rhythm of the Aurora Engine - can produce some well executed scenes of silky, theatrical conflict. There’s really not much more to it than clicking on the enemy you want to attack and ensuring you’re in the correct style, but through some tight animation work, high combo moves (achieved by simply clicking on the enemy when the cursor flashes) are flashy, and evoke their styles pretty well, with the last stages of a fast style combo playing it in satisfyingly blistering speed, while the last leap of a strong slash has some real oomph behind it. The Witcher Signs, a sort of weak level magic quickly forgotten in the books is revived here in the form of five varied spells. A quick Google seems to suggest each one is overpowered in their own way, but I had the most fun using the Axii sign to temporarily turn foe to friend while searing their allies-turned-adversaries with the Igni sign. Again it’s not exactly a technical tour de force as trying to use signs while already in an attack animation for example will just result in periods of static nothingness, but when it works, it can supplement the flashiness of the rest of the combat quite well.

Acutely related to the combat is the alchemy system, which is another Witcher concept sort of left by the wayside in the books, but is picked up here to mixed effect. On the one hand, I love the theoretical idea of Witcher concoctions; elixirs, potions, and brews which directly heighten the already superior Witcher abilities and stress the importance of forethought. As I’ve already highlighted though, in practice combat rarely needs preparation, and most encounters can be cleared most often without any supplements, bar maybe Swallow, a health regeneration potion. In theory though, the alchemy system is quite robust, allowing Geralt to create remedies through the knowledge gained by books and scrolls or through experimentation. We accumulate an abundance of ingredients throughout the game, both from flora and bits of the beasts we slay, and each potential brew requires certain parts, a few sprigs of this plant here and bit of drowner brain there and we have a way to see in the dark. Others enhance our sword damage, others make our signs more effective, allow us to see through walls, boost our defences, or even turn our blood to poison, so any blood suckers are in for a surprise when they decide to sink their teeth into us. Ultimately, its surplus to requirements, as, to sound like a broken record, the game’s normal difficulty simply doesn’t encourage using them all that often.

One common notion I saw when looking at opinions of the combat online was one of ignoring it as much as possible. Stick the difficulty on easy and enjoy the story. Because really, The Witcher is closer to old school RPG’s than it is a hack ‘n slash brawler. So how is the story? To keep the same record in rotation, it’s something in concept quite neat, but doesn’t fully stick in the landing in the field. While the overarching plot of The Witcher is new, I came away viewing the overall game as something akin to a soft reboot, a retreading of many of the themes of the books, specifically the short stories. Destiny, neutrality, good vs evil, man vs monster. Plenty of quests ask a question, and have you (and thus Geralt) answer it. Do you burn the witch for bringing about a curse of demonic dogs, or do conclude demons only come about as a result of human immorality? Do you kill the werewolf out of principle, as the Witcher code to defend humanity states, or do you view their own vigilante justice as the lesser evil? These are dilemmas which make the short story collections so endearing, and by and large the game implements them here to great effect. Though where it stumbles is in the more moment-to-moment details, namely the dialogue. Perhaps this is a translation thing - assuming the script was first written in Polish - because conversations often give the impression that different writers were assigned a character, given a prompt, and wrote their retorts and rejoinders in secret. Geralt can at times evoke his characteristic dry wit, but more often than not comes off as stoically dull. Dandelion is the biggest victim here, lacking so much of his performative, flowery, yet affable articulation in service of an uncanny facsimile. Directly pertaining to quests, they can often feel underdeveloped, not because those larger concepts aren’t interesting, but instead because the path to exploring them is filled with underdeveloped, ineloquent speech.

What a baffling game. I’m tempted to just paste my Dead Island review here, as for all intents and purposes this is just more of the same. Unfortunately, “the same” is foundationally flawed, and this standalone expansion of sorts is incapable of fixing the framework it’s built upon. The positive: if you liked Dead Island, it’s safe to say you’ll probably like Riptide, and you can ignore the rest of this review. While it takes a few steps back, there are a couple of neat additions like fully voiced player dialogue and a spattering of new perks to play with. For those that didn’t like Dead Island, read on as I try to make sense of why this thing exists.

As our four heroes - and friendly neighbourhood convict-turned pilot - escape the island, we take a quick pit stop on a naval vessel to refuel. Big bad generic billionaire however is having none of this survival business and throws us in a cell, where we undergo tests to investigate our immunity. The ship titanic's itself and we end up on the island Palanai where the virus has spread to, and reestablish a point I’ve already made: “more of the same”.

