Infinity Blade was a big deal when it was released. It was the Dark Souls of mobile games at the time, before Dark Souls even came out. Chair Entertainment started a revolution that many tried to copy but failed. It was a rogue-lite that had you dying over and over to only use the gold and XP you acquired to level up and get further each time. Some consider it a repetitive grind, but others feel it makes them want to get further and further and find the chiseling of progression addictive. Rage of the Gladiator tries this and doesn’t do any of it very well. Forget a story; it’s pretty much nonexistent outside of a few stills with text.
There are ten bosses to fight through. Each one does more damage, has faster moves, and has more of them. Despite this sense of progression in difficulty, the game is very easy. You have to dodge left or right in first person, jump, swing your sword left or right, and even kick when you successfully dodge. You can get a maximum of a 5-hit combo in unless you use a special move before that fifth hit. There’s no strategy involved, and I only died once during my entire playthrough. Moves are easy to predict and rather slow. The repetition gets worse when you have to win three rounds per boss. That’s 30 rounds in total before unlocking medium difficulty. Yeah, you work your way up through hard work, but the moves are just faster, and one or two more are thrown in. You also take more damage.
You can buy weapons, shields, armor, mana, and health potions, acquire passive and offensive abilities, and increase your stats. You win gold after each match and earn one measly XP per match. Yes, it’s a complete grind, and this is leftover from this being a mobile game. At the end of the tenth boss, I was only able to buy two new weapons: a single shield and an armor piece. You can use gold to buy XP, but this system is in favor of grinding or slowing you down enough to make you buy this stuff via microtransactions, which aren’t on the 3DS version. So, instead of rebalancing the game, they kept the grind.
This would be fine if the game was as epic or good-looking as something like Infinity Blade. Instead, we get generic Greek mythology bosses, a ninja, and a Chinese martial arts master, and that’s about it. Medium and Hard difficulties have one additional boss at the end, but they’re not exciting. However, the animations are stiff, the visuals are ugly, and everything is just on repeat forever. There’s no strategy involved in the fights, or even how to go about your attacks. Instead of adding a parry system that allows you to counter an attack, you just dodge. There are a few attacks that can be paired, but they’re only on a few of the bosses. It would even be cool to change up the background, but instead, it’s the same Roman arena forever.
Overall, Rage of the Gladiator is a repetitive, boring, easy, and weak attempt at a genre that has been done better and to death. There’s no rebalancing of the shop or winnings, so you’re grinding as if you can buy these things to advance quicker. The bosses are uninteresting and boring, the game is ugly and drab, and there’s no story to speak of. Shoving a mobile game onto the 3DS was a bad move, and it shows here.
As time goes on, I’ve learned to appreciate engaging casual games that don’t require intense focus. Small adventure games that only take a few hours to beat, relaxing puzzle games that don’t really have an ending, and anything in between are fun to enjoy and veg out on. It has the same effect on me as binge-watching a show.A Little to the Lefttries to be that. It has engaging puzzles and serotonin-squirting organization puzzles, along with cute visuals, but it does come with issues.
The game’s puzzles start out fairly simple. There are around 75 puzzles in the main game, with 365 daily puzzles. Puzzles start out with just straightening photos on a wall, putting cat toys in a basket, arranging a dinner set, aligning colored pencils in a certain order, stacking rugs, etc. These first dozen puzzles are relaxing and really give you a taste of what this game could be. Yes, I said it could be, as the game quickly ramps up the abstractness, and even with a full-on guide and accessible hint system in the game, it still doesn’t make sense. The arrangement puzzles are the absolute worst. These are abstract shapes that don’t snap together but instead are arranged in a specific pattern. The patterns usually make no sense since the pieces are so far apart. These puzzles will frustrate most players and lead you into a false sense of relaxation and simple organization and stacking.
That’s not to say I don’t like a challenge. One puzzle has you sliding a mirror to the left and right and arranging the objects according to the reflection. Another has you stacking cat food cans in colored columns that match. These puzzles were enjoyable. My favorite was the organization puzzle. Put all the junk in the correct cubbies. That’s a lot of fun with the process of elimination. Sadly, there are only about four of those puzzles, and I wanted more. The difficulty is all over the place, but it’s artificial difficulty. The puzzles are just so obscure sometimes that most people may quit the game.
