Video Games & Capitalism

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Media as Ads

Last week, the Game Awards took place. While I didn’t watch the show, there was a moment I read about and saw online that was a complete summarization of the show. Geoff Keighley, creator and host of the award show, stood on stage in his suit jacket/t-shirt combination, under the lights and in front of the cameras, and told the audience that he and the Game Awards condemn harassment in the offices of video game studios. Then he introduced a trailer for a new Quantic Dream game, a studio notorious for an abusive workplace culture that includes sexual harassment and bigotry from its higher ups, including CEO David Cage. This sardonic moment was not too surprising, honestly. The Game Awards have seemed concerned in being a vehicle for commercials and hype—pretty much just wanting to be a mini E3—then actually celebrating video games, their accomplishments of the years, and their creators. Video games are a billion dollar industry and, like anything making that incomprehensible amount of money, it is in the pocket of capitalism overlords sucking their workers and consumers dry while getting fat and bloated with obscene wealth. 

I said the Game Awards being a platform for ads isn’t surprising. That’s because game companies have had a long history of treating game media and journalism as a source of advertising for them. From blacklisting reviewers or media outlets for not reviewing a game positively or making reviewers sign NDAs saying they will not mention bugs in reviews or have to show pre-approved gameplay footage. Cyberpunk 2077 recently used NDAs to gloss over known issues with the game prior to release. It is estimated that CD Projekt Red spent almost twice as much on marketing Cyberpunk as it did actually developing it, which is absurd frankly. That is, until you realize that it worked. Advertising the game, hyping it up as much as possible, making everyone think they needed to have it at launch, was the plan and it led to over 10 million copies of the game being bought in its first month. Publishers will use hype culture to try to squeeze as many day one sales of a game as they can, especially when they know the game is going to launch broken to all hell or is just plain awful. 

But that is just to get money when the game is released. Capitalism isn’t satisfied just making money once on a product, no matter how much profit it brings in. Capitalism is only interested in infinite growth, infinite profits. So how do you continue to make profit on a product that’s already been bought?

To Feed Off Whales

When a whale dies in the ocean, its body sometimes sinks to the sea floor where its decaying corpse will attract and be fed on by scavengers and fauna. This is called a whale fall. It can create unique and localized ecosystems among the sands since plants and animals can survive for decades off the nourishment taken from the dead whale. In nature, this is a fascinating, grotesquely beautiful thing, but as a business practice, it is simply grotesque.

Sadly, in-game purchases like loot boxes, microtransactions, and gacha mechanics are standard now, even in full priced games. More often than not, they have a direct impact on a game’s quality. When the purpose of a game is to push additional payments from the player, they have to be designed around microtransactions. They become grindier to incentivize purchasing experience boosters, they create FOMO by offering limited time cosmetics, and they offer new characters or weapons only from random chance pulls instead of letting the player pick and choose what they might most want. But if a developer or publisher wants to bend a game til breaking just to fit money grubbing schemes into them, that’s their choice. It’s stupid, but it’s their choice. I’m not going to bemoan a game for what it could have been without extra monetization because, at the end of the day, it is just a product to be sold. However, I will always rage against the cost these in-game purchases have on actual human lives.

Loot boxes and microtransactions often use gambling mechanics like flashy animations during unlocks, randomized odds to get what you actually want, and confusing menus with the purchase button always being the easiest one to find. They are built to prey on people with gambling addictions, OCD, or other mental illnesses. There are countless stories out there of recovering gamble addicts or people compelled to complete things having to stop playing their favorite games because they felt targeted and pressured to buy in-game purchases, of adults and even kids spending thousands of dollars on a single game through microtransactions, and of folks falling down a pit of loot boxes just trying to get a character or skin they want. It’s easy to say “Well just don’t spend the money” if you don’t feel that pull, if you do not have an issue with gambling or mental illness, but the fact that games make it so easy to do, so easy just to put spend a little more money with the click of button, is the real problem here. 

Of course, not every player is dropping hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars into a single game. The vast majority are not, but, in a sick reversal of the richest 1% elite, the burden of cost on these games are often put on very few players–the whales. This dehumanizing term refers to the small percentage of players that spend the most amount of money in a game–the biggest fish in the shallowest pond. These games can strip these players bare, lead them to economic disaster, and continue to build their digital empires upon their bones.

Bloody and Bruised, Crunched and Abused

Capitalism’s contempt doesn’t end just at the consumers buying their products, but also the workers making them. Since companies will do anything to make even a little more money, an easy way to achieve this is to limit costs in production and this often comes from exploiting their employees. This is true in the video game industry and the most egregious manifestation is with crunch.

Crunch in terms of game development refers to the time when employees are working in overdrive to meet a release. It can take many forms, but the common thread is long days and weeks without time off. Think of any major game from the last decade or so and it’s pretty much guaranteed the developers had to rely on crunch to ship it–twelve or more hour days, six or seven days a week, for months at a time. This overworking can have severe effects on the workers’ mental and physical health. It shouldn’t have to be explained why crunch is wrong. No one should be working so long and hard that they become ill, no one should have to go weeks at a time without seeing their family to finish any project, no one should ever feel obligated to sleep under their desk. It’s inhuman. Crunch is abuse to workers. Sadly, it’s not the only type they will have to face.

The past few years have been terrible in terms of abuse at video game studios. Both Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard have had many employees come out with their stories of being sexually harassed by people in the companies, many of them managers, and often seemingly being protected by other higher ups. Activision Blizzard laid off hundreds of employees both in 2019 (even after making record breaking profits in 2018) and just this month when many members of the Ravensoft team were let go after being told for months that pay increases were in the works. These layoffs are often argued to be necessary to balance the costs of game development. This also strikes as incongruous though since the easiest way to reduce costs at one of these companies would be to reduce the outrageously bloated salaries of their CEOs (especially at Activision Blizzard where Bobby Kotick is already a billionaire).

The Ethical Consumption of Video Games

Before promoting the product of an abusive company at the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley said we should show companies our true values and “vote with our wallets.” And this is the only true thing he probably said all night. Was is tone-deaf and out of touch? Maybe. Was it well meaning? Probably. Was it a mealy mouthed, idle threat of a weak puppy dog in a den of hungry wolves? Absolutely. But it is true. The best thing you can do as a consumer to show companies their practices are not ok is to not purchase their products. Boycotts can be an effective way to tell a company to fuck off since the consumers’ purchases are what give them the money and power to continue to exist.

Video games are in a unique position for consumer goods since the second hand market is so accessible and thriving for them, meaning that boycotting a company and never having to purchase their product only has to last until their games appear on the shelf of your local used store. Since companies do not see any additional revenue from the purchase of a used game, you can buy a game you might want without having to worry about that money going to companies that are overworking and underpaying their staff. As someone who prefers collecting physical copies of games, this is how I buy a lot of them. I have a long list–too long to get into here–of developers and publishers whose games I refuse to buy new. I will wait to find a used copy of their games if I know crunch was used in making it. I completely understand the preference for digital copies of games and if you prefer those, I suggest waiting for sales so terrible companies see less profit from them. In the end, everyone will have to decide for themselves which companies they feel alright to support and they will have to draw their own lines in the sand.