Only, the beautiful backdrop of Hanoi has been replaced with the murky, sludgey, half-uninhabited jungle of Palanai. Visuals are one of Dead Island’s strengths. Bolstered by the Definitive Edition upgrades, the fifteen year old game is a looker, which I believe goes deeper than being screenshot fodder. Despite my misgivings towards the game, I think the tonal juxtaposition between spooky zombies and the idyllic resort in that game gave off a stronger vibe than the gameplay ever did, which did ultimately retain my interest for longer. Bikini clad survivors fleeing atop beachside festival stages and suitcase strewn pools emmenate pure panic. Palanai conversely is more akin to the original game’s Act 3 jungle area, though even less interesting. Its colour palette rarely includes those outside the dark, murky shades. Abundant bogs of dirty green water occupies much of Riptides environments. Algae, moss, and other messy foliage envelops the tatty submerged slums, and where there is colour it usually ends up sticking out like a sore thumb given its scarcity.

My main complaint with Riptide isn’t that is looks like literal dookie of course, though the fact the world we explore is so turgid is definitely part of the reason I couldn’t even muster a full four hours of playtime. Sprinting in Dead Island was never a fun experience (especially without the “essential fix” mod which removes the horrid motion blur) mostly because you have to keep your eyes partly focussed on the stamina bar. Worse in Riptide are the aforementioned pools of water, populating a great deal of Palanai, necessitating a boat to navigate for even short distances, since sprinting through water is, naturally, out of the question. There’s also a weird vertical design choice with much of the island’s architecture. For sure, given the high water level, it makes sense in universe for shacks and slums to exist propped up above eye level, but for a game with an awkward relationship with movement, it makes moving around quite a chore. In a game like oh, I don’t know, Dying Light, this would be a dream, leaping from rooftops, utilising the game’s instant death drop attack etc. But here, Techland’s parkour prowess is still many years in the making.

As for other changes, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some notable inclusions come in the form of enemy variety. A new menu entry notes all the types of the undead we fight, with new unique types (which in my experience where just the beefy “thug” zombies) given a little backstory. However, all of my issues with the first game remain issues here, and are perhaps amplified. For one, you can import your character from the first game, which in my case was a level 20 odd Sam B. My heaven-kissed sledgehammer may have been stripped from me, but all my perks and stats are there. One of my primary complaints with Dead Island was its level scaling, which made combat a largely fruitless endeavour, one by the end of the game I ended up ignoring if I could. Riptide is substantially more combat focussed, and while I think Dead Island’s intentionally floaty combat is fine, combined with zombies of ridiculous levels, many encounters last way too long. These special names undead in particular are given so much health I had to just walk away from them, my puny sticks and flimsy hammers incapable of making a dent in their HP. One way in which Riptide puts combat more front and center is through these sort of “defend the area” missions, where undead will swarm you in waves and you, often with the help of NPC’s, hold the line. In theory quite fun, but much like the escort and retrieval missions which still make up the entirety side quests, they tire quickly.

It ends up feeling like for every step forward Dead Island Riptide makes, it has another step back to ensure they stay firmly planted where they began. Playing Riptide immediately after the original doesn’t help my perception either. Already weary of the game’s banal mission structure and shoddy writing, their presence in this pseudo-sequel makes it abundantly apparent how this is simply more of the same. The structural issues are still here, rotting and on the verge of collapse, held together by the same redeeming qualities of the first game. It makes sense then that Techland’s next attempt abandoned the series completely. To echo what I said at the end of my Dead Island review: Just play Dying Light.

I should note before anything I played the vast majority of the game with the “Essential Fix” mod which, while not altering the game fundamentally, removes motion blur and other post processing effects, along with “fixing” the movement to feel less awful.

---

Dead Island is many things. A zombie game; of course. A bit of an RPG; for some reason. A huge disappointment; for sure. And above all, almost entirely redundant in a world where Dying Light exists. That’s probably a bit hyperbolic. The existence of better games never makes something obsolete, but given everyone has limited time, I’d argue Dead Island just isn’t worth said time.

I don’t want this whole review to be a contrast between the two games, so lets highlight what Dead Island does well. With the juiced up visuals of the Definitive Edition, Dead Island looks mighty fine. The games tropical resort locale was a selling point from the start, and the game never looks better than the first act, set amongst the glistening blue sea, idyllic coastal shacks, and serene poolside deck chairs. Zombies too, abetted by solid animation work, are a real horror treat, particularly when contrasted by the otherwise cheery scenery.