I also found the snapping system pretty broken. Sometimes you place an object in the right spot, and it will snap into place and make a faint ding sound. However, abstract pattern puzzles require two symmetrical objects in the same spot in the scene before they will snap into place. This hinders progress, as there are no tactile hints that you are making progress. There is a hint system that shows you the solution by erasing and uncovering. This was nice, as I would try to just erase one part and still be able to solve the rest on my own. However, even the hints sometimes make zero sense.
Thankfully, you can still move on with the “Let It Be” system, which skips the puzzle for you. There are some puzzles that have two or more solutions, such as sorting from highest to shortest, then by color, and then by matching an image on the same object. While the first solution may seem easy to spot, the additional solutions can be insanely abstract and obscure. I really tried to solve as many as I could on my own, but in the end, I solved maybe a quarter of the puzzles by myself. There were just too many that were frustrating, and I felt I wasn’t making any progress. Some were just me overthinking the puzzle, but some were just poorly designed.
The visuals are cute. It has a pastel, minimalistic look. Lots of colored pencils, charcoal, and watercolor art designs The music is great and relaxing to listen to in the background; it’s just too bad the game isn’t as relaxing. In the end, A Little to the Leftis misleading in its first dozen puzzles and quickly ramps up the abstractness and obscurity too much, requiring too many puzzles to be skipped. The most enjoyable ones are too few. This isn’t a bad game at all. There are fun puzzles peppered throughout the bad ones, and the overall cat aesthetic is enjoyable with great music.
Ys is a series I have barely dabbled in. I rarely finish JRPGs, either due to their insane difficulty spikes, incessant grinding, or boring story and characters. Ys I is a game that’s older than I am. It’s also incredibly short because of this, and due to the cryptic nature of games from the late 1980s, I decided to play this game using a walkthrough guide. This is sadly one of those JRPGs that has a specific way to play, or it becomes an incredibly hard game. There are so many things you can miss, but it also encourages multiple play-throughs. For a game this old, I don’t see any reason to play it other than to complete the Ys series from the beginning. It is as basic as JRPGs come due to its age as well.
The story is pretty decent, despite the short playtime. I actually enjoyed the characters as well. There isn’t a lot of talking that drags on forever. The game does get to the point with some short and sweet dialog. You play the series’ main protagonist, Adol Christin, who must collect the books of Ys to save the world from evil. It’s pretty typical, but I enjoyed the little world they built around the books of Ys. They were interesting to read, and I felt this was a world you could get sucked into if it were to progress (which, surprise, it did). The art is amazing, with beautiful backdrops. The music is also fantastic, thanks to legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro. There is lots of rock and beautiful orchestral music. The Chronicles+ version contains both the chiptune versions and the arranged versions.
Ys’ main combat system is called the “bump” system, in which you just walk into enemies and are dealt knockback damage if hit straight on. The idea is to hit them on the edge of their sprite, kind of like speed jousting. It’s a weird system, but it keeps the pace of the game moving, and I like that. Again, the game is really hard unless you quickly level and are constantly acquiring the best equipment. You can get some for free if you do things in a certain order or find a certain key for a certain chest. These are JRPG tropes that I absolutely hate because, most of the time, no one will know them without a guide or accidentally coming across them. Easter eggs and extra dialog are fine, but essential things to play are something that really irks me.
Due to the short length, you can easily hit the level cap in a few hours. The cap is 10, and you quickly acquire money and XP as you advance to more powerful enemies. For such a short game, there is a large variety of them as well, and their design is really cool. I always looked forward to seeing what was next. The dungeons are also varied, such as a mine (which is dark), an ice floor with mirrors, a 20-floor tower that you must climb towards the end, forests, and other places. It’s crazy just how much unique content was crammed into a 4-5 hour game. One thing I was relieved by is that if you keep up with the equipment and level up to maybe 4-5 before the first boss, you can easily fight each boss with just a few hits. I know that sounds crazy, but there’s only so much balancing in a game this short. The final boss is notorious for being impossible to beat, and even with the best armor and weapons, level cap, and Easy, I still had to try nearly a dozen times to beat him. You can also only fight him with a specific weapon.
