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.
Apple Arcade continues to dominate the mobile platforms with amazing original games that are non-pay-to-win or stuffed with microtransactions. These unique games invoke what gamers love about games and what mobile games should be. Not since the early days of iOS gaming have there been this many awesome games.
stitch.
A gorgeous and fantastically unique puzzle game that will keep you glued to your screen. The game insists on stress free and relaxing gaming. The bright colors, simulated textures, and overall zen nature of the game is welcoming. The addictive nature of mobile games is a key ingredient to making them great. You want to be able to play for an hour or five minutes, but always want to come back. Stitch has done this without making it frustrating or repetitive.
LucasArts’ SCUMM engine games hold a great fanbase for those who grew up in the 80s computer gaming scene. They were bright and colorful. revolutionary for their time in terms of gameplay and art. They were also later updated with voice acting, which was some of the first of its kind. While the games were short (running around 6 hours per game), they were memorable and had a special sense of humor that was considered top-notch. The series got a much-anticipated remake, starting with the first game. While not much was really added, the entire game was redrawn from scratch with all new lines of dialog recorded by the original cast.
The game definitely plays like an old point-and-click adventure of yore. Clumsy controls (which were never really fixed), slow pace, obtuse object hunting, and no puzzles That’s not to say the game is bad. While it doesn’t feel as modern as The Longest Journey or even David Cage’s games with quick-time events and button pressing, that’s part of the charm. Thankfully, the game has a hint system that slowly gives you more specific hints, including full-on arrows pointing to the exact spot you need to be. This was really helpful and a must-have for first-time players or those who aren’t familiar with this era of adventure games.
The game has two main areas. The first one consists of some small areas, a town, and a large overhead map to get to these areas. Most of the game is spent gathering items and figuring out where and how to use them. You have multiple commands, such as talk to, push, pull, look at, use, open, and close. These are used by pulling up an action command menu, and then you have your inventory. To use these commands, you need to pull up the command menu and then the inventory. This is cumbersome and took a while to figure out. You control Guybrush by clicking around on the ground, but his walk cycle is pretty slow. There’s a lot of backtracking in this game, and this slowed the progress a bit. One thing I didn’t like was the insult for sword fighting. You have to lose to pirates to learn their insults and comebacks. You need to learn enough to defeat the first “boss”. There was a lot of trial and error doing this, and it got really frustrating.
The stars of the show are the characters and the writing. The salesman Stan, for example, is hilarious. Using overexaggerated arm waving and an obnoxious coat to look like a sleazy salesman. The pirate LeChuck doesn’t get much on-screen time, but neither do most of the characters. The main character, Guybrush, is who you will get to know the most. There is an optional dialog for most characters to get to know their personalities more than their backstories. There just isn’t enough time to get to know them more. So, it makes up for funny writing and witty humor, which the game does solidly.
I liked the visuals in this game. The hand-drawn art is beautiful and still captures the classic LucasArts look. Some of the animations feel a bit stiff still, but again, that all adds to the charm. The voice acting is awesome, and there are some funny uses of items and small tidbits of humor thrown in that did make me chuckle. I have to say that this game won’t hold everyone’s attention. It is slow to build up and takes a while to get going. A lot of people might feel lost clicking on everything and not realize what order to do things in, but the hint system makes this game much more enjoyable. I highly recommend this classic remake, but it won’t be to everyone’s taste.
I love short point-and-click games, but they are hit-and-miss. For these games that are less than two hours, it takes a lot of talent to pull off a good story, something to get attached to, and fun gameplay. Cat Museum nails almost all of this except the story and something to get attached to. The mini-game and puzzle-driven gameplay are more entertaining than pixel hunting, but there’s also the fantastic art direction and grotesque nature of the whole game.
The story just doesn’t make any sense. It’s told in abstract story panels. I only gathered that you’re possibly dreaming, and your dream is of a cat museum full of monsters and creatures that need help. You’re searching for special eggs, and that’s all I could gather. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. The game isn’t confusing or anything like that, which is nice. Clicking around moves the boy, and you will see eye icons for things to look at and hand icons for interaction. These hand icons advance the game, and each interaction is unique and different. Jigsaw puzzles, slider puzzles, timing mini-games, and just weird things like pushing and pulling things to reveal hints It’s hard to get stuck in this game as there’s always one object in each room to interact with, which will reveal a hint or advance the story.
The best part about this game is the insane art style. There are lots of grotesque characters, guts, bodily fluids, and crazy monster designs right out of a child’s nightmare. However, it’s still colorful and full of life. I really liked the atmosphere and world of Cat Museum, but at a 90-minute runtime, the game doesn’t allow any type of world-building or anything of that nature. Dialogue is cut down to a couple of lines per character, and none of it is meaningful. There are a couple of scenes where you need to run and hide from a monster chasing you, but it’s just at the end of the same room, so there’s no challenge there either.
There’s not much to say about a 90-minute game. For a few dollars, this is an interesting art exhibit, but not much more. I appreciate the unique puzzles and mini-games, but the monster designs are so cool that I wanted to spend more time in this world and learn more about it. What’s here is a short and crazy ride full of weird art and nothing more.
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.
With most consoles gaining ground with their subscription platforms and Microsoft killing it with Xbox/PC Game Pass, Apple and Google both grabbed that idea and did their own thing. Google Game Pass just isn’t that great, but Apple Arcade features many exclusive big-budget titles. While the platform has a trickle of game releases, this was a solid year for the paltform. It helps show that Apple cares about quality mobile gaming and controller support.
Punishing Gray Raven
Gray Raven is a fantastic action game with stunning visuals for a mobile game. It has fun characters, a fast-paced and crazy fun combat system, and overall features a nice anime style story. While it’s nothing mind-blowing compared to console games, it is still a great feat on the system with controller support to boot.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…