Built into that is how the undead act in combat - which as a whole, while floaty and somewhat inconsistent, is one of Dead Island’s strengths. With a focus on melee, Dead Island excels at embodying the scrappy and sluggish swings of a baseball bat as it tumbles through the air, slowing travelling towards the zombie skull set as its destination, concluding with our target staggering and slumping to the ground. There’s a sort of aiming system here where you can direct your hits at specific body parts, though I found it was only ever useful to strike heads and arms, and because of that, enemies react in a genuinely impressive fashion, swaying with believable and satisfying inertia. These strengths don’t extend to ranged combat though, where aim assist is inexplicably always enabled even when using a mouse. Even disregarding that, pistol duels - either against zombies or humans - are a drab affair, failing to even live up to the shallow standards of a trite CoD copycat.

Everyone remembers the infamous Dead Island trailer; the raw and artful depiction of a zombie outbreak, the expertly paced imagery of ordinary parents beating back undead to save their child, and in graphic detail, failing. None of that of course exists in the game. It’s an emotionally detached brawler with godawful writing, woeful acting performances, and under baked, wholly incongruent RPG undertones, from the side quests to the levelling system. What should be a grim juxtaposition of paradise and hell is turned on its head by base RPG elements, ranging from a level up perk tree to weapon stats to every terrible side quest structure we hate. The writing is universally cringe, but the side quests aren’t even afforded the luxury of B-movie-esque cutscenes present in the main story. Every single one follows the pattern of “go to point A, kill zombies/pick up item/escort survivor, get reward”. The game is split into four acts, and I stopped doing almost all side quests by the mid point of act two, already pushed to my limits by the banal writing of the primary mission.

That’s only the start of Dead Island’s RPG-ification. It’s most apparent in levelling up. A childhood favourite of mine is Oblivion - a game which progressively gets worse as I become more aware of its many, many problems, one of which being level scaling. Dead Island uses level scaling, which is to say all enemies, regardless of location, get stronger as you level up, and no day goes by where I don’t daydream about how utterly pointless and infuriating level scaling is. Levelling up in Dead Island seems like an oversight, given the only benefit is to plonk a point into an uninteresting and near worthless perk tree. Just like in Oblivion, you’re somewhat punished by levelling up unless you somehow gain power elsewhere, since your enemies are just plain stronger than you otherwise. It’s a pure mathematical problem - because zombies and math go hand in hand, dontcha know? - whereby I get a perk to increase the amount of money I find by 5%, and my undead assailants get buffs to their health and damage. There do exist some perks of note. Two in fact - one which lets you stomp on prone enemies for an easy kill, and another which makes that kill instant - are so much more beneficial than the rest they further exemplify how laughable the whole folly is.

The only way to circumvent this is through your arsenal, but the firm grips of terrible RPG mechanics know no limits, for weapons in Dead Island, while superficially diverse, essentially fall into the same trap. Even going as far as adopting a rarity colour system, every weapon from lead pipe to kitchen knife to sledgehammer scales with the game, meaning the ultra rare excalibur you picked up at level five is a mere rusty bread knife by the second act. You can repair, upgrade, and modify weapons, giving them boosts to their damage output through raw number bumps or special effects like electric or bleed. It’s ultimately a futile task though, in the same way clinging to a weapon in modern Zelda is. They are going to break or be outclassed very quickly, the infinite circus of finding new weapons is a necessary chore, which is unlike modern Zelda, where new, peculiar weapon interactions are worth tossing old sticks and hammers for.

It’s not a total waste of time, though to loop back to my initial argument, why settle for less when better games exist? Dying Light for example, has many of the aspects discussed here - both in the positive and negative camps - yet those in the latter are either less of an issue or turned on their heads. There is a degree of RPG gameplay to Dying Light, but with a far more robust skill tree and crafting system, I looked forward to kitting myself out with new weapons. Just the same, the stale side quest structure can be present there too, though in terms of writing, much of Dying Light’s best material is found in these inconsequential secondary escapades; I mean, it certainly isn’t found in that games equally dreadful overarching narrative. It’s also worth noting that by mashing together these two disparate tones of zombie horror and silly brawler, Dead Island sacrifices consistent scares for an unsatisfying middle ground, whereas Dying Light’s nighttime was so terrifying I personified my inner NPC and stayed put at the fort until the sun rose. The nicest thing I can say about Dead Island is that is provided a framework for better things. That being Dying Light. Just play Dying Light.