Overall, Ys I is a memorable JRPG if you play it the way it was supposed to be played. Many will get frustrated due to the need to constantly level up fast and always have the best weapons, and the weird boss difficulty spikes will turn many away. I only recommend this game if you’re a fan of the series or really want to start from the beginning, like I am. It has fantastic art and music and is a well-contained and fun JRPG, if you play it right.
Ys II Chronicles+
Being a direct sequel to Ys I and being in my late 80s, I came into this not expecting much. While content-wise it’s completely new, with new locales, new characters, new weapons, and armor, otherwise it looks the exact same and plays the same way. You still play as Adol Christin, trying to save the world of Ys from another evil source and rescue the goddesses Reah and Freena.
The game even starts out the exact same way. You wake up in a house in a quiet village and must start your adventure in a green forest area, like before. Sadly, the game is just as cryptic and obscure when it comes to figuring out what to do. I followed a guide through my entire playthrough, but if I hadn’t, there would be so much backtracking and aimless wondering. Some of the dungeons are more improved layout-wise, but the final two dungeons are a labyrinthine mess, more so than anything in the first game. I had to resort to a map online to figure out where to go, especially when I had to backtrack and start learning shortcuts.
The bump system still exists, but seems a little easier and more forgiving this time around. You don’t need to hit enemies off-center, but it’s still not a fun combat system. It makes the game fast-paced, and I like the lack of random battles, but it’s still not engaging in any way. Thankfully, this time around, you don’t need to rely on hidden, obscure equipment and can just buy stuff as you can afford it. Only the short sword, in the beginning, can be had for free in the first dungeon, but everything is to be purchased. I liked the addition of magic wands in this game. It helps add a layer to combat, but sadly, it’s abused with boss fights. All but the final boss need to be beaten with magic only, and the only offensive magic is fire. Which I found a bit weird. Everything else is passive magic, such as being able to turn into a Roo to talk to enemies to pass certain areas; light magic, which is used to see secret doorways and light dark areas; and time magic, which slows enemies down. Unfortunately, a lot of items, required or not, are hidden in obscure areas and can be easily missed without thorough exploration or a guide.
I did find the boss fights more manageable this time around and less frustrating. The leveling system is also improved, but only slightly. While the cap this time around went from 10 to 55, you can easily reach the first 30 levels in the first two hours of the game. Before the first boss, I was already almost level 20. Bosses are a lot more reasonable, and I only struggled with a couple of them, but once you learn their attack patterns, it becomes much more manageable.
Overall, YS II is a good sequel to the first game. With enough new content to explore, an interesting story, and fun characters, while I wouldn’t say the story itself is memorable, the adventure itself is fun. I just wish the magic system was more expanded and there was less backtracking. Most of the game’s fault comes from the cryptic items and confusing dungeon layouts, but it’s manageable with a guide. It’s a fine Ys game to send out with the 80s and still remains a solid RPG today.
The entire series is well worth playing, but only if you’re curious about the beginning of the series, want to start the series from the beginning, or just like 80s JRPGs. Expect basic combat, cryptic progression, confusing dungeons, and unbalanced bosses in the first game. If you play with a guide, you will most likely have a great time.
We as humans tend to dwell on death and what lies beyond. It’s only natural as we simply don’t know. Behind the Frameexplores this concept with an emotional tug-of-war of a story, but you really need to pay attention, and a lot of the story is more between the lines and not what’s really being shown in front of you. There’s a lot of assumption that you know what’s happening when the main character looks shockingly off in the distance based on the previous scene. It’s done fairly well too.
Most of Behind the Frame is puzzle solving. It takes a dark twist halfway through and it surprised me. Your goal is to acquire all five missing colors on your paint palette to finish your painting. To do this each color is locked away behind a chapter puzzle. These got rather complex towards the end, but nothing you can’t figure out without exploring and finding that key item that gives you that “AHA!” moment. Some puzzles are as simple as matching colors on a painting to memorization. Nothing is overly complex and it does eventually come together. The painting itself is a matter of scribbling enough in the empty space and it will auto-fill. Nothing extraordinary there. There are some other small tasks like making food which is as simple and dragging items around.