Apart from boycotting companies that are practicing harmful business practices, you can also do the opposite and support good companies. Show some appreciation for companies that do rely on crunch and treat their workers with respect–this is why I have purchased every Supergiant Games, even though I’ve only really played Hades so far. And support video game workers attempts to unionize. Follow social media pages like ABetterABK and Game Workers Unite. Educate yourself on the more nasty practices of the industry–personally, I’m a big fan of the Jimquistion and Matt McMuscle’s Wha Happun? series on YouTube. I know it can be a bummer–hell, it can be downright depressing and disheartening–but the industry will never get better if we all turn a blind eye to the capitalist hands pulling the string–exploiting workers, preying off their own fans, releasing half-completed, broken games. Remember that we all do better when we all do better and in this case “we” stands for us the consumers, the workers in trenches, and the games we love.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Critical Miss #33

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Flying High, Falling Fast

I’ve said before that I’m a more casual fan of the Legend of Zelda series. I’ve liked every game I’ve played from the illustrious series, but they are not in my favorite games of all time. However, I do want to play through all games in the series, though, both the good and the bad. That brings us to Skyward Sword. Released for the Wii in 2011, this is one of the most divisive games under Zelda’s name. The contrarian in me went into the game wanting to love it. While there are a lot of good things in it, the game has a counter to everything there is to like. This is one of the most mixed experiences I’ve had with a game in a long time.

One of the best aspects of Skyward Sword is the art style. It is bright, colorful, but not super cartoony. It’s like a good mix of the more realistic proportions of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask and the colors and cell-shading of Wind Waker; it fits a Zelda game perfectly. The characters in the game are all bold, goofy, and memorable. Their charm instantly made me more interested and care about them, especially Zelda and Link themselves. Never before has their relationship been so fleshed out. They are best friends with some romantic feeling growing inside them. It gives Link a more personal reason for risking his life to save Zelda and gives the player strong context for the adventure. The character Grouse even has a nice character arc throughout the game, starting as a mere high school bully and turning into an honorable fellow trying to help Link however he can. The world of Skyward Sword is a pleasant and beautiful one to exist in, but it would be nice if there were more things to do in it.

A thick layer of clouds separates the two parts of Skyward Sword’s world: the surface and the sky. The surface is divided into the Faron Woods, Lanayru Desert, and Eldin Volcano. These are the areas where you will spend most of your time looking for and exploring dungeons, but in between dungeons you will have to return to the sky. To put it bluntly, the sky is too big, too empty, and traveling across it feels way too slow. Since you can see everything in the distance, travelling to a destination is a matter of pointing your bird at it and watching it sluggishly get closer. The first few times I flew in the game, it felt exhilarating until I realized how little nuisance is needed to control your Loftwing. Besides Goddess Chests that appear in the sky, there’s nothing to find in it. There are only a few memorable islands worth exploring in the sea of cloud including Skyloft, the main hub, the rest are just floating rocks that neither pique interest or act as an obstacle to avoid.

So flying above the clouds is not terribly engaging or fun, but what about below them?  Since there are only three main areas you will explore below the clouds, the world of Skyward Sword feels rather small, especially since you will revisit these areas at least three times each. Areas sometimes change, like the Faron Woods being flooded at a point, or there will be all new areas to explore for a dungeon entrance, but it doesn’t help the game world feel any less small or tedious. Often to find a dungeon, you will have to use Fi’s dowsing abilities to find things. This process gets very tiresome and repetitive after the first few times. Same with the strange stealth sections when doing a Goddess Challenge to get a new piece of equipment. There are even times the game makes you run through the entirety of a section you’ve already played in order to progress—most egregious of this would be the 3rd trip to Eldin Volcano where you lose all your items and have to sneak around enemies to get them back. Once you get through all the tedium and nonsense and actually get inside a dungeon, though, is when the level design of Skyward Sword starts to shine.

Dungeons are always a highlight of any Zelda game because they blend the gameplay loops of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat. Skyward Sword is no different since the dungeons are probably the best part of the game. Each has unique gimmicks and different visuals, despite taking place in similar areas. From using special stones to shift time in certain areas, lowering and raising a central statue, and dropping water in lava to create platforms, all the dungeons offer something new and interesting to play with. These are probably the most balanced dungeons in series too, with puzzles being tricky and clever, but never too obtuse to feel unfair. The loop of finding a new item in a dungeon, discovering ways that new tool opens new paths and lead to the boss, and using the item against that boss is as strong as ever. The bosses themselves are also a blast. Blowing sand away to reveal Moldarach, pulling the arms off of Koloktos to use its own weapons against it, and pushing Scaldera down a ramp to weaken it; every boss is interesting and fun to fight. That is, when the game is not reusing bosses, which it does a lot. Ghirahim and Demise will both have to be fought multiple times throughout the game. While Demise is always a pretty lame fight, Ghirahim has the nugget of a great fight in him, but it hindered by the games controls.

Being released on the Nintendo Wii, Skyward Sword makes heavy use of motion controls. This is why opinions on the game are so mixed amongst Zelda fans. I played the recent HD remaster on the Switch where it can be played without these motion controls. Instead of waving your arm for a sword slash, you just flick the right stick; instead of thrusting the nunchuck forward, you click in the left stick for a shield parry; and instead of aiming the bow or slingshot with the pointer, the right stick is again used. These controls work about as well as they can, but they still feel unresponsive and clunky. This is especially true when using or selecting items, where the difference between clicking the right trigger and holding it down is seemingly a matter of microseconds, causing the item selection wheel to pop up in the heat of battle when you were trying to aim your bow at an enemy. These controls have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the game, adding to the sense of tedium and clunkiness that is present throughout, but especially in combat.

Much like flying around the overworld, combat in Skyward Sword is something that starts off feeling thrilling until fatigue quickly sets in. Since you can attack in eight directions at any time, you have more freedom than in any other Zelda game. Enemies will block your attacks and this encourages you to feign to create openings to hit them. This helps every enemy encounter feel unique, challenging, and engaging since you are not just waiting for an opening and spamming the attack button. That would be great if spamming the attack button wasn’t more often than not the easiest way to break an enemy’s guard. Even Ghirahim, whose whole deal is he will grab your sword if you don’t feign attacks, goes down pretty easily if you just spam sword swings in different directions. It is a shame because I can see what the developers were trying to do, to make every fight require attention and skill and patience to beat, but it’s not fleshed out enough, the enemy AI not smart enough, and the controls not refined enough to require players to get good at it to survive. I probably died more times in Skyward Sword than any other Zelda game, but it always felt like the result of poor controls rather than any lack of skill.

Like I said at the beginning, playing through Skyward Sword is the most mixed experience I’ve had with a game in a long time. I didn’t hate the game, there is a lot of fun that can be found in it, but for everything good the game has, there is something negative that hampers it. It was ambitious to make a game that relies almost entirely on motion controls, but I can see a more enjoyable game buried here that would be alright if it had standard Zelda controls and mechanics. Even that wouldn’t have fixed everything with the game though. The world design and progression throughout the game is just tedious and slow and extremely bloated. The search for the Goddess Flames or the Triforce, could have easily been cut and the game wouldn’t have lost anything important. But I still had fun during parts of the game. Skyward Sword is still a Zelda game and still rather good as far as AAA games go, but it is the Zelda game that I have the least interest in revisiting anytime in the future. I played through it once and that’s enough for me. 

The Binding of Isaac & Forever Games

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The Binding of Isaac is my favorite game and I’ve been playing way too much of it lately. Since the final expansion, Repentance, released on consoles last week, the game has its hooks firmly in me again after months of not really touching it. There are a few games I experience this waxing and waning of interest with: Stardew Valley, the Monster Hunter and Pokémon series, Darkest Dungeon—all games I will have a feverish urge to play all of suddenly, games I will obsessively play for a few weeks, and not have to desire to touch again for months until the cycle repeats. I call these types of games “Forever Games” and Isaac is my ride-or-die forever game.

No game is meant to last forever, though, so how can a game be considered a forever game? I define this type of game not as a game that will take up 100% of your free time and be the only thing you play for the rest of your life, but more so a game you can pick up, play, out down, and return to at any time and still enjoy as much as always. I often think about what would happen if I ever had to get rid of my game collection, to pare it down to just a few titles and have only them to play going forward. Although I have lots of games—probably too many games—on my shelf and digitally to play, I feel like I could easily just choose three to five games in my collection to last me forever. And I honestly think that anyone who plays video games could do the same. They may be massive strategy games, MOBAs or MMOs, multiplayer shooters, or giant open world games. These games, the ones that someone could look at and say “I could be happy just playing this for the rest of my life if I had to,” these are forever games to me.