In 2014, the idea of a first person rogue-lite was pretty novel. Most were still top down and/or 2D a la The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, and Dungeons of Dredmor, and while some in the 3D realm did exist, such as Eldritch and Paranuatical Activity, Tower of Guns was the first to make an impression on me, and perhaps solidify my love for the genre. It’s hectic and absurd, a true embodiment of a Quake-style shooter, only with rogue-lite elements. And while it holds up pretty well in terms of a shooter, it’s already starting to look dated by how little content there is.

It’s a silly game from top to bottom. Like Quake, the weapons we use aren’t exactly conventional, spanning from a saw blade shooter to a disproportional hand cannon to a literal tiny Hadron Collider. All of them, to some extent, offer a fun time, though their lack of impact - combined with zero enemy recoil - does make them feel a tad weak. We can upgrade them overtime with passive XP drops, but sadly each upgrade is typically just a damage or rate of fire boost, which for a game as bonkers as Tower of Guns I would’ve hoped for more. Before each run, we choose a perk to help (or hinder) us. One gives you a triple jump from the off, another makes you immune to self damage, and another just makes the game wholly easier, offering more bullet damage, higher armour and less difficult enemies - while another perk does the opposite.

And while the weapons wear thin fairly quickly, and the enemies’ lack of reaction to your attacks leave a lot to be desired, it’s a romp, holding no bars in allowing for absolute nonsense, and in fact actively encourages it. It’s a movement based shooter, very much of the vertical variety, populating levels with foes stuck to ceilings, hopping and hovering across the air, and to make up for that, the game liberally allows for upgrades to the amount of jumps you can make midair, along with jump height and general speed. By the end of a run, you can simulate what it must feel like for a top tier DOOM speedrunner to zip through stages in seconds. Tower of Guns plonks plenty of secrets - like an oldschool shooter - around each level, a lot of them requiring soaring through the sky to hard to reach ledges and mantels. Some (again like oldschool shooters) are completely esoteric, and I had a particular disdain for any hidden behind false walls, but flying through the air, blasting robots from the skybox, and picking up an extra jump or two here and there exemplifies what Tower of Guns does best.

While I’m a bit down on the game’s gunplay, it’s completely serviceable. It’s negated somewhat by enemy variety, both in actual enemy types and how they are placed across levels. Many turret-style hostiles hold static positions, though to comedic effect they’re often latched to moving walls or upside down on a roof. Flying foes offer a more pressing worry, while bigger, slower moving tanks can take chunks off your health if you get too close. Though the lack of oomph is disappointing, beefing up your character with a handful of damage upgrades and mowing through a whole room of enemies is still fun. Watching a horde of floating bombs quickly explode from a few well placed rockets is a satisfying sight, while circle strafing a boss has its moments of glee as well.

Where Tower of Guns shows its age is in its lack of content. In writing this review, I found there are actually double the amount of guns I thought there were, though given I’ve completed several runs, unlocked every starting gun and perk and hadn’t seen a single one, I question how many others will see them too. Level design is broadly solid, mostly held up by the oldschool infatuation with secret areas, but is visually rather bland and starts to repeat rapidly. Unless you play in endless mode - which, get this, is endless - an entire run can span a mere twenty minutes, and doesn’t leave me satisfied, lacking a proper ending, and in same instances, any challenge at all. The choice of perks, while technically adequate, is actually limited in usefulness, and I found myself returning to the same two or three choices every time. Within runs, you don’t have much influence over what upgrade path you can take either, and given many secrets filled with coins, XP, or even plain upgrades themselves are often behind several jumps, you might not be able to acquire any at all.

Compared to modern takes on the genre, Tower of Guns is more a proof of concept than a veritable classic. When I played this in 2014, it was truly something unique. My love for games like DOOM and Quake hadn’t borne fruit yet, and going back to this a decade later, I can appreciate where it took obvious inspiration, and where it took it to a completely wacky extent. It’s for that reason Tower of Guns is still worth a look, though given how much choice we have nowadays, its lack of complexity and content is sure to mean playtime's that fall short of much of its newer interpretations.