There isn’t a lot of context on the main character’s life itself through any reading of notes or anything. It’s pretty much learning about her past and her connection with her neighbor. The game has gorgeous anime-Ghibli-inspired art with a few small cut scenes thrown in. I never got tired of looking at the game, but it is confined to mostly her apartment. Every so often you “dive” into a painting, but it’s usually just for story context. There were a few panoramic scenes that were breathtaking. I actually felt like I stepped into a painting myself a few times.
In the end, the game is over in about 90 minutes or less depending on how long it takes you to solve the more complex puzzles in the final chapters. Without having to solve these this game is over in an hour. The story does unfold quite a bit towards the end and without voice acting it gets a lot of emotions across and I have to give the developers credit for that. Most of these short indie games don’t have any meaning behind them. They have some clever gameplay ideas or neat visuals and nothing beyond that. Behind the Frame actually tugged at my heart strings a bit and got me thinking at the end which is more than I can say for 60-hour-long AAA titles. If you want a puzzle-filled emotional evening with great visuals and fun gameplay mechanics then look no further.
The original release of Doom 3was a huge deal. It was a technical marvel with fantastic new lighting effects and textures that could fill the latest GPU and all of your RAM. It split fans due to the slower pace and focus on jump scares (that honestly don’t really work these days anymore) and a bigger focus on the story (if you can call it that). The game retains the same dark visuals and monsters from before, but being the first game in full 3D it had a lot of problems.
The first thing you will notice is that this release has no visual upgrades outside of some texture filtering and anti-aliasing and slightly better lighting. The textures still look muddy and the models are still low-poly. With this being the third official release of this game I’m surprised more work hasn’t been done to it. You play as a marine who is stationed on Mars when things suddenly go wrong. The first couple of levels is probably the best since they slowly introduce the gameplay to you and have better-designed levels. Zombies emerge from the dark, and your flashlight is a lifeline. It does have a short battery but recharges within seconds.
The main issue with Doom 3 is its much slower pace in every part of the game. The movement is slow (you have adrenaline that’s used for limited sprinting which is annoying), and the weapons reload slowly (why is there reloading anyway?). Not to mention the weapons just plain suck. The pistol is useless outside of the first couple of levels. I never touched it after this. The machine gun is useless in later levels, and everything else just feels slow. Enemies feel slow as well. The environments are also cramped with too many enemies spawning at once and I constantly backed into walls and got stuck in corners trying to get away. Very rarely does the game ever feel like a classic Doom game with more open areas.
The level design is also terrible. The game is way too long as it is and it’s just boring hallways after hallway finding PDA access cards, running back and forth activating switches, and trying to open doors. nearly eight grueling hours of this. It felt like a chore after the first two. Eventually, you do get to Hell, but it’s such a short level with a boss fight at the end, but it still suffered from cramped areas and nothing new except a couple of enemies that finally show up such as the Hell Knight and Arch-Vile which are some of the toughest enemies in the game. I mostly stuck to the strategy of using guns that shot the fastest such as the Cell machine gun being the most powerful with the chaingun being second. I used the shotgun through most of the mid-section of the game until I got the cell rifle.
There are a few boss fights in the game that all play out the same, and in the end, the entire game is just one long boring chore. It’s fun at first, but if you are a veteran of classic Doom games then most of you may just shut this off early. This is my third play-through of this game and it’s less enjoyable each time. I originally played this on Xbox, and then PC, and then dabbled in it a bit on Xbox 360 and never finished it. Now I completed it on Switch.
Speaking of the Switch the game plays fine, but there is some slow down in the larger areas and it doesn’t always stay at 60FPS. In handheld mode, the game runs fine as well, and you have the option to turn off flashlight shadows to help, but overall it’s great to just have another FPS on the Switch. These don’t come around often. Included is the Resurrection of Evil expansion which I already finished once on Xbox and a new Lost Mission short campaign which I will get around to eventually. It’s nice that there’s some new content. Overall, this could have easily been a remake from the ground up or a mode that made it feel faster-paced like the classic games. If you are itching for a mid-2000s FPS game then go ahead. Don’t come into this thinking it’s like the newer Doom reboots. This game was a specific era of id Software at its lowest point (Quake 4, Rage)
Gimmicks that use various types of hardware are nothing new since the days of the Wii made that mainstream, but very few games use your camera outside of a home console for gameplay. While it’s wholly gimmicky and can be played with a controller, the game uses your webcam to see your eyes blinking to determine when to change scenes in the game or interact with objects. Not often does the gimmick feel like it’s influencing something important, but when it does it works well.
