Surrealism in gaming is fascinating to me. It’s one thing to see a painting or photo, but to see it moving and interacting with it is a whole new scale. In my bottomless hunger for the surreal, dreamlike, and psychological in gaming, Isolomus fits a few of these categories. This claymation interactive art exhibit is not for those looking for a full-on game, puzzles, or even a story. There is a lot the player needs to interpret or just be square with not having an answer to. This is a game that can be completed 100% in less than an hour. My interpretation of the game is that it represents humans being slaves to our daily schedules and needs. I will leave it at that.
Each “cycle” of the game starts out the exact same, and there are two different endings. You just start clicking on objects on the screen. Squishing green men into blobs and then watching the “hub” of the day and night cycle as a man does a task you select. This can be eating, using a computer, looking out a window, brushing your teeth, etc. Each task is shown in full during the first cycle, and then you sleep. Once you sleep, you can choose two different doors. Once you start the next cycle, each activity is an interactive scene. I don’t want to spoil them too much, but you need to figure out how to advance the scene by interacting with their objects in a certain manner. Each scene has two different endings, and how you interact determines that ending.
The entire game barely represents anything human or discernible to the human eye. Strange shapes, sounds, and the eerie, dreamlike soundtrack playing in the background will keep you glued to the screen just to see what whacky thing comes next. The animations are uncanny, inhuman, and downright bizarre, but that’s what I love about this game, if you can even call it that. The gameplay here isn’t much, but you still need to be curious and find new ways to interact with the game, which I found a lot of fun.
There is no dialog in the game or even any written text. Just grunts, sounds, and ambient music. Sometimes this is just what the doctor ordered. You can vibe out and relax in a game like this that doesn’t require any skill to even interpret a story. This is a game that will stick with you. Maybe even more than a 50-hour-long AAA game. It’s so strange and surreal that you will need to talk about it with somebody just to make sense of it all. Isolomus may not get the players or attention it deserves, but for $1, what more can you ask for? You can’t buy anything for $1 anymore.
Minimalistic, story-driven games can be quite memorable and fantastic. The lack of gameplay requires you to have a laser focus on the story and characters, and the subtle gameplay can bring a visual element that no other medium can provide. Three Fourths Home isn’t one of these, sadly. While the visuals are striking and minimal, the story and writing have so much potential, but they are let down by a short and disappointing ending.
You play a teenage girl named Kelly who is driving home in a violent storm in rural Nebraska while talking to her family on the phone. Gameplay consists only of holding down a button to continue driving and choosing a few dialogue options. Holding down a single button for the entirety of the game is a really dumb idea. It introduces hand cramps and constantly breaks your focus on the story. You can honk your horn and turn off your lights, which is entirely pointless, and you can’t move the car at all. You can also choose to turn the radio on and off. There is no spoken dialogue in the game, but this requires you to make up voices and visuals for the game in your head. This may sound really dumb to most people, and some might argue that you should just read a book, and in this specific context, this would be a better medium for this story.
Choices in dialogue don’t seem important at first, but your response to your family plays into how they react to you on the phone. I guess multiple playthroughs could be worth it as there are a couple of different endings, but with how mundane the gameplay is, no one will want to sit through the hand cramps to make it worthwhile. I had issues with the controls, causing me to choose the wrong option as well. You need to skip through dialogue with a button to advance each line while holding down another to keep driving, and some times you wouldn’t know that a dialogue option would be coming up and you would just advance forward.
See, with minimal games like this, you need some sort of gameplay hook to keep it interesting enough. Three Fourths doesn’t do this at all. The mom, dad, and brother are all interesting characters, and you slowly learn about this family dynamic through this phone call. You learn about why you “ran away,” what kind of person the dad is, whether or not this is a broken home, etc. The dialogue is tight and interesting enough to keep you glued until the end, that is, if the hand cramps don’t send you packing first. I also wish more was going on visually. Occasionally, a background object will be brought up in the conversation, but it’s just black-and-white visuals without any type of payoff. The visuals, gameplay, and everything else are just an excuse to call this interactive story a game, and it does the bare minimum to qualify as that.
Most games like this have a story that ends in sudden tragedy to flip the entire thing on its head and stun the player, but this one doesn’t really do that either. If it did and the pay-off was incredible, all of this could be worth it, and there are plenty of games similar to this that pull that off. As it stands, Three Fourths Home is a well-written story in a terrible game with an even worse gameplay mechanic.