I’m reluctant to even call Luck be a Landlord a rogue-lite. True to the roots of a slot machine, it’s inextricably tied to random chance. Entering a “run”, there are no classes, no builds, no perks or bonus items, no (player controlled) modifiers. It’s a game about spinning a slot machine and letting fate take the wheel. Based on that alone, the game is a tough sell, and where it not for the words of Balatro dev, LocalThunk, I wouldn’t have bothered with it. And while it’s in no way as good as Balatro - I mean, what is? - I can totally see the inspiration, and that precise giddiness which comes from seeing the numbers go big like in a game like Balatro is, to a lesser extent, present here.

As is probably very obvious, a lot of my thoughts on this game are in relation to Balatro, though it’s worth stressing how different they are in many ways. For one, Luck be a Landlord is mechanically much simpler. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a literal slot machine, though the fiscally exploitative underbelly of the gambling world is thankfully absent. We spin the machine, win virtual cash for the value of each symbol shown, complete the loop by, if we so wish, adding a new symbol to our collection. Where you’d see 7’s, hearts, and fruits on a traditional machine, we also see that here, though there worth is twisted and warped to facilitate wacky combos. Fruit for example range from bananas worth one coin to strawberries worth three. The magic is often in how they interact with other symbols. Bananas are imbued with the power to destroy thief symbols, of which leech coin from you each spin, but return a multiple of the combined stolen currency when tripped by the pesky potassium-filled produce. Strawberries score high, but score even higher for each other strawberry on the board. Cow symbols have a chance to produce milk, which cat symbols can drink for an immediate cash injection. Keys score low by themselves, but naturally open the locks of chests, brimming with coin.

By the late game, these interactions can get truly wacky, emphasised by the slowly rising pitch of the audio ding which plays every time a symbol scores. Some of my favourite symbols are those which destroy others symbols and increase in passive value as a result. Divers for example can remove common aquatic beasts from the board like jellyfish and turtles, both to make space for new symbols but also to increase in value itself. Symbols like the oyster - similar to the cow - have the chance to pop out a pearl, which the diver thusly devours, creating a farm of sorts for consistent profit. The item system builds on this, acquired sporadically through a run, which help you build a more focused strategy. Some give a passive chance to unlock chests without the need for keys, others simply increase the value of certain symbols. They can manipulate how often a symbol produces coin, how likely they are to produce another symbol, or how long they stick around before imploding. The result of all these interactions is, if lucky of course, big, chungus, numbers - which is specifically what LocalThunk points out when crediting this game as an influence in making Balatro.

However the likelihood of hitting these euphoric moments is limited by lady luck, and she do be a landlord, and much like a landlord, she also be fickle and unreliable. Unlocking a new deck in Balatro and exploring the new ways you can interact with the game’s jokers was a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience, a constant barrage of ingenuity and player choice. With Luck be a Landlord, we really don’t have any choice, which in the theme of renting is very apt, but as a video game can be quite frustrating. As I said before, we can’t influence anything prior to a run, so I often found myself (especially at higher difficulties) getting a few spins in and restarting when it became apparent nothing was coming together. It also means you can’t strategise or play with an archetype you want to. Even if you manage to land yourself that one symbol you want - which for me was often the geologist - you also need those combo symbols, and in many cases they get destroyed in the money making process. As a result, where Balatro can reliably give you these hits of dopamine, Luck be a Landlord is much more conservative with how often it rewards you.

You’ll know whether you’ll jive with Luck be a Landlord within the first 15 minutes. While there are plenty of symbols and interactions to discover, its adherence to randomness means it doesn’t offer much in the way of critical thinking, nor does it get harder in a satisfying fashion. Each level (of which there are 20) introduces a slight debuff, like a higher “rent” requirement to not fail the run, or dud X symbols being stuffed into your machine. But without reliable ways to counteract these challenges, Luck be a Landlord progressively exposes how shallow the strategy side of it is. All the while it doesn’t exactly become less fun. In a way, because it demands less of your attention, Luck be a Landlord is a fantastic game to play with a podcast on in the background, though compliments like that don’t exactly sing the game’s praises. I do truly believe Luck be a Landlord is a fun time even without the need for external stimulation, though understanding its limits is key to getting the most out of it.

Stacklands blurs the line between card game and city builder ingeniously, constantly flipping between the two in my mind; One moment I’m placing wood onto my sawmill card to create planks like some wacky solitaire variation, the next I’m fully under the illusion I’ve created of a bustling village made up of warriors and wizards, brickyards and farms, only its all made of digital paper.