You play as a boy named Benjamin Brynn floating along the river of death in a boat with a wolf as a ferryman. He’s to be taken to a being in a large tower whom he has to sell his life story so he can pass on and the ferryman can be paid. You start out as a child and you eventually learn your mother is an accountant and failed music composer and wants you to follow in her footsteps. Each scene is full of mostly black with just what you can remember being in view. Sometimes an eye will appear on objects for you to blink at and interact with. When a metronome appears you can blink and jump to the next scene or try to hold your eyes open and see the scene to the end. Most of the time I couldn’t do it (it’s very dry where I’m at here in the summer).
You slowly progress through the story only to find out that you need to retell the story correctly. I won’t spoil anything as to how or why, but the only times the blinking gimmick felt right was when you had to close your eyes to focus on someone talking. With headphones on this is a great effect. The game does a great job detecting your eyes even in low light, and I was using a laptop webcam which isn’t that great. There isn’t much else to this game. It’s an interactive adventure with interesting visuals. The whole game reminded me a lot of That Dragon, Cancer, but I can’t connect to this game as much as it’s shorter and at the time I was expecting my first child so that game hit home quite a bit. A big fear is your child being born with some sort of debilitating disease.
You’ll most likely not really feel the game’s impact until the last 20 minutes when things get really dark and sad. It didn’t make me tear up, but it was really sad for sure. You can finish the game in about 90 minutes, but I did connect with the character to an extent, but not wholly. The scenes rush by too fast and you’re meant to understand the moral of the story more than connect with the characters and get behind their motives and feelings. I feel a game like this misses the mark due to its short run time, but the gimmick would get tiring for more than 90 minutes.
Overall, Before Your Eyes is a charming game with a lot of heart and a fun gimmick that works well when it wants to. It’s a very short game and doesn’t let you really connect with the characters enough. It’s forgettable in the end, and not as memorable as some other short adventure titles I’ve played in the past, but it’s fun and worth a look.
When it comes to “vise”-type” controllers for phones, there’s been an increasing demand for quality now that mobile games are pretty much console quality. We still get nice, simple games, but sometimes we want our console experience to be super portable. It used to be that Apple took quite a while to catch on to official controller support. It wasn’t until iOS 13 that Bluetooth controllers were officially supported. They have been available on Android for nearly a decade, but the cheap Chinese devices never quite held up. So there are two animals you can tame. The traditional controller with a phone clip or the vise-style controller I personally prefer the console, as it feels more like the Switch or a traditional handheld console. I always felt the controller and clip were super heavy, and view angles got weird.
Within the last couple of years, major gaming companies have been making official controllers for phones. With games like Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG, and GRID: Autosport, there’s a reason why. These games play phenomenally better with controllers. The Kishi isn’t perfect, but it does a great job of giving us quality where we need it. The vise actually folds into itself, which is something I can’t say for cheap Chinese devices that I have used. They have this weird sliding mechanism that’s spring-loaded and just feels too rigid and universal. This controller is hand-tailored for iPhones, and using my iPhone 12 Pro Max was a dream with this controller.
The first issue I ran into is that unfolding the device is a pain. There are two pull tabs that are oriented awkwardly and don’t have a nice snap or click when they unlatch. You have to pull the controller simultaneously and just let the controller kind of fall apart, and some wiggling is required. The controller is basically two halves of a controller that are connected with a soft rubber band that is anchored with plastic pieces at the end that have a peg that allows for stretching. There’s a rectangle backpiece in the middle that has support pegs that rest on the back of the phone. It feels tight, and I never felt like the device didn’t stretch enough or too far. There are spacers for smaller iPhones, so the band still gets tight. You insert your phone into the lightning port side and slide the other half on and it just pulls tight and it works. The right side is solid, but the left side has a bit of giving and wiggle, but this is because there’s no port to keep it in place. I never noticed this while gaming.