Kingdom Hearts has a special place in my heart. I remember when the first game came out, and it was talked about by a lot of people on the school grounds. I was in junior high when it was released, but I didn’t get it until it was a Greatest Hits release at $20. I found it hard at the time and never finished it. When the second game came out, I rented it from GameFly and actually cried at the ending. It was so memorable and engrossing for me as a teen.
Here we are, almost 15 years later, with the third installment in the mainline series. I was insanely excited and didn’t follow any previews or reviews for the game leading up to actually getting around to buying this game. I played the first area of Hercules (again?) and got to Toy Box (Toy Story!) and lost interest. Yeah, the game hasn’t really evolved all that much. My biggest problem with Kingdom Hearts III is the lack of imaginative level design and the use of mostly modern Pixar movies. The best part about a new Kingdom Hearts game is discovering what the next Disney movie will be that you get to explore. It’s like a surprise each time, and I loved that with previous entries. This was the first time I was praying it wasn’t another modern Pixar movie.
While Hercules was very cinematic, scripted, and looked great, it’s an overused Disney movie in the series. Toy Story was exciting, especially when we were in Andy’s room, but we wound up in a generic boring mall? It was such a boring level to get through, and I didn’t feel anything like the movie. We then move on to Repunzel. Why? Another issue with this game is playing each movie scene by scene around the second act. We’re stuck at a generic forest level here. After this, we get into Monsters Inc., which is actually pretty cool, but it’s a generic monster factory. Then it’s…FROZEN?! Why Frozen? We even get a literal, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot rendition of the “Let It Go” song. If I wanted that, I would just watch the movie. A generic snow level awaits us here.
Then we go back to Pirates of the Caribbean, of all movies. I appreciate that the visuals are improved enough to give us realistic versions of this movie and not the cartoony one we got last time, but I didn’t care as the original voice cast wasn’t present again. And it’s based off of the third film for some reason. I liked the fact that you get to sail an open ship and go find crabs to upgrade your ship, but I skipped all of this. The ship steers like a hot-wheeled car, and the generic seaside town and ship battles weren’t very interesting. Then we finally arrive at Big Hero 6, which is also pretty cool, but it’s a generic large map of San Francisco, and it is incredibly boring. That’s it. No more worlds, and you are stuck in the last level for about 10 hours doing boss rushes like every other RPG has done, and this seriously needs to stop to just bloat game time.
Even if you like or dislike these Pixar movies, the fact is that the levels are incredibly boring, and each one plays out the same way. You get through several mini-bosses, fight waves of enemies, collect some stuff, and fight the movie’s main antagonist. Every world is a generic feeling with no life from the movie injected into it. The reliance on playing through scenes of these movies isn’t what I want in a Kingdom Hearts game. I want a unique experience at each level that makes me feel like I’m part of that world. Not just some character who crashed the movie in the middle of its runtime.
I can go on and on about how much I hated the uninspired level design and repetitive nature of each world, but then there’s the Gummi Ships. I hated these in the first game, and I really don’t like them here. I like that the Gummi Ship part is a large open map that you can explore freely between worlds, but there’s nothing interesting here. You fly around collecting parts, Munni, and you can find shooter waves flying around that have levels and stars attached to them. Upgrading your ship but being able to buy parts to put together blueprints is a staple of the series, but I just don’t find it interesting. A new alpha Gummi part can be attached now to help fight in battle. It’s essentially a satellite ship flying around yours. There are speed tunnels all over the place, asteroids, and various obstacles, but I just wanted to get to the next world.
Finally, there’s the combat itself. I never really cared for Kingdom Hearts‘ combat. It works, it’s fine, and it can be fast-paced, but you fight the same Heartless over and over again, and the game is heavily reliant on keyblade transformations. Actual attacking and magic have taken a back seat. I rarely touched magic, and it felt useless. I was just attacking until I got my three pips and I could transform my keyblade into a more powerful weapon and execute its finishing move. This does the most damage and is a must for bosses, or you won’t survive at all. The final act of the game pits you against around a dozen bosses, one after another, and it’s a frustrating chore. You can still use Link commands, but they aren’t that great this time around, and I felt like they hindered battle more than anything. The goal was to attack and get a few combos in, transform my keyblade, execute attractions that put you on famous Disney park rides that do damage, and just rinse and repeat. Items are useful for sure, and it’s important to keep abilities tagged, as adding combos and modifiers to combat really gives you an edge. However, this all gets so repetitive, and you just stop caring before you get to the third world.