Stacklands starts simple, and while it progressively gets more and more chaotic, it never strays from that initial conceit: put a card on another card and something might happen. It’s like a real version of a game from a crap mobile ad - probably called Merge Monsters or something equally as generic - where the satisfaction comes from starting from a piece of wood and stone and somehow finishing the game with a smithy and blacksmith. In Stacklands, you manage resources like the aforementioned stone and wood, along with gold used to buy card packs, food used to feed your population, and your population to do population stuff.

The game is pretty hands off when it comes to progressing through its trials. There are no harsh winters that strain food supplies, no hostile neighbours threatening your town. The difficulty comes from how quickly you want to expand, naturally combining two humans with a house to create a baby. Each human needs a required amount of food per cycle, so as long as you can create enough food - be it through working forest cards to hunt for game or planting carrots on top of farm cards - the game will stagnate, which I should add, is a blessing. It is possible of course to lose at Stacklands, though given how easy it is to produce a robust food system, it’s not very likely.

Without the threat of failure, Stacklands could be considered a “cozy” game. Once I realised how unlikely it was I was going to see my quaint town crumble, I revelled in just admiring my villagers do their thing, harvesting basic resources, refining them into more valuable goods, exploring catacombs and the like. It’s worth noting that this admiration comes in large part due to how it’s almost all player created. Advanced automation is quite tricky in Stacklands, and doesn’t stretch further than cards of the same type stacking on top of each other without manual input. I adore how approachable Stacklands is, though by lacking any sort of depth in this sense, the game can become quite chaotic by the late game and pace wise slow down quite a bit. In the early stages of my village, I never used the pause function - whereby you can stop time and move cards around freely. By the time I had ten plus workers, smelters pumping out iron, and farms producing a frankly silly amount of carrots, I was having to pause the game every ten seconds to make sure everything ran smoothly, or rather, ran at all, given without player input, villagers won’t do anything, unless assigned to jobs like stone mining.

Though if you can push through the potentially overwhelming mid game, Stacklands never slows down in proving just how mindboggingly inventive it can be. New formulas and recipes are unlocked by those previously mentioned card packs, and each time I revealed a new one, I felt like I’d reached a new era in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization, now wielding the power of agriculture, ore processing, fishing, animal husbandry, and weapon smithing. The list goes on, and each time I scored one of these groundbreaking recipes, I rethought how my village operated, how the new idea could would supplant my previous systems. Each card pack explores different niches, one focuses on food, another exploration, and another on combat. It was a joy gradually mastering each aspect of my village’s economy, nurturing a bountiful farmland, forging a profitable iron mine, and decking out my villagers with axes, magic wands, and frog hats. For the attack speed, of course.

It’s worth noting how all of this plays into the illusion of a city builder, because from screenshots or even video footage, Stacklands is blatantly a card game. Everything from humans to goblins to flint to onions, everything is a card, often with depicted with sokpop’s distinct cute and funny art style. Furthermore, when I talk about building these districts of my town, they’re little more than clumsy piles of cards. Sawmills are just a card labelled “sawmill” with a heaping ton of wood card plonked on top, slowly producing plank cards. My food industry was a particularly chaotic cacophony of carrot and campfire cards. And while this is totally and unavoidably messy - to a degree I thought was ultimately sensory overload and limited how much time I spent playing the game in the end - it’s utterly fascinating how my mind ended up filling in the blanks, where the black outlines of my ore deposits formed imaginary mountains of iron.

I never finished Stacklands I should note, because yes, I did find it a bit too overwhelming by the time my village was pumping out wood and iron at a pace any real economy would be envious of. Yet still, I walk away with the opinion Stacklands will at the very least entertain anyone, because while other games with a focus on city management often veer into complexity to replicate the real thing, Stacklands goes the other way, reducing what it takes to run a silly little village into the bare necessities, and wraps it up in a card based system anyone can engage with. It’s a profoundly innovative game from one of the most prolific developers out there.

I first played Guild of Dungeoneering many years ago at the recommendation of TotalBiscuit (RIP). His outlook on the game was mostly positive, with a lot of his criticisms landing, in typical John Bain fashion, on the technical side of things, sprinkled with some quality of life complaints. The Ultimate Edition could be seen as a direct response to that review, as it fixes essentially everything: adjustable game speed, variable resolution support, new animations, more depth. The list goes on with the multitude of changes made here, though despite these admirable and welcome changes, this is still the same game of 2015, and that isn’t entirely positive.