The controller feels solid in the hands and like a handheld system. Of course, ergonomics are only half the battle, and the other half is how the buttons feel. The alternate analog placement (Xbox style) feels amazing. These are some damn fine analog sticks, and I felt they weren’t too loose or tight. They click nice and are just full-size analog sticks that feel similar to an Xbox One controller. The D-Pad is weird, but at least it rolls and rocks and isn’t separated like the Switch or PS4. You can easily use this with fighting games, which is my point. The face buttons are similar to the Switch but feel a tad stiff. They aren’t loud and clicky like Moga controllers are, but you eventually get used to them. I noticed that after a week, they loosened up a tad. The Kishi has triggers similar to those on the Xbox and two shoulder buttons. The shoulder buttons are stiff as well, and the analog triggers are a little loose for my taste, but you get used to them, and they aren’t a deal-breaker.
There are three other buttons: one for recording and taking screenshots, a home button, and a menu button. They are located below each analog stick and are out of the way. Other than that, my next favorite feature is the passthrough charging, but it’s oriented at the bottom and out of the way of your hands. This allows for longer tethered gaming sessions. You can use a power bank in your pocket or sit near an outlet; it’s great. When you’re done the controller easily snaps back together, but only after you figure out how. You have to orient the tabs inside just right or it won’t go together. It took me too much time trying to figure this out, but essentially the small gray tabs on the inside need to touch and you know it’s oriented correctly. Then the back plastic piece just snaps on to keep the halves together. It’s a rather compact thing when it’s all said and done and easily fits into small pockets.
With that said, there’s not much left to say. There is an app that upgrades the firmware, but mine didn’t need it. Other than that, if the game supports controllers, it will recognize this device. I have yet to play a game that supports controllers that won’t see the Kishi. The only issue was Real Racing 3, but there’s been a long-time glitch that requires you to put the game in airplane mode to use controllers, so that’s not Kishi’s fault. For the price point, you’re paying for quality, and this is well worth $100. I know console controllers are $40 cheaper, but this thing is a bit more complicated to make and has more moving parts. I think it’s well worth the money, and it turns your iPhone into a portable handheld gaming device.
Tim Schaffer games are always hit or miss. He may be a great story writer or character creator, but he’s not a great game designer. I don’t want to come out swinging with everyone, thinking I hate Grim Fandango or all Schaffer-made games. A lot of his work is considered some of the best games ever made on PC, which I get, but they’re remembered for their story, atmosphere, and characters—not so much their gameplay.
You play as Manual Calavera. A Mexican salesman of the dead gets wrapped up in a huge film noir-style story trying to save a mysterious girl, get back at his evil overlord of a boss, and also an evil co-worker. The game is split up into four years. It takes four years for people to travel by foot to the Ninth Level if they don’t qualify for an express train ticket. For some reason, Manny can’t get any good clients, yet his co-worker Domino can. You wind up uncovering a plot of fraud, sabotage, subterfuge, and love. I can’t go too far into story details, but they’re quite entertaining enough to keep you pushing on.
And pushing on will do. The game’s object-hunting obtuseness varies from minimal to I will never figure this out without a walkthrough. The way objects are used is very illogical at times, and you wonder how Schaffer thought gamers would think in these ways. It doesn’t help that the areas you explore are massive, with dozens of hallways and rooms, and you can easily miss something that needs picking up or completely bypass something that needs to be interacted with. LucasArts had a lot on their hands with this game, as it was the first 3D game they developed and the most sophisticated to date. There’s no object mixing, either. Manny stores everything in his cloak or jacket, and you must either try everything on every interactive object or simply think in odd, obscure ways.
One example early on requires Manny to gum up a pneumatic tube system and get the maintenance demon to open the door. That was fine and all, but the demon left, and I couldn’t get in the door. I then had to re-acquire all the items needed to gum up the system again by running down hallways and doing a ton of backtracking, all because I didn’t realize I had to throw the bolt to stop the door from closing. How was I supposed to guess that? You run into these situations every step of the way, and it gets exhausting and discouraging. Another scenario requires Manny to take a sign and use it to find a hidden doorway in part of a forest. This forest has doorways that loop back around to the same room and do nothing. How would you know to take that sign from the previous room and use it as a compass to find the hidden doorway in this room? The puzzles are insane and poorly designed, which leads to constant frustration. I felt my progress halted every five minutes.