There is another term that is similar to mine of the forever game: the desert island game. You might be asking what the difference between a forever game and desert island game is and the answer is delicate. I don’t much like the term desert island game. It strikes me as more of a thought experiment or game you discuss with your friends. Choosing a game that you would want to be stranded on an island with as opposed to a game you could see yourself enjoying playing at any time is a subtle but important difference. I might choose a game like Skyrim, a game I would want to force myself to make the time to play, for a desert island game; I might choose a big game that would take forever to 100% like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild; or I might choose some sort of fighting or strategy game so I have the time to dig deep and learn it inside out. Choosing a game with the expectation of forced isolation is less personal than choosing a game you have already played and know for certain you would be happy playing for the rest of your life. And that brings me back to The Binding of Isaac.

I can’t recall how I first learned of Isaac. It might have been from an old Super Beard Bros video or just a random top 10 YouTube video. I do remember the hours and hours I’ve poured into the game since first playing it in 2015. I put 200-300 hours in on my 3DS, 200+ hours so far on my Switch, and countless hours (I would estimate at least another 200) on my PS4. Isaac has been with me for half a decade and has shaped the gamer I am today; it helped me through some of my worst bouts of depression; and helped me discover my favorite YouTuber: Northernlion—which is obvious if you are familiar with the man’s content. But this is all to say that I love Isaac; obviously, it is my forever game. Now let’s answer why that is.

Isaac is a roguelike, meaning each time you boot it up the rooms, items, bosses, everything is randomly generated. Death ends a run and you start completely fresh when dropping back into the basement for a new one. This is all standard roguelike stuff, but what sets Isaac apart in my mind are the synergies. With hundreds of items, all combining and interacting with each other in strange, powerful, or run-ruining ways, each run feels more different in Isaac than any other roguelike I’ve played. More entertaining too. Besides discovering new combinations or building different archetypes of runs, the visual spectacle of wacky synergies is always a blast to watch. Isaac is an endlessly replayable game. Not just due to the randomly generated runs and seemingly infinite ways the items interact with each other, but because it is just absolutely massive.

There is just a shit ton of content in the Binding of Isaac. 34 different characters to play as, different routes to take and end bosses to fight, 45 special challenge runs to beat, and over 600 secrets to unlock that give you new items, trinkets, and consumables to play with in the game. If you only unlocked one new thing in The Binding of Isaac a day, it would take at least a few years to get everything. I’ve been playing the game off and on for over five years and I still have never gotten a 100% completed save file—although, this is mainly due to moving what console I primarily play it on. There are hundreds of hours to juice out of Isaac just to get a 100% save file and after that, you can just keep playing it since every run is different and fun. And the best part about this is that it feels like a complete game. There are no pay-to-win mechanics, no option to just purchase a deluxe edition with everything unlocked, no road map or any of the live service bullshit that seems to fill half of the AAA games releasing now. While those types of games feel soulless, cynical, and greedy, Isaac still feels nurtured, personal, and true to its designer, Edmund McMillen.

Even a game as story light as Isaac needs context for the world it brings the player into. It needs themes for the players to reflect on. The Binding of Isaac deals in themes of Catholic guilt, dysfunctional families, religion zealotism, and child abuse. McMillen uses the game to explore these themes as they affect his upbringing, his current life, and the world at large; and they very thematically resonate to me. Through playing Isaac, I found myself looking back on my own Catholic upbringing and family life as a kid, not only the bad, but also the good. It helped me accept how those things molded me into the person I am today. It helped me see religion as a whole in a less black-and-white way than I used to; helped me see the community some people find in their religion and the good it can do.

This connection with the themes, this interest in Catholic myths and demons the game fostered in me, is a huge reason why I continue coming back to Isaac again and again and again. Add to that, the replayable nature of the game and mountain of things to unlock, characters to play as, and synergies to learn, and the game never gets stale. It is the game I boot up when I just need to kill an hour or two. It is the game I turn on when I have no interest or am too depressed to play any of the other games on my shelf. It is the game I can also rely on to destress or calm me down when I’m feeling too anxious. With the release of Repentance on consoles, I am determined now to finally buckle down and 100% the game. It might take forever to do, but that’s fine since The Binding of Isaac is, now and always will be, my forever game. 

MediEvil – Critical Miss #32

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Spooky, Scary Skeleton

It’s Halloween. The kids are trick or treating, the jack-o’-lanterns are alight, and the sheet ghosts are looking for souls to steal. I didn’t play a horror game this year for Critical Miss, but I did play a horror-themed game. MediEvil is an action platformer that released on the PS1 in 1998 and Sony decided that over 20 years was long enough of a slumber and resurrected the game in 2019 with a remake. I played this remake for PS4 and it was a great choice to play during the Halloween season. As we all know, skeletons are the spookiest thing imaginable—well, besides a bad port perhaps.

The story in MediEvil is very simple, but charming. Sir Daniel Fortesque is hailed as Gallowmere’s greatest hero after he led his army against and defeated the evil wizard Zarok and his undead hordes. Only thing is, Sir Daniel was the first to perish in that battle with an arrow through his eye. He never even faced Zarok, but has been falsely remembered in history as the hero of the day. So when Zarok returns and green misty magics the land of Gallowmere to shit again, Sir Daniel rises from his grave as a skeleton and has a second chance at being the hero he failed to be. As far as a redemption story goes, it is extremely bare, but it works well because Sir Daniel is such a pitiable character. The first action he takes upon waking from death is to pull cobwebs out of his empty eye socket, he mumbles and is misunderstood constantly while talking to others because he is missing his jaw, and his armor looks at least three sizes too large for him. Everyone you come across in the story like the ghosts of other heroes and gargoyle statues know the fraud Sir Daniel truly is and constantly shit on him about it. All this adds to give the put upon skeleton a true underdog feel and it’s hard not to relate with him.

While the art style is strong, I found myself less impressed with the graphics in MediEvil as I was with other remakes of PS1 games like the N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro remakes. It is partly due to the MediEvil remake’s graphical style feeling so similar to those other games and I am starting to feel fatigued with it. But there are also the issues with the performance of the game. Character models are covered in jaggies, the frame rate plummets when the screen is busy, and textures pop in constantly. I played this on an original PS4 model so that contributed to these issues being ever present, but the game doesn’t seem to be well optimized at all based on reviews I’ve read saying the game doesn’t run great on the PS4 Pro either. It’s a shame too because underneath all these issues, the core game is still rather solid.

Sir Daniel feels right at home in the lands of Gallowmere which are dipping with the classic gothic horror atmosphere. Crumbling castles, flooded battlefields, medieval villages, asylums, and graveyards all need to be explored to complete the game. Most levels are linear with paths criss-crossing each other or opening up with the help of different colored runes à la Doom, but the goals and gimmicks of the levels vary a lot. One level you just have to make it to the end, another you’ll solve riddles in a hedge maze or just fight waves of enemies, or you will have to collect the souls of fallen soldiers. Although the levels can be so different, the game still feels like a cohesive whole since Gallowmere is perfectly suited to these areas and the gameplay never strays far from the basic mechanics for any new gimmick to feel out of place.

The core gameplay of MediEvil is exploration, some light platforming, and combat, and boy I wish the combat was more engaging. It’s not terrible, just some of the most bare bones combat I’ve ever played. Sir Daniel doesn’t swing his sword as much as he just wipes it in front of him like he’s boringly painting a wall. There’s no feedback when hitting an enemy—no grunt from them, no slight pause as the weapon hits flesh and bone, nothing except some enemies get knocked back to a comical degree. I can deal is lackluster combat in a game, good game feel isn’t absolutely everything, but when there is no indication from the game when I get hit, no rumble or crunching sound, and my health mysteriously drains to zero in fight because I couldn’t tell I was being hit, that sends a fire of frustration up my lungs.