As a turn-based rogue-lite from the mid 2010’s, Guild of Dungeoneering doesn’t have the same complexity you would perhaps see and want from a game of this ilk today. Employing a pen and paper visual style, where characters are scribbled with distorted cutesy features and a broader emphasis on silly enemies and dialogue, GoD evokes the image of a kid making do with what they have, creating their own adventures on the fly and quickly scrawling down quick illustrations of their mental escapades. Fittingly, GoD’s combat uses an easy to grasp card system, where both your own and enemy cards will either have attacks on them, blocks, or a combination of the two, lightly dusted with other potentially detrimental or advantageous effects, like healing, self damage, card draw, or damage over time.

Anyone with any experience of anything can get to grips with GoD within a few minutes. It would be a stretch to say it has the complexity of even something using Rock, Paper, Scissors logic. It’s just weighing up how many hits you can take before you can get their health to zero. You unlock new builds over time, but the restrictive nature to GoD’s combat creates a situation of false depth. I don’t think I could list many of the classes by name, as a large proportion of them play identically, most either falling into mages, warriors, or blockers. The former build their decks by shoving as many damage cards into them as possible, while the latter play a sort of game of attrition, making small ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the enemies health bar while avoiding any themselves.

I don’t think this is through lack of trying on the developers part, as the sheer number of classes and their proposed gimmicks indicate intent, though the dearth of unique cards to pad your deck with - along with the fact each deck resets after every short ten minute adventure - means most classes play the same. The game is hit with another blow as it relies so heavily on randomness to create conflict. After every successful run, your class will pick up a trait, which effects that classes deck permanently in the future. Most of the time, this feels like an unintentional hindrance, as classes which rely on blocking for example can have their decks instead padded with spell cards which cannot ever be removed, unless of course, you die.

Segueing into the overarching progression of this rogue-lite, Guild of Dungeoneering hinges on the concept of an ever expiring, ever replenishing conveyor belt of new adventurers. When one class dies, a new character with the same base deck joins the guild, losing all the traits the recently departed acquired. The intent here is almost the inverse of say XCOM, where you slowly build attachments to your squad members, and mourn them when they inevitably get disintegreated by aliens. Only, where the XCOM build bonds, GoD’s character impermanence naturally makes disposability and dispassion a key theme. It doesn't help that there's little to no permanent upgrade system. You can buy small talismans which give minor boosts to all your adventurers, and purchasing the few card packs on offer makes future runs contain better loot, but they're drops in the bucket when so many runs will end up relying on luck anyway.

This is a fairly negative outlook on an otherwise perfectly serviceable game. Echoing the same sentiments as TotalBiscuit, Guild of Dungeoneering’s simplicity is both its biggest strength and greatest hindrance in reaching it's full potential. While enemies and items quickly blend into homogeneous entities, lacking distinct qualities that make them identifiably unique, the ease of play and broadly flat difficulty curve make for enjoyable short bursts of gaming. Building your short-lived deck is often left to chance, but on the occasions you nab the right cards that fit your class, Guild of Dungeoneering doesn’t concern itself too much with balance and lets you engage enemies with silly, evidently broken builds, like lathering the enemy in burns and bleeding, passively sapping them of their health, while you sit comfortably behind several cards capable of swatting any of their attacks away. It’s a shame that the Ultimate Edition doesn’t quite go far enough in making Guild of Dungeoneering a veritable staple of the genre. It’s wonderfully illustrated, and built on a sharp, if simple framework, which due to some shoddy design decisions make for frequently irritating gameplay loops.

I suppose I just don’t understand the point of this game. I know games don’t strictly need a point - and to that end, Electric Fairyland seems more interested in portraying itself as a Saturn-style janky than actually being fun in its own right. However, looking at other platformers, I can see why they exist: Mario 64 to do sick flips and backwards long jumps, Banjo Kazooie to hoover up collectables in a seemingly endless barrage of dopamine hits, even something like Kiwi 64 is evidently more a homage than unique game in its own right, but by aping Banjo, it becomes rather enjoyable.

Electric Fairyland is just lame. While I can appreciate both its looks and sound, I ultimately left what I believe is a very short game unfinished because it’s just so very boring. You run around each level collecting stars to unlock new levels. The world seems to be split into different themes of sorts - the first is more generic flora and shrubbery, while the second has you explore vegetable patches for example. The tunes which accompanied both are bops, I as I say, I can appreciate the vibe sokpop are going for here, as the slightly hazy and blurry fidelity of the visuals paired with the cutesy, eye popping visual direction work well, but it’s a surface level distraction from the mundane nature to its gameplay loop.