Then there’s the story, which I haven’t even touched on yet. It makes zero sense, even to people who have played the series up until now. My main interest was in the little stories inside each world. I never cared for the overarching Kingdom Hearts story. It’s a bloated, overcomplicated mess involving Organization XIII, and Final Fantasy isn’t even a part of this story anymore. Xehanort was the X-Blade. Aqua is trapped in a world, I think, where there are multiple versions of everyone. Yeah, I don’t know. Go watch a comprehensive timeline explanation on YouTube instead. Sadly, each world is just a retelling of each movie, which I could just go watch if I wanted to. At least the visuals are really good, and everything is bright, colorful, and full of life.
The voice acting is also hit-and-miss, but mostly terrible. Haley Joel Osment as Sora again was a bad choice; he’s just not a good voice actor. Outside of some of the mainline Disney characters, the voice acting is just wooden and awkward. Most Disney films don’t retrain their original voice actors. Especially in Pirates of the Caribbean…again. What’s worse is the writing. The script feels like it was written by a grammar school student. It’s just the most basic lines, replies, and banter. It’s just enough to get through each scene. There’s a lot of nothing being said by most of these characters. Shouting each other’s names a lot, and a lot of “You will never stop us!” or “I will defeat you!” over and over again. Yawn.
So, there’s a lot I don’t like here. The lack of older Disney movies, the complete absceneness of Final Fantasy stuff, and the fact that each movie is just a scene-by-scene replay of the original movie are boring. The levels feel generic, uninspired, and repetitive, and the combat, while flashy, uses an overreliance on keyblade transformations, attraction attacks, and links and magic. Enemies repeat far too often, and the final act is nothing but a frustrating slog of a boss rush. The story is insanely and wildly confusing and unnecessarily complicated, but at least the visuals are a nice treat. If you didn’t like previous games in the series, this does nothing that will convince you to like it now.
Side note: I was incredibly disappointed by Utada Hikaru’s song with Skrillex on this one. Both Simple and Clean and Passion/Sanctuary are classics and some of Utada’s best work. This song was terrible and wasn’t a good start to the game for me.
You play as Kai. A girl is sent away to a strange village in a post-apocalyptic world to re-connect with her extended family. You spend the entire game walking around to the various dozen or so screens, collecting seeds, planting gardens, and learning more about your past and the ties between the village and your family.
I have to give credit to the developers for their tight and well-written dialogue. The characters have, well, character. For the short time you spend in the games (under 4 hours), you really get to know these people, and the dialogue is written in a way that feels organic and like you’re listening in on a conversation. Talk of relationship issues, depression, carelessness, death, suicide, and many other emotions that we face in ourselves and amongst our own families. There’s an atmosphere that’s both uncomfortable and familiar. You will plant your own life in this game and strategize relating to certain characters or hating them. It’s just so well done.
As for the rest of the game, there’s something to be desired. As you walk around the screens, you will see a hand icon over anything you can pick up. These are usually plants, and you need the seeds to plant gardens to advance the story. There are eye icons for objects that Kai will comment on and a clock icon for an interaction that will advance the story. You never really get lost. Kai’s journal gives hints on who to talk to and what area you need to be in. Using a little common sense and learning the screens and where everyone resides helps a lot. As you pick up seeds, you learn songs that help you grow the garden. Each seed grows based on its song, so it’s recommended to plant seeds of that type. You can place the seeds with an outline of the plant that will tell you if there’s enough space for it. Sing the song a few times, plant enough seeds, and your garden grows. You can then harvest the plant for what you need to advance the story.
Don’t get this confused with something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. This isn’t a farming simulator at all. The planting and gardening are rudimentary at best and mostly uninteresting. I just threw seeds around until I filled up the meter, spammed the correct song, harvested, and off I went. I was more interested in the characters and the story. There’s a mystery behind the village that I couldn’t wait to unravel, and unfortunately, gardening got in the way. I did love the music; it’s amazing and good enough to listen to outside of the game.
The art style is well done. It’s bright and colorful, but it can be really dark when needed. The characters have unique humanoid designs that seem familiar but are still alien, and the paper cut-out look just fits so well. I just wish the story was a bit longer, as I wanted to get to know the characters more. I can’t really complain about gameplay, as you do move around constantly and patterns change and mix up, so it never really gets boring. This is a great little adventure game that can kill an evening, and you might have a new favorite OST.
2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn’t accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that’s about it. There really isn’t even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.
This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that “Aha!” moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can’t jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.
I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It’s not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.
Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they’re also nothing memorable. We’ve seen this kind of art style before in other games. That’s the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares’ ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside’s dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.
The Cold War was a rough time, and you really feel it in the South of the Circle. You play Peter, a British scientist struggling between love, his career, and being stranded in the Antarctic during one of the most strenuous times with Russia. Peter is a climatologist and ends up meeting a Scottish woman, Clara, who is protesting the war. He ends up torn between her companionship, his career, and the present times of him stranded at a remote research station trying to find rescue.
I don’t want to spoil the story because that’s all that South of the Circle has going for it and is the only reason to keep playing. There is almost zero gameplay outside of pressing buttons for dialogue choices. These come in the form of emotion bubbles that range from neutral, scared, sad, happy, and so on. I don’t quite know if this effects the overall story path, as my choices almost seemed to not matter. As Peter is talking to people, a bouncing red ball means a scared response. A blue ball hanging low means a sad response. A sun icon will make Peter respond joyfully, etc. These come up pretty frequently, so you’re always pressing something. Occasionally, you can move Peter around and interact with the rare object here and there, but that’s all there is to it. There are no puzzles or anything like that.
You follow this linear path of Peter trying to find people at this station while seeing flashbacks. You start in the middle, and as you move forward in the story, the flashbacks start from the beginning. It’s very entertaining, and I was interested in the story until the end thanks to the well-written dialogue and fantastic voice work. The visuals are striking in the sense that they almost look rotoscoped. There is motion capture for this minimalistic style of art, and it’s quite captivating.
The entire game is a linearly scripted adventure and lasts less than four hours. It’s a bit longer than most super-short story-driven walking simulators, and the excellent writing will keep you hooked. All of the characters have depth, and you actually have feelings for certain characters, despite some having only a short time on screen. Scenes can get intense and emotional, and you can feel the dread that Peter is facing in his struggle for survival. It’s just so well done, and it’s sad there isn’t more gameplay attached to it. It’s one of the better walking simulator stories I’ve finished in recent years.
Overall, South of the Circle provides an entertaining, well-acted, and well-written story and script, but the lack of gameplay makes you question whether this is just enough here to be an excuse for a game. The art is fantastic, and the motion capture is enticing. I wish the dialogue choices were a little more obvious about what they did or if they changed anything at all.
Walking simulators can be really great or really terrible. There is usually no in-between, but somehow Kona manages to accomplish this unremarkable achievement. You follow Carl Faulbert, a private investigator, who arrives in a remote other Canadian town to discover something is lurking around and killing its residents. The plot itself is mostly uninteresting, and details are really only explained in found notes. There is a narrator who explains things throughout, but he mostly just asks questions and never answers anything for us.
The game starts out fairly simple, and it’s an illusion of how the rest of the game is. You walk around in first-person view, interact with objects, and drive your truck. You can pull out your map in the truck to figure out where to go. You have an inventory system and can pick up objects to store, such as duck tape, hardware, flares, matches, etc., but most of these items are useless, and you don’t ever use half of the consumables. The game isn’t open-world, but there is a giant area to explore. You can wander off the beaten path or main road to find campfires to light, objects to pick up, documents to read, and various other things, but this is purely for achievements only. Wandering around the town is a chore due to the slow walking speed and short sprint speed. You have heat, sanity, and health; however, the heat meter helps drag the game down further. Yes, this is a remote area in the cold, but needing to find a specific object to obtain a jacket from a person you may never find without a walkthrough is pretty annoying. Once you get the jacket, your heat meter never becomes an issue. There are wolves spread out in the wilderness off the main road, and these can harm you. Hit them with a hammer or hatchet, or shoot them with a gun, and they’re gone. There’s an option to throw steaks at them if you want to hunt for achievements too.
The game always feels clunky in some way. Having to constantly pull out your map to check your surroundings gets tiresome, and never knowing exactly where to go will make people quit early on as well. You just wander into each house marked on the map and hopefully figure out how to make your way north until you reach the end of the game, which isn’t satisfying and doesn’t make me excited for a sequel. You can only save at campfires, and if you don’t have matches, a firestarter, or a log, you can’t save. Your inventory space is limited, so you must drag your items around in the back of your truck, and then if you need something, it’s a hike back.
You have a camera and can take photos, but again, this is mostly for achievements. Achievement hunters would love this game, but outside of that, the gameplay is mostly repetitive or pointless. The visuals are great and hold up well even today, but you are mostly seeing just white and log cabins. There isn’t anything artistic or unique about this game, which makes it a very boring game to look at. The narrator does a good job, but what’s the point if he doesn’t help progress the story? I only kept pushing forward to see if the story got more interesting or had a really awesome ending that made all of the mind-numbing walking worthwhile.