You don’t only have to deal with the combat in order to progress through the game, but also to unlock the Hero Chalices in each level. You’ll notice that sometimes after you kill an enemy that their soul will float up and dart away. This goes to help fill a chalice hidden somewhere in the level and, after killing enough foes, can be collected before exiting the level. Usually, the chalice is hidden somewhere near the level exit or along the path you would need take to the end, but sometimes it is at the very beginning. This requires you to backtrack across the entire level before leaving to grab it and, with all the enemies dead, it’s very boring.

The chalices are the best way to upgrade yourself throughout the game. If you beat a level after collecting its chalice, you will be taken to the Hall of Heroes before returning to the map screen. Here in the Hall, you can find the glowing statue of a hero and they will talk to you a little bit before giving you an award for collecting the chalice. The reward is sometimes an extra life bottle or some gold, but it is usually a weapon. These weapons are important to collect for the higher damage output because the ghouls and monsters you fight in levels just continue to get tankier. It’s extremely disappointing that all the weapons feel like all the others in their types—swords all swing the same, hammers and axes slam on the ground, all the range weapons like throwing knives, bows, and crossbows all feel like the same weapon with different firing speeds. As someone who relishes games with many different weapons and combat styles, I was disappointed every time I got a new weapon in MediEvil only to find it’s just a copy of a weapon I had already been using. 

The only real time I felt I was strategizing in the game was with the Life Bottles. Once Sir Daniel’s HP hits zero, he will automatically heal with a Life Bottle, provided you have one to use. These bottles can be filled at Life Fountains or by picking up smaller Life Vials. The rub comes when getting a game over or moving onto a new level because your health and Life Bottles do not refill—so if you limb to a level exit on death’s door with no back up bottles, that’s how you will be starting the next one. I found myself having to plan out when to grab health on the tougher levels in order to most efficiently fill my Life Bottles. This could be tricky though in the later levels since they start getting pretty stingy with healing items available.

Apart from combat, MediEvil also challenges the player with some platforming, but not a whole lot of it. This is smart of the game because controls are dreadful for it. Sir Daniel is surprisingly agile for a dusty old skeleton in a giant suit of armor. He is fairly fast and shockingly light, but he also has some strange momentum behind his movement. This makes sections where you have to jump on small platforms infuriating. Even if you line up the jump right, Dan will often just slide off the ledge due to the momentum you don’t have a good feel for. The collision dictation in general is garbage. Jumps get cut short cause Dan’s feet get caught on an invisible ledge on a small step, he slips off ledges that he is clearly on, and I got trapped more then once in a haystack or a step, leaving Dan floating off the ground in a perpetual animation of falling until I restarted the level. 

To use a pun, MediEvil is a fine game in its bones, but all the issues and annoyances in the game left me feeling pretty low on it. The frame rate dips and terrible collision detection, the lackluster combat and samey weapons, and the frustrating controls when having to platform all led to a pretty irritating time with the game. I often agonize over whether I should play the original versions of the games I review here, but I most often choose the most available version, be that a remake or just a port on modern consoles. I want to review the games most people are able to play and, while I do like collecting and playing old games, a lot of them are too expensive or hard to find for me to get. I found myself thinking about this more often while playing this MediEvil remake. I can’t help but wonder if my time with the game would have been enjoyed more if I played the original. Maybe someday I’ll find a copy and see how it stacks up to this remake, but, for now, all I can say is the remake is fine, but very clunky. It stumbles around and trips over itself like a dead body reanimated to life.

Resident Evil (Remake) & the Spencer Mansion

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It’s spooky season and I’ve had a hankering to play the Resident Evil remake again. I first played the game a little over two years ago and loved it. You can find my thoughts on it in the Critical Miss post, but I wanted to take a deeper look at one of the most interesting aspects of the game: the Spencer Mansion. A mix of atmosphere, great design, and just the right amount of goofy locks, the Spencer Mansion is one of the most memorable settings in video games. While it’s not the only location in the game, it is the main one and any player who can brave its halls until the end will come out with an experience they will not soon forget.

The main hall greets the S.T.A.R.S. members as they burst through the front door and it perfectly encapsulates what to expect throughout the rest of the mansion. Large, dusty, and desolate, the mansion is dripping in the lonely, moody atmosphere expected of a horror game. But the interesting thing about the Spencer Mansion, the thing that sets it apart from other horror game settings in my mind, is that the mansion isn’t completely run down, decrepit, or ugly. Lots of the rooms in the home are gorgeous and pleasant—it doesn’t look like a bad place to live. Where most horror games tend to lean too heavily on settings that are overtly grimy and blood-splattered, so over the top they become desensitizing, Resident Evil shows the Spencer Mansion shortly after its fall. You get the sense that people lived in and cared for the home until recently from the brightly lit rooms and tables still set for supper. It’s not until you explore deeper that you start to find the unkempt, unused rooms and dank, dingy cellars, the blood-soaked carpets and filth crusted walls.

This restraint and subtlety with the environmentally storytelling in Resident Evil helps heighten the horror of the game. Once your character separates from the rest of the S.T.A.R.S. team, they are alone in this hostile home, and you, as a player, are also alone with just your imagination and echoing footsteps throughout the halls. With the fixed camera angles and loading-screen doors between every room, you never know what’s coming up and the developers use these blinds spots to hide zombies and other nasties to jump out at you. It makes every corner anxiety inducing, every door threatening, every window possible of crashing apart as a monster flings itself through it to grab you. 

The game uses the presence of monsters to great effect as a way to pace itself for the player. As the game progresses, the player finds more ammo, more health items, and better weapons that make short work of the standard zombies roaming the halls. So bigger and badder foes start appearing in the mansion and surrounding areas to make sure the player never feels too comfortable. The enemy type that requires a special mention are the Crimson Heads, which were introduced in the remake as a nice surprise for veteran players of the original. Unless a zombie is killed with a gushy headshot, their body remains laying on the floor throughout the rest of the game. They literally lay there and wait to return as a Crimson Head, a faster, stronger, more deadly creature to face. Besides a headshot, the only way to prevent a zombie returning as a Crimson Head is to burn its body before the transformation takes place. This requires the use of a limited quality of kerosene. Giving the player this autonomy of where to burn bodies makes them look at the mansion and think about what rooms or halls they want to be safe from hazards. Clearing hazards out of the rooms and halls is extremely important because you will be traveling back and forth across the mansion consistently, but in doing so, the true depth of the Spencer Mansion’s design becomes apparent. 

The Spencer Mansion is essentially a giant puzzle box that you are dropped into in order to discover a way out; it’s basically an escape room before they were popular. The mansion is full of items to find, puzzles to solve, and the most impractical locks you’ll ever see in a game. Hidden passages behind walls that up open by playing the Moonlight Sonata on a piano, doors that inexplicably unlock when emblems on placed on them, and gates that open once some weathervanes are pointing in the right direction are all different ways the Spencer Mansion is designed to keep prying eyes from its secrets. While it makes sense that the people in the secret lab beneath the home would try to keep people out, the methods of the locks make no goddamn sense and are even silly sometimes, but I feel that adds to the charm and memorability of the mansion. 