With puzzle obscurity out of the way, there’s nothing else to this game. There are pretty environments to look at, great music and voice acting to listen to, and some great characters, although none of them are very memorable. You can unlock quite a few achievements by talking to certain people at certain points or looking at certain objects. I find this in tune with the puzzle’s obscurity. I also didn’t like how many areas are reused over and over again while, in new ways, they’re still the same. Things are just spread so far apart, and so many sub-plots and hints are given to you that you can’t make heads or tails of any of them. There’s no journal to keep track of what’s said or even what you’re really supposed to be doing next. It can become quite frustrating.
Thankfully, the game isn’t very long, especially if you use a walkthrough. My adventure was over in about 6 hours, and I enjoyed it while it lasted, but it’s not something I will be talking about for years to come. The gameplay time isn’t enough to really flesh out the characters more than you wanted, and it almost plays out like a Pixar movie. It’s a fun blast while you’re in it, but once the credits roll, you quickly move on to something else and probably won’t remember it a year down the road. Something about this whole game just didn’t stick with me, and I can’t put my finger on it. If the puzzles weren’t so obscure, I might be more inclined. At least there’s fun developer commentary all over the place, and the remastered upgrades are nice. Everything looks sharp and clean and is rendered in a much higher resolution. However, there are still many collision and animation bugs.
Overall, Grim Fandango is a fun story with some fun characters while you’re in it, but you will quickly move on to other things as something about this game doesn’t quite stick. It feels more like a Pixar cartoon with gameplay bits in between than a full-blown game. It looks good, sounds good, and the voice acting is excellent, but many won’t finish the game just due to how obscure getting through everything really is.
Oxenfree is all about horror and mystery. It starts out with five students in their early 20s arriving at a small town in the Pacific Northwest to discover some sort of weird thing that goes on in the caves there when you tune a radio to a certain frequency. After a good amount of dialog, plot, and character development, you tune your radio and discover a rift in time. You also discover the island is actually haunted, and you are trying to free the ghosts within. Why, how, and what they are in the mystery that I won’t spoil.
The horror elements are mostly audio-related and are something I have not really heard in a game before. The game uses the eerieness of radio static and voices. Have you ever gone down a scary YouTube rabbit hole and watched “Top 10 Scariest Sounds” or something like that? Well, if you ever heard one that was about strange radio call signs that were used in the Cold War, then you know what you will hear in this game. It made the hair on my neck stand up and was very chilling to hear. There are various stones you can find throughout the game that give you tidbits of stories about the island, and these creepy radio calls are part of this.
You wander around the island, listening to the dialog, as there are no puzzles in this game. It’s very much a “walking simulator,” but you walk and talk with the characters and choose from three different dialog options as they pop up in conversation. Some of these are story-altering, and some are not. These choices determine the ending you get, which I found was a little too short and disappointing. I really got to like the characters here, and the game is so short that you can’t invest a lot of time into them. Every so often, the game will bring you into a time loop, and these are when a lot of important choices are made. Even for a 4-hour game, the story is done quite well and has a beginning, middle, and clear ending, and you wind up exploring most of the island, albeit at a snail’s pace. You can wander around further to collect letters and find these frequency stones, but I honestly didn’t find the story of the island as interesting as the characters.
The voice acting is actually really well done, and I like that when you answer before someone finishes a sentence, Alex, your character, will interrupt with a correct tone and inflection in her voice. The constant bantering between the characters is the most entertaining part of the game, and I was always looking forward to hearing what they had to say. The game also looks really good with 2D backgrounds and 3D models. It’s a 2D side-scrolling adventure, so it’s hard to get lost here. I found the game’s pacing was all over the place; however, there would be sections where I felt I was progressing quickly only to get slowed down by too much backtracking or lots of cut scenes and dialog. You don’t have to really think to finish the game, and I felt collecting everything was too tedious due to the slow pace of the game.
Overall, Oxenfree is a great horror mystery game that, while not very memorable, will entertain you for an afternoon and might be something you discuss with friends as the story does have a twist ending. It looks good, has great voice acting, and the characters are interesting, but the constant backtracking, slow pace, and almost zero gameplay may put some off.