Overall, Kona has its place for a certain crowd. I love walking simulators, but many often waste my time with forgettable stories, boring settings, or mind-numbing gameplay. Kona has more gameplay than any other walking simulator has a right to, but if you cut all of it out and only let the player drive down the main road, that effort put into all the extra exploration stuff could have been put into a better story. As it stands, Kona doesn’t do any one thing particularly well.
When it comes to walking simulators, some get more praise than others, and some are just forgotten. Ethan Carterwas talked about quite a bit upon its first release, even receiving a BAFTA award for best game innovation. After playing this game, I can’t understand that kind of high praise for game innovation, but it sure does look pretty, and I have to give the ending some credit. It’s one game that builds up to a great conclusion where everything comes together. However, during the actual journey, the narrative is pretty messy and vague.
You play a detective trying to find a boy, Ethan Carter, and along the way, you solve murder scenes. The game is built to be sort of open-ended. You can easily miss side content (in the form of puzzles) if you don’t wander off and check out the house off the beaten path. Your main goal to advance the story is to find every clue for the scene, then go to the main part of the scene (usually an object), hold down the mouse button, and go into detective mode to piece everything together. Blue whisps fly out and show scene segments. You need to put them in the correct order and play it out to find out what happened. Once you do this, you get a piece of Ethan’s story and can move on.
There are a couple of areas with optional puzzles. You need to navigate an area to find the clues, which are usually identical to the area with the puzzle in it. These are either audio or visual clues; they can be quite challenging and make you think a bit. Notably, there aren’t any collectibles in the game, so you don’t have to worry about missing much. There are a couple of objects to find for achievements, but that’s about it. I wish there was some sort of reward for taking off into random, remote corners of the game. The path seems to be far more linear than it lets on. It’s really more of an illusion of how far you can walk.
The locales vary quite a bit, and the game is really pretty. When the game was initially released, it was a great piece of tech for PC gamers pushing Unreal Engine 3, and now it has been ported to Unreal Engine 4. While it looks sort of dated today with some less-than-stellar lighting effects and a lot of 2D leaves and branches on trees, there is still a lot of detail. Huge open vistas look into the forests, lakes, rivers, and dams of the Wisconsin wilderness. It looks good in these wide-open areas, but the interior parts look pretty average, and there’s nothing to write home about in terms of art direction or style. It’s hyper-realistic-looking, with very minor touches of horror sprinkled throughout.
While looking at the landscape is nice, you can easily get lost as the game prides itself on not holding your hand; however, being completely clueless also isn’t fun. Without a guide, many will turn the game off before even knowing you must solve these murder scenes during the first ten minutes. You can walk for quite a ways before realizing nothing is happening or hitting a dead end. This requires a lot of backtracking and aimless trekking through nothing but silence. While there is technically a “path” you can follow, it’s very loose and not so obvious all the time.
My favorite atmospheric segments were when the detective narrates and you’re just traveling through the vistas and valleys, taking in the scenery. It’s a bit foreboding in spots but never creeps into horror game territory. There are no jump scares, no ghouls, and nothing supernatural. A building might be dark and dilapidated, and you might enter an old mine, but there’s no creepy music or anything. It’s foreboding. That’s the best word I can come up with. I constantly found myself confused and disoriented trying to figure out what was going on in the story most of the time, so I always looked forward to that break in solving crime scenes with the walking and narration.
Overall, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a game I have put off for nearly a decade, mainly because I knew it would be a confusing mess and the story would disappoint, but I do have to say waiting for this Unreal Engine 4 port was worth it. If you like walking simulators, this is among the best visually and is a nice change of pace from the horror ones we seem to get mostly. Even if the open-ended nature of the game frustrates you, stick with a guide or keep trying, as the ending is well worth it and those open vistas are incredibly gorgeous to look at.
Linear, narrative-driven adventure games are some of my favorites. Bramble does a great job trying to be different than the rest by delivering a little bit of everything and not overstaying its welcome. You play as Olle, who is trying to rescue his captured sister from the bramble and evil forest creatures who took her.
The game does a great job of luring you into a false sense of security. The game starts out bright and colorful, with beautiful sweeping vistas of green. You get to solve various simple puzzles with cute gnomes that laugh like little babies. The first third of the game is cheerful and bright—until it suddenly isn’t. Bramble quickly turns dark, gory, and downright depressing. Sacrificed babies, wading through pools of animal gore, climbing moldy meat—and those cute little gnomes get slaughtered at some point. It’s just done abruptly and suddenly, and it’s shocking.