You will also remember the mansion intimately after a playthrough or two due to how much you will be running back and forth across it. It’s easy to get lost in the mansion; it is a maze of halls and rooms, one way doors and locks. You will eventually get maps of every area you explore and they are life savers. Clearly showing which rooms you have visited, which doors are still locked, and what rooms still have items to find let’s you know where you need to explore further for progress. I find myself pulling up the map every minute or so while playing Resident Evil, which some people may find tedious or immersion breaking, but I love it. It makes me free stuck in the world, trapped in the mansion along with my character desperately trying to find a way out. The map helps you know where to head in the moment, but what helps you retain knowledge of the Spencer Mansion between playthroughs is backtracking and designs of the rooms.

When I booted up Resident Evil again after a couple years, I was surprised how much I remembered of it—certain rooms and halls were burned into my brain and I knew exactly where on the map I would find them. Of course, some things got lost in the fog of the time, but I remembered a lot of rooms and what to find in them immediately upon entering them. I tend to forget a lot of the little details after playing a game and only remember the board strokes like different sections or biomes. So Resident Evil must be doing something right for me to remember so much of the mansion after only playing it once before. And it does something right: backtracking. When I said before you will travel back and forth across the Spencer Mansion over and over again, I was not understating that. Oftentimes, you will find a key or item used to unlock a room on the complete other side of the mansion, requiring you to hussle across the building, avoiding or killing any zombies you left in rooms along the way—this is why burning bodies in areas you know are going to be well tread is so important. But with each trip across the mansion, you learn a little more about it. As the mansion opens up more and the area you have to explore becomes larger, the time it takes to travel across it becomes shorter thanks to better knowledge of the layout and doors you will unlock creating shorts between areas.

The Spencer Mansion is a mastercraft of level design and atmosphere. The fact that the designers use its echoing halls to heighten the tension of the game, make backtracking rewarding as players learn quicker, safer routes across it, and making each room distinct enough to be memorable long after putting the game down is truly incredible. And Capcom would show time and time again they understand how important and well designed the Spencer Mansion is as they revisited the same mentalities for the police station in Resident Evil 2 and the Baker’s home in Resident Evil 7. It’s easy to see why the first Resident Evil is so highly regarded after so many years, why the series is still one of Capcom’s most successful after so many games. It is built on such a solid foundation. 

Metroid Prime – Critical Miss #31

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Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

In a Phazon Supernova

I’m very excited about the upcoming release of Metroid Dread in October. It’s been over ten years since the last completely new Metroid game, and over 20 years since an all new 2D game in the series. While I have only played Super Metroid before now, there is another game in the series that gets bought up as being of equal, or possibly even greater, quality than the game: Metroid Prime. Released on the Gamecube in 2002, Prime was met with no small amount of ire from the series’ fans. It was the first 3D game under the Metroid name, developed by a western studio, and it changed the traditional 3rd person gameplay perspective into a 1st person shooter. Fans wailed that it was a true Metroid game before they had even played it; they had to because, once they did play Prime, they realized what an interesting, unique, and true take on the series the developers at Retro Studios had made. 

It always blows my mind how good some games on the Gamecube look and Metroid Prime is not an exception. There are games with strong art styles like Windwaker and Mario Sunshine that will always look good, but even more realistic styles like Resident Evil 4 and the remake of the first game look practically next gen. Metroid Prime looks incredible for the console it released on with its clean textures and great models for the variety of enemies. The game would not look out of place as a PS3 or 360 game. It’s disappointing then when the GUI and the different visors cloud up the graphics. The transparent read out of Samus’s helmet is something you get used to and learn to look past, but it sometimes makes enemies to your side hard to spot or read how many missiles are left in your arsenal. The X-Ray and Thermal visors can be fun and are more often than not utilized well, but they just cover the screen in a homogenized filter. 

Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

While the graphics are great, the music and story I was more lukewarm on. While the music is good, and hearing remixes of Super Metroid tracks in areas like the Magmoor Caverns reminded me that I love that game’s soundtrack, it tends to be more atmospheric in nature and something I can’t bring to mind easily. I only have a basic knowledge of the story happening in Metroid Prime—something about Space Pirates trying to weaponize Metroids again, but this time with a new element called Phazon. Most of the story is fleshed out through pieces of lore and information you can scan from items in the world. It’s great when you get a tip on how to beat an enemy, but having to stop the game to scan things like computer screens to learn about the Space Pirates plans is not very engaging and completely breaks the pacing of the game. Which is disappointing because, at its bones, Metroid Prime is a fun game to play. 

As the first game in the series to be in 3D, Metroid Prime had to translate the gameplay of the series into a completely new style; not only did it have to work around the z-axis, but it was also a FPS. The developers managed the transition beautifully though with Prime having the same core gameplay loop of its earlier, 2D siblings. The player explores the world of Tallon IV to find power-ups and abilities that unlock new areas to explore. The feeling of isolation the series is known for comes across well in Prime too. It’s just you against the world while you fight enemies, scour for secrets, and solve puzzles. Prime empathizes puzzles a little more than Super Metroid, but not by much. The world never feels like a Zelda dungeon to explore with that series love of puzzles, but you will come across many rooms on Tallon IV that take some clever thinking to pass through. 

Even though Prime is a 1st person game, there are moments when you play in 3rd person. These are when using one of Samus’s staple abilities: the Morph Ball. I thought the transition of Samus emerging from the ball and the camera going into the back of her helmet would get tedious, but it never did. The switch is so quick and feels so natural, that I never minded it. The Morph Ball itself is fast and smooth to control leading to great feeling sections and puzzles to solve with the technique. It is mostly used to explore the world, but can be used in combat when Metroid attached itself to you and needs to be blown up by a bomb or as a quick way to gain some distance from a large boss.

Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

The hardest hurdle to overcome when looking at a FPS from the Gamecube era is the controls. Nowadays, FPS controls are pretty universal: move with the left stick, aim with the right stick, fire with the right trigger. Things don’t seem to have been as clarified back in the 6th generation of consoles. Metroid Prime’s controls feel very clunky, and downright alien, to someone who is used to modern FPS controls. The left stick is used both to move Samus and aim your cannon, the big green A button is used to fire, and the C-stick (which would be the right stick on a more traditional, non-Nintendo controller) is used to swap between different cannon types. The game lets you lock onto enemies by holding down the left trigger, but they have to be near the center of the screen making flying enemies or ones close to the ground difficult to shoot. If you want to aim independently of moving your character, you hold down the right trigger, but even this feels strange since the aiming reticle constantly fights with you to return to the center of the screen. I did get used to these bizarre controls after a while, but the first few hours in the game were a mess of fighting with muscle memory. 

Once you have a grip on the controls though, the combat in Metroid Prime is very satisfying. Swapping between all your different cannons and visors towards the end of the game can get tedious—and the tiny d-pad on the Gamecube controller meant I often switched to the wrong visor in the heat of battle—but it just feels good charging up beams, blasting missiles, and strafing around enemies. There is a good variety of enemies to fight and all have different methods for disposing of, keeping combat engaging. The bosses are all unique and interesting to fight too; all with gimmicks or little puzzles that need to be figured out in order to beat them and are all the right balance between tough and fun to fight. This all leads to an excellent difficulty curve throughout the game. I never felt over or underpowered while playing. Even when revisiting early areas with end game weapons because new, tougher enemies were now patrolling them. 

Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

You are alone on the world of Tallon IV and it’s up to you to find the necessary upgrades in order to overcome the challenges the alien planet poses. Like any other Metroid game, Prime is a deeply explorative experience and exploration is only rewarding if the world you adventure through is interesting. I’ve mentioned my problems with how the story is told in the game, but I’ve always been a more mechanics driven player than a story driven one. What I find appealing in a game that asks you to explore the world is interesting level design and rewards to find. Prime is not bad in this sense at all, but I found the world to be lacking compared to other Metroidvania games and even Prime’s older, 16-bit sibling, Super Metroid. The world of Tallon IV just seems small to me, which is pretty silly because the size of the world is huge, but so much of it is just rooms connected by winding hallways that it starts to feel repetitive. There are tons of secrets to find—more so than I even found since I ended the game with only about half of the missile expansions—but something about the 2D sprite work of Super Metroid made looking for the secrets feel more organic and satisfying. The level design is solid throughout, with clever ways the room layouts subtly guide players to where they need to go, but there are few places where the biomes of the world intersect or connect, usually by elevators. This means you end up travelling the same routes over and over again while backtracking since the map is tied up in only a handful of choke points.