From what I can tell, you don’t unlock abilities, enemies don’t prove a threat at all, and navigating the wider world is a pain due to the lack of signposting and a functional map. I dock points again, because were Electric Fairyland actually tangibly and mechanically robust, I could probably push through to the end, but instead, it suffers with a horrendous, permanently inverted camera, unavoidably inaccurate depth perception, and a complete lack of oomph behind your characters movements. The game isn’t hard by any stretch, but that serves as just a bigger damnation at how frustrating it is as a complete product when such simple platforming is made so profoundly infuriating by these problems, combined together genuinely start causing me a headache.

My sokpop adventure is in the very nascent stages, and perhaps the booming start I had with Stacklands and Grunn set this game up to fail regardless, though I guess this not being an inhouse sokpop release shouldn’t suggest much of their other games. Disappointing regardless, as its comforting and emotive presentation is wasted on a wholly uninteresting release.

Grunn is wonderfully weird. It’s a puzzle game at heart, though what the puzzles are and how you solve them is deliberately obtuse and foggy, though it never veers into being frustrating. Perhaps its because underpinning those puzzles is a delightfully serene and nostalgic - if increasingly eerie and nonsensical - world, where we can cut the grass, water the plants, and maybe stumble into a haunted house or two. And “stumble” is the perfect verb here, as Grunn’s lack of direction almost necessitates, at least at first, that we aimlessly fall into “side quests”; small seemingly (and sometimes truly) unconnected plot holes, from the mundane task of trading an “eggball” for a band members instrument, to the outlandish endeavour of reviving a dead goldfish pried from its earthy resting place in the park to live a new life inside a fishbowl, inside warp hole, inside the park grounds.

Despite this psychedelic description, Grunn isn’t an overwhelming bombardment of nonsense. I’ll repeat: it’s weird, but it’s mechanically very simple. We slowly build up our arsenal of gardening tools, from shears to trowel to watering can, and from there we can interact with the world in different ways. Grunn quickly establishes a “groundhog day”-esque gameplay loop, where after our first run, we’re told we’ve achieved one of eleven endings, followed by a short piece of dialogue from some unknown person stating they’re trapped and need saving. There is a “good ending”, which for me was the seventh one I got, though by all accounts, my enjoyment of Grunn stretches past merely “finishing” the game in that sense, and comes more through interacting with the world and seeing what bizarre occurrences I can experience.

Visually, Grunn’s world is pasted with hazy, blocky textures, with a wide mix of both muted colours interspersed with bright, almost blinding splashes of warm floral pinks and reds. Grunn never lands on one particular tone - though I suppose eerie and suspenseful comes closest to a through line - as at times it’s funny and cute, like watching a snail race itself over the course of the weekend, to bordering horror with intermittent jump scares or distant figures watching you with gremlin-like mugs. Part of the fun with Grunn is never knowing what will happen, facilitated through that “learning though death” loop, you’re always encouraged to just try stuff and build upon that the next time round. My aforementioned dead fish friend existed in my inventory for many playthroughs until, naturally, I discovered the well of life unearthed by a friendly fisherman. On the other end of the spectrum, it was sometimes the most grounded resolutions which brought me joy, even if the path to get there involved many wacky steps. One achievement requires you find a seed in an otherworldly greenhouse, hop back into your own bizarre world, plant it on Saturday, water over the weekend, and come Monday plant the now sprouted flower next to a grave.

This all might sound dull and/or convoluted, and to some degree, Grunn’s unwillingness to help the player at all might be off putting for some. After achieving seven endings, I’m not too sure how to go about getting any of the other four. Additionally, I’m at a standstill at many of those inconsequential side larks, like one which requires you equip three members of a band with instruments, though I’m completely stumped when it comes to finding the final one. Of less importance, though definitely of note, the game doesn’t seem to run very nicely. Even though it barely pushes my rig, it’ll randomly dip into the 40’s and 50’s when looking in certain directions.

You don’t need to commit a lot of time or effort to get something from Grunn. Unlike a grand RPG which demands multiple weekends and mental acuity to really absorb its value, Grunn simply hands you a watering can and shrugs. Grunn is like a half-lucid dream, one where you’re flying through the sky with nothing but the clothes on your back, where you’re aware of the impossibility of such a feat, but also completely absorbed by the feeling of the wind through your hair. Grunn is weird, and it doesn’t demand you make sense of it. I don’t feel pressured to find every secret, nab every achievement, see every ending. My only regret is not seeing the snail cross the finish line.