The majority of the game has you running around areas with fixed camera angles, jumping, climbing, pushing the occasional push, twisting the odd lever, and solving the easiest puzzles. I honestly don’t know why these puzzles are even here. Exploration is also nonexistent. You go into a room with a locked door, only to find the key on the table in front of you. This happens multiple times as well. I don’t understand the point of it. There is a bit of combat thrown in, but it’s saved for boss fights. You have a ball of light that’s not only used to illuminate areas and clear some paths, but you can also chuck it at weak points at bosses. The boss fights are the only challenge in the whole game, as you must memorize attack patterns and dodge, jump, or toss your ball at the right moments through waves of attacks.
The environments are constantly changing, and they all look fantastic. Depth of field is used well here as you are a small person in a giant’s world, so everything from blades of grass to a normal-sized rock is huge. This is well shown, and the perspective is pretty cool with the depth of field effects used. Textures look great, and models look good too. The entire game is narrated by a woman, so it’s the only voice acting in the game. I do want to mention that the soundtrack is gorgeous. During chapter changes and while the camera pans across a vista while you’re running, an incredible vocal soundtrack will play, and I honestly would listen to it outside of the game. The soundtrack by Martin Wave and Dan Wakefield is fantastic.
Despite the great pacing, wonderful visuals and soundtrack, and challenging bosses, there still isn’t much of an actual story here. The game is narrated like a children’s storybook from medieval times, but that’s about it. I had no reason to get attached to the characters or the world around me. The monster and creature designs are top-notch, and I always looked forward to the next screen because it was always a surprise. The game is nice and short and is better than most short, linear, narrative-driven adventure titles. I love the dark tone and theme, and while you may not discuss this with your friends a year from now, it’s at least a sight to behold.
Retro controllers are making a comeback thanks to retro enthusiasts. Many companies are finally catching on to this and making controllers compatible with older systems but with newer technology and sometimes better designs. NYXI might be a generic Chinese brand, but they’re the first to make GameCube WaveBird-style Joy-Cons that slide onto the Switch and include a centerpiece to turn them into a controller. This got me really excited, and I love my original WaveBird. The excellent purple (indigo) color brings back memories that I wish I had, as I didn’t play GameCube games until I was an adult.
The controller itself feels good in the hand. It has a nice weight, doesn’t feel cheap, and looks the part. The button arrangement on the front is just like the original GameCube controller. There are a few changes, such as the added turbo buttons (I personally don’t ever use these), and there are two buttons on top where the Z button normally is on the GameCube to represent L and R. There are also two buttons where the grips are, and these can be programmed to be anything you want. While all this seems fine, the controller does have some flaws.
First off, the buttons don’t feel all that great to press. There’s a cheap, hollow pinginess to them, and the shoulder buttons are micro switches rather than rubber domes. It has an unsatisfying feel, and most people will be turned off by this. The controller buttons are also very loud. The large A button makes a loud clunking sound. This is a huge letdown, despite how good it feels in the hand.
The analog sticks work just fine, and the right stick has an interchangeable direction gate to make it like the default 8-way gate or a regular round one. The 8-way gate would be great for the N64 emulator on the Switch. As a bonus, the face buttons are backlit, which was a really nice touch and looks pretty cool. I just wish the joysticks lit up as well. They, of course, make the Switch incredibly bulky when used in portable mode. Especially the OLED switch. It makes the entire system nearly a foot long! Another small annoyance is the overly bright status lights on top. They won’t turn off and outshine the otherwise nice glow of the face buttons. It’s a distraction.
Are you ready for the worst part of the game? The vibration function One side is about double the strength of the other side. This makes no sense. You can adjust the vibration strength with a button combo, but I had to put the stronger side all the way down to match. This isn’t all. It’s incredibly loud. You can hear the motors vibrate and shake the controller. It has some of the worst vibration functions I’ve ever seen. For the high asking price, I’d expect more. This definitely looks better as a display piece or for casual emulation than a main controller.
Overall, the NYXI Wizard controller is a nostalgic trip, but anyone who may not have fond memories might want to stay away. The buttons don’t feel that great, the controller creaks, and the vibration function is awful. I do appreciate the backlit buttons and the interchangeable analog gate, but it’s not enough to offset the weaknesses.
Great post tthankyou