And I said the dreaded word; the dirty word in video games that often turn people off from a game or a series or an entire genre: backtracking. I’ve never really had a problem with backtracking in games as long as there was still something to do on the way, like fighting the new enemies in old areas in Prime, and it was done for a good reason. Backtracking through Metal Gear Solid for the keycard puzzle was horrendous while backtracking in the first half of Dark Souls made me appreciate the level design so much more. There’s a lot of back and forth across Tallon IV in Metroid Prime, but it never bothered me for the most part because I knew it was leading to a new area to explore, a new upgrade to play with, or a new boss to fight. But then came the Artifacts.

Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

After you have collected all the necessary upgrades, you will still have to unlock the final area of the game by finding twelve Chozo Artifacts hidden around the world. There is an area near the beginning of the game where you can get hints where all the Artifacts are by scanning pillars. This helps to some extent, but I would suggest using a guide as I did for this last scavenger hunt. I had only found four or five Artifacts by the time I had collected everything and that was with pretty thorough searching. Turns out, you need the X-Ray visor and the Plasma Beam—pretty much the last two upgrades you will find—to get nearly half of the Artifacts in the game. It seems strange for a game that empathizes exploration and finding secrets that so many of these are required to reach the end game before you can even think about looking for them. It would be so much more rewarding if they could be found by clever, curious or even knowledgeable players throughout their regular playthrough. If you use a guide and just write down the rooms they are in, the path to the Artifacts are easy to map out and the puzzles are satisfying to solve, but there’s no denying that the pacing of the game suffers due to this choice. It’s not quite putting a stick in the spokes of a bike, but more like a pleasant ride down a quiet road only to hit a mile of wet concrete to slog through.

Once I was in the space boots of Samus Aran, once I was exploring the alien world of Tallon IV, once I was blasting away monsters with the Charge Beam, I was in. Metroid Prime is a great game, no doubt, and I think I may even like it more than Super Metroid at this point. It is a very strongly designed, atmospheric, and engaging game to play. Now I see why people are clamoring for Metroid Prime4 and why everyone is begging Nintendo for the Prime trilogy to be ported to the Switch. With Dread releasing in a few weeks, the future’s looking bright for Samus. But is it the brightly twinkling stars she is heading for? Or a supernova of a sun just before it collapses into a black hole?

Photo from metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_Wiki

What Remains of Edith Finch & Magical Realism

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“…in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Outside of video games, my other biggest hobby is reading. Comics have taken up most of my reading time in the past months, but I will always love fiction. The stories told, the characters come to life, the craft of writing a compelling novel has always enthralled me. One of my favorite genres of fiction is Magical Realism, which blends mundane life with fantastical events. It is a genre that leads itself extremely easily to fascinating, beautiful, and heartbreaking stories and seems like it would be such a great fit for video games. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how well video games could embrace Magical Realism ever since I played What Remains of Edith Finch.

An indie walking sim, What Remains of Edith Finch stood out from the crowded genre by offering a variety of small, brief gameplay sections. The game focuses on Edith Finch, the last living member of the Finch family, who are proclaimed to be the most unlucky family in the world. She has returned to her ancestral home to discover the secrets of her family that have eluded her for so long. I was immediately struck by the outrageous architecture of the Finch home and the narrative text floating in the air for the player to read. But I did not realize the game took inspiration from Magical Realism stories until the first gameplay section where you play as Molly, Edith’s Grandmother, as she turns into various animals and hunts for food. When I finished the game, I immediately looked up if there was anything from the developer saying they were inspired by Magical Realism stories—in particular A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—and, according to a 2017 Eurogamer article, my assumptions were correct on both accounts. I will get to the similarities between What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude in a bit, but first I should explain what the term “Magical Realism” means in the terms of writing.

As a genre, Magical Realism is a bit fuzzy to define. I’ve read multiple books and essays trying to pin down exactly what Magical Realism is and is not, but scholars cannot seem to decide on one solid definition. The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a genre where the impossible can happen in the mundane, real world. What sets it apart from the fantasy and science genres are a few caveats. The “magic”—anything impossible, unnatural, or extraordinary—is most often not explained, it is generally accepted by the characters in the story as real and not often questioned, and it is not clandestine. Books like science fiction, which tries to explain or base its fantastic elements on real world science, and the Harry Potter series, which keeps its witches and wizards separate and hidden from the normal world, would not be considered Magical Realism. While Magical Realism stories existed before Márquez, it was his novel A Hundred Years of Solitude that thrust the genre into public attention.

As I said before, What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude have a lot in common. Both are a generational story revolving around the hardships of a single family—both families are even headed by a elderly matriarch who seems to have outlived her natural lifespan—but while the Buendía family of A Hundred Years of Solitude is doomed to repeat the past over and over again, the curse that haunts the Finch family is a much more nebulous thing. The most the game says about the curse afflicting the Finch family is that it makes them considered the most unlucky family in the world, but it seems to relate to the fact that every member of the family dyes in unexpected and tragic ways. The player is expected to take this curse as a real force affecting the family, not imaginary or simply superstition. Every story and related gameplay section the player discovers throughout the game relates to the last moments that character spent alive. There is a sense of a desire to escape in every family member—escape their problems, their family, and the house they all call home.

The Finch house is a great setting and another similarity between the game and A Hundred Years of Solitude. Spacious and filled with secret passages, it is a joy to explore. There is a lopsided tower jutting to the sky out of the home where the family haphazardly built additional rooms for the growing family. While the Buendías never built a rickety tower, the ancestral home in the novel is under constant construction and expansion as the family grows. The fact that the Finch house looks the exact same as when Edith and mother left years ago is another bit of unreality in the game. It’s not just that the home looks the same or that everything is in the places they were left—literally nothing seems to have changed. There is no dust in the home and nothing appears to have aged at all. It is a detail that is never really mentioned in the game, but one that caught my attention at once. All the bedrooms in the Finch house have been sealed up by Edith’s mother. While this is a more outrageous than magical detail in the story, it helps heighten the strange, unworldly nature of the home while remaining true to the narrative’s more grounded nature. Edith says her mother sealed off the rooms to try to forget about the past, about the tragedy and death that has haunted the family for generations. By gaining access to these rooms and discovering the secrets of her own family, Edith will finally understand the true scope of the Finch curse.

There are moments where What Remains of Edith Finch breaks with the standard walking sim formula and lets the player experience little bite-sized bits of gameplay. These moments are when Edith is reading—whether it be a dairy, comic book, letter, etc.—about her family. All of these sections show the last moments of the relative’s life, but also reveal the entire family’s history to Edith in a very similar way that Melquíades’ scrolls reveal the history of the Buendía family to Aureliano. These are also the moments where the marvelous come to the surface of the story. These moments range from a little girl being sent to bed without supper turning into different animals to hunt for food, an artist painting a door on a canvas and stepping through it, to an infant using some sort of telekinesis to move a frog around the bathtub. These stories are effective, both as gameplay sections and as a work of Magical Realist fiction, because they ask the player to take them as not just stories, but real and true.

Magical Realism as a genre places a lot of emphasis and importance on stories, be it myths, folktales, superstitions, or confused memories. It is a genre that inherently understands and explores the gray haze between facts and truth. So in What Remains of Edith Finch, when I was reading a pulp horror comic book detailing the disappearance of Barbara, I took that as the truest recounting of her fate. When I played through Lewis’s section that shows his need to escape the mundanity of his work through his imagination growing more vivid, I believed a part of him ended up in lands of Wonder. Milton will forever remain lost because the door he painted to escape was as real as the paints he made to create.

But there is a wrinkle to all of this, a common wrinkle that hangs off stories of this nature. It is a debate that many insist on having over and over again and write fan theories of and it’s one that I frankly don’t have much patience for. What if it’s all in the characters’ head? Molly is shown to eat mistletoe berries, which are poisonous, before she transforms and goes on the hunt. Could that not be a hallucination of a fevered mind? The scene with the infant is shown through their eyes and could be an overactive imagination. There is no evidence that Milton and Barbara didn’t just run away from the family and the home. There is as much evidence that there is nothing actually magically happening in the game, but I choose to believe that everything shown to the player is real for a few reasons. First being that there is nothing to explain the family cure, which is always presented as a real force at work against the family and one that the player sees the direct result of time and time again. Second, as mentioned before, the developer has cited works of Magical Realism as huge inspirations. And third, if there is nothing magical happening in the game, then it just becomes less interesting, more bleak and dour to me. If none of the stories can be trusted as real, then nothing in the game can be trusted as real. Explaining everything as psychotic episodes from the character robs the whole game, pardon the pun, of all the magic it has.

After completing What Remains of Edith Finch, I went online to see if there were other games that would be considered Magical Realist, but I couldn’t find many. Life is Strange seemed to be the most well known game in the genre, but I’ve never played it so I wouldn’t be able to say. At the recent Playstation Showcase, Sony showed off a game called Tchia that looks like it establishes itself in the genre so I’m interested in that when it comes out. But other than that, I couldn’t really find any solid contenders. But why is that? Why are video games not taking inspiration from Magical Realism when it could be used to tell such unique and interesting stories? I really don’t have a good answer, honestly. Maybe it’s because the conventions and tropes of standard fantasy and sci fi are more easily understood and digested by the masses. With video games being such a time-intensive and expensive medium to work in, many AAA developers seem deathly allergic to anything that doesn’t have much wide appeal. Magical Realism is still a relatively new genre in the world of literature, and not a very well-known one at that still. It would make sense then that game developers have read more fantasy and sci fi compared to Magical Realism and just want to tell stories in those genres. I really can’t say, but I love to see more video game stories blend the world of the mundane with the outrageous, the surprising, and the magical. 

Psychonauts – Critical Miss #30

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Ra-Ra-Razputin

I never went to summer camp as a kid. Closet thing I had growing up was a thing called P.I.T.S., Parks in the Summertime, where kids from the town would go to the park on Thursdays and a group of volunteers would have games and activities for them to do. Even this I didn’t attend very often, always being a more indoor, bookish kid. So I’m glad I got to experience summer camp vicariously through Psychonauts. Released upon the world in 2005 from the brain of Tim Schafer, the game received critical acclaim, but disappointing sales led it to be one of the most famous cult classics in video games.

Whispering Rock in the game is no ordinary summer camp. It’s actually a camp for psychic children—a place that trains and nurtures the psychic abilities in the campers and a place the main character, Razputin, dreams about attending. He is so determined that he runs away from his acrobatic, circus-performing family to sneak into the camp. The counselors at Whispering Rock inform Raz he only has one day at the camp until his father comes to pick him up. So Raz decides to get as much psychic training as he can in that single day. Along the way he will meet new friends, make new bullies, and unravel an evil plot to steal children’s brains in the works. 

Psychonauts’ art direction is a great balance of ugly yet charming. It takes inspiration from movies like A Nightmare Before Christmas with its darker color palette and grotesque character models—all unnaturally, sickly skin tones, uneven teeth, and lopsided, bulging eyes. Usually I’m not a fan of this type of character design, but there’s something about Psychonauts that makes it work. Possibly due to how charming and well-written the characters themselves are and possibly just due to how well the humor is done in the game. I laughed a lot while playing Psychonauts. The strong character designs also lead to strong level themes since the levels in the game take place inside different characters’ minds.

Much like the characters in the game, levels vary wildly in Psychonauts in terms of art style, mechanics, skills used, and puzzles to solve. The game is constantly changing things up with each and every level and the art style chosen for each one perfectly represents the personality whose mind you are exploring. Levels range from more combat focus in Sasha’s Shooting Gallery, which has a sort of 50’s retro style, to pure platforming challenges like the 60’s inspired dance party of Milla’s mind. A lot of levels are more based on solving puzzles than platforming or combat. Gloria’s Theater has the player finding the right play scene and mood to put on in order to gain access to the cat walks and Waterloo World has Raz shrink down in order to act as a piece in a board game. These more puzzle focused levels were my favorite in the game because when the game demanded quick or precise platforming, it started to show cracks.

Razputin comes from a family of acrobats and inherently has a moveset for fun platforming. He can walk and bounce on tight ropes, swing around and leap off poles and trapeze swings, and can grind down railings. For the most part, the controls work fine, but there is a clunkiness to them that’s a little hard to explain. There is a sort of lag that needs to be accounted for when trying to string moves together. This makes simple things like jumping off poles or railings touchy since it’s a crapshoot whether or not the double jump will work. As Raz does more psychic training, he learns how to enhance his physical abilities with his psychic powers. He can use his mind to double jump, levitate and move faster, and let himself float slowly to the ground when falling. These abilities help with some of the trickier platforming and the camera in the game, which also feels like it’s fighting the player, but the weird lag is still present when trying to combo these moves together. It’s only a real problem in certain parts of the game where platforming challenges get tricky. Levels like Black Velvetopia and The Meat Circus are terrible for these moments, but pretty much every level seemed to have a section that took me much longer than it should due to the controls. It was frustrating, but not so much that I ever wanted to quit the game. However, the controls were the major reason why I decided early on in the game not to 100% complete it.

Every level has many collectibles to grab. Figments are the stand-ins for the common collectible like Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings, there is emotional baggage that need a corresponding tag to open, and repressed memories to be discovered that are represented by locked safes. Collecting these items help Raz level up in camp rank, rewarding the player with new skills and upgrades to existing skills, concept art, and back story on the character whose mind you are playing around in. But figments are just too faint and hard to see since they are paper thin and transparent to spot easily in the busy levels of the game. A lot of baggage and safes are hiding in plain sight along the main path, but some are tucked away in sections that require precise platforming to find. While it’s a nice thought that you are helping someone clear out their emotional baggage, it would have been great to see that reflected in the character themselves once you leave the level. There is a theme of helping people through their trauma or mental blocks in the game’s story, so I feel having characters improve the more baggage you clear out in their mind would be a great tie between story and gameplay.

The story in Psychonauts is very enjoyable, even if it suffers from some weird pacing issues. The game feels very episodic with how characters, themes, and mechanics are picked up for a single level and then nearly forgotten for the rest of the game. By the halfway point of the game, all the children at camp have had their brains stolen and turned into drooling mindless zombies that only moan out to watch TV. Even Milla and Sasha, the two teachers who have been helping Raz train, disappear at this point, only to return for the conclusion of the game. I use this term to describe a colorful art style a lot, but Psychonauts’ story feels very much like a Saturday morning cartoon: episodic, character’s coming and going in each episode and hardly having a bearing on the overall plot, and setting changing up as needed with every adventure. This isn’t a bad thing though, it works extremely well for the story being told, but it did make me wish we could spend more time with the characters I liked like Dogen, Milla, and Lili. 

While the clunky controls made playing Psychonauts more frustrating than it had to be in the moment as I was playing, I still ended the game extremely positive on it. There is so much creativity and clever design in the game not to like it. From the juxtaposition of the mundane setting of the summer camp and the fantastic world of psychics and people’s individual mindscapes to the varied mechanics and puzzles in the level, Psychonauts is too unique not to try out. It’s not the best 3D platformer I’ve ever played, but it has some of the most interesting levels and charming, fleshed out characters of any. The game can be picked up for pretty cheap now on most modern consoles, so check it out. 

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker & Diorama Levels

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The Super Mario franchise has to have some of the most charming characters of any video game franchise. I’m not even talking about Mario, Bowser, or Peach either; characters like Boos, Wigglers, Monty Moles, and Cheep Cheeps are all beloved by me. They are all incredibly cute and show personality simply through strong character design and a few set actions. Another character I’ve grown to love is Captain Toad, but it wasn’t until recently when I played his very own game, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, that I saw how great the character and the world he inhabits could be. With a strong, clear focus of using dioramas as inspiration, Treasure Tracker displays not only some of the strongest level design in the Mario franchise, but some of it’s most charming.

Captain Toad as a character was introduced in Super Mario Galaxy as an adventure seeking little Toad that would appear in levels with his trademark mushroom-shaped spaceship. The same ship and character also appear periodically in Super Mario Odyssey, but in either game, the character doesn’t amount to more than a way to get an extra life or collectible. Captain Toad was first playable between those two games in Super Mario 3D World where you control the little adventurer through small, self-contained levels to collect Green Stars. While these levels were mostly just alright in 3D World, being short, easy, but ultimately fun mini interludes between the main levels, they set the foundation for Captain Toad’s gameplay and level design that was expanded greatly upon in his own game.

The levels in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker  were inspired by dioramas and that’s exactly what they feel like—standard Mario levels that have been struck down miniature scale. They are very small and confined, but have the colorful art style, well-thought- out design, and incredible amount of polish present in larger Mario levels. The benefit of having levels so small is that they feel meticulously created. Everything in the levels is necessary—there is absolutely no wasted space in them. Aside from the critical path to the end of the level, all side paths hold secrets ranging from Golden Mushrooms for the bonus objectives to just a few invisible coins to collect. Even though the levels are tiny, they always feel rewarding to explore since the game constantly rewards the player. The levels even tend to feel larger than they actually are thanks to clever uses of the camera and level design.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is played in the third person perspective, but the camera does not follow Captain Toad as he explores the level under his feet. Instead, moving the camera rotates it around the level itself, using the character as a sort of anchor, making sure the player can’t see too much above, below, or across the level from them until they reach that part. When a level starts, you can see most everything there is to see: the character rearing for adventure, the Power Star that acts as the end of the level, any and all level gimmicks or mechanics you will have to puzzle out—all the important information is present at a glance. But what the level hides in the spaces the camera can’t see immediately are the most interesting. Things like paths throughout the level, little caves to find entrance into, bonus diamonds or collectibles, pipes that take you to hidden parts of the level. These help a level feel like it’s unfolding around you as you guide the Toad throughout it and move the camera around to look into every nook and cranny present. What starts out looking like a simple, straightforward level soon balloons to a little puzzle box of branches to explore and secrets to discover.

There are over 50 levels in Treasure Tracker and—even though there are repeated level themes like grassy areas, desert ruins, little beach sides, and spooky haunted mansions—there are an abundance of level gimmicks and new mechanics being thrown at the player in every new level. This helps alleviate some of the repetition that comes from the game’s insistence on playing each level multiple times for 100% completion. The gimmicks usually revolve around moving parts of the level: wheels that rotating bridges, towers, or entire chunks of the ground, glowing blocks that can be shifted up, down, left, or right with a single touch, and some built-in mechanics like a level themed after a wind-up box that have each side of the level shifting up and down and a late game level that is just a cross of boxes the rotate around in a circle. These level gimmicks not only provide puzzles to solve and new ways to reach the Power Star, but often hide secrets within the moving parts. This is extremely common with the Pixel Toad Hide-and-Seek mode with the sneaky little Toad will be hiding behind a chunk of the level that must be moved first to see, but there are other secrets hidden within these folds of the levels. Often, if a diamond can be seen, but it is not immediately obvious how to get to it, there will be a hidden door somewhere behind a piece of shifting level. This again helps the levels feel bigger than they are due to every part of the level being used to encourage exploration.

The small, diorama levels adds another brilliant aspect to Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but it is the hardest aspect to explain due to its extremely subject nature. This aspect is the charm of the game. It all comes down to the art style. The highly polished and colorful style makes the game feel like a Saturday morning cartoon, especially when paired with the upbeat and catchy music. Super Mario 3D World has a similar art style, but it seems like the artists just had much more opportunity to fine-tune each and every level in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker simply due to their smaller nature. The world in the game is just a very cheerful, pleasant, and cute one to immerse yourself in. Captain Toad and Toadette themselves also help to add to the charm of their game through the determination they show in trying to reunite with each other and the excitement they display when collecting another treasured Power Star. Each level is so enjoyable to explore and cute to see, that you will soon find yourself unable to put the game down just by sheer desire to see what comes in the next level. 

It’s telling how well the diorama inspiration aids the design and overall fun of Captain Toad when you look at the levels that stray away from that focus. Some levels, like the boss fights, mine cart levels, and levels that just feel overly large, seem to ignore the diorama structure of the others and they feel much weaker for them. These larger levels feel too long to complete—especially when trying to 100% the game requires multiple playthroughs of every level. They are not poorly designed, however, just more tedious and tiresome to complete.

Basing the levels on dioramas not only provides a clear focal point and through line throughout Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but also helps limit any excess commonly found in games nowadays. With keeping levels small, confined, and focused, the developers were able to make the most out of every level’s space and mechanics. Every level in the game feels so finely tuned, so meticulously crafted, and polished to a brilliant shine that it works as an example of the benefit of limiting a project’s scope, almost like a counterpoint to the massive, bloated open-world games that have taken over AAA game. Much like a diorama or miniature, if you have a very small space to create in, you better make sure it is the most detailed creation you can make.

Dragon Quest 1 & 2 – Critical Miss #29

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The Foundation of the House of JRPG

In North America, Final Fantasy and Pokémon are the JRPG franchises. They are the most common answers you would get if you asked anyone to name a turn-based RPG. In Japan, however, there is another series that gets just as much, possibly even more, respect and recognition than those series. Dragon Quest has been a cultural touchstone in Japan ever since the series debuted in 1986. Created by Yugi Horii and with character and enemy designs done by manga legend Akira Toriyama of Dragonball fame, the first game set the groundwork for all JRPGs to follow. The first game and its sequel, released just a year later in January, 1987, both predate the Final Fantasy series and outsold that series for decades after. But I have never played more than a few hours of any Dragon Quest game before. I wanted to go all the way back, to the very beginning of the series and the JRPG genre in general, to check out both Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest 2 and see what JRPGs were like in their infancy, in those wild, swashbuckling, and more experimental days of the 1980’s.

I played the games on my Switch, which are ports of the mobile versions. While the versions I played were the same games in terms of gameplay and balance, there are a few minor changes and updates present. The most notable is the graphical overhaul. I didn’t like the mixture of pixel sizes at first, with the character and monster sprites being more detailed than the overworld art, but I found the distraction from it waned after a while. The names of items and town are the Japanese names, so anyone experienced with the American NES version might be confused by some references at first, and the menu now offers a quick save feature which is extremely helpful for reasons I’ll get into a little later.

The stories of the games are bare-bone and simple. Dragon Quest 1 sees the heir of legendary hero Erdrick tasked with saving a kidnapped princess and banishing darkness from the land. And so begins the tale of BeefyBoi as he travels across the continent of Alefgard to defeat the Dragonlord. Dragon Quest 2 is set a hundred years after the first game and follows the descendants of that game’s hero as they attempt to stop the wizard Hargon from summoning the evil demon Malroth and destroying the world. In my game, the three protagonists were named Steakums, Pork, and Tofu. They