Smart phones have hit a plateau in the last five or six years, if you haven’t noticed. We went from huge leaps and bounds in software and hardware to arguing over megapixels, keyholes, and camera bumps. Phones have gotten to a point where even lower-end phones are no longer slow and can pretty much do whatever you need. The gap between a premium phone and a low-end phone is shrinking, and it’s getting harder to justify the huge price hike in premium flagship phones because of this. Samsung is one of the largest perpetrators of this issue. The Note series was their bread and butter, was easily miles ahead of the iPhone and many other popular phones, and continued to innovate with every iteration. Once the Note 8 was released, I was pretty much over it all. I switched to OnePlus and never really looked back, as it offered most of what Samsung could for over half the price.
What made me want to go back? Especially since Note phones run over $1,200 these days. The Note series has evolved enough since the Note 8 to catch my eye. The phone may not be super special to anyone who upgrades yearly, but for a jump from three generations ago, it’s a beautiful piece of hardware. The evolution of the note is still subtle, but in many ways. From the pretty much edgeless display to the return of an aluminum back and expandable storage, The series feels like it went back to its roots compared to older generations. Outside of lightning-fast response times and fantastic game performance, those are a given. I came back for the little things.
The unboxing is rather humble and minimal. Just a plain box with the S-Pen on the front and a big N20. It’s screaming, “Yeah, we don’t need to say much.” Just a charger and a phone without all those crazy adapters that the Note phones started getting since the Note 7. When you pick up the phone, the first thing you notice is a huge camera bump. Like, holy hell, this thing has grown! These things are getting so big and silly, but it doesn’t detract from the phone’s looks. The series finally feels premium again. Glass doesn’t make a phone feel premium; it makes it feel delicate and fragile. I never liked glass-backed phones, and I’m glad aluminum is back in. The brushed bronze color is gorgeous, and it continues on the top and bottom, with only the front being glass like it used to be since the Note 4. There’s also a lack of a headphone jack, but loo, it’s over. Headphone jacks are bulky, and you’re fighting for room inside the phones. You also can’t make a phone thinner than 3.5mm if you keep this.
The software is a rather familiar experience, but I jumped off the Samsung train before the Galaxy One UI ecosystem was created. It feels familiar but very evolved, and there are subtle things I like. The Note20 has some of the most in-depth options for a phone I’ve ever seen, and it’s incredibly customizable down to its features. The S-Pen is pretty much the same, but has minor changes, the biggest of which is an internal battery and being able to use it for air gestures away from the phone. The phone also has lost its weird quirkiness of slowing down over time and being sluggish, which was the main problem I always had with Samsung phones, but it seems the 12GB for much faster processing has helped that.
Gaming on the phone is amazing, and it will run any game out there with no issues. Using various controllers and clips of your favorite configuration as well as emulating systems like the GameCube worked really well with not many issues outside of just typical emulator compatibility issues. The phone does get hot, but Samsung’s Game Launcher has evolved to allow performance plugins to monitor framerate, temperature, and CPU and GPU utilization. It’s great that Samsung has embraced the hardware demographic, as these are the phones power users reach for.
I do have to talk about the S-Pen and its functionality. This is a gimmick for anyone who doesn’t need to write notes or do art. My previous job found this phone useful as I was always needing to take notes on the fly, but the various software added feels more and more like there’s less of a reason to use the pen. AR Gestures, Live Messages, and various other apps like these are pure fun and gimmicky, and there’s no reason why Samsung hasn’t really advanced the Pen’s software suite much in almost a decade. The air gestures are great for presentations or something, but unless you actually need a pen on your phone, you probably will never use them outside of satisfyingly clicking the pen in and out. I love the S-Pen, and there’s no other phone like it on the market that has something like this.
Overall, Samsung has created the most premium Android ecosystem on the market, and the Note 20 reigns supreme. With a 108MP camera, themes, an always-on display, tons of battery-saving measures and options, the best OLED phone display on the market, Dolby Atmos speakers, a 120Hz refresh rate, a true edge-to-edge display, and the return of the aluminum back, the Note20 feels like it has returned from a long run of being a copycat instead of staying true to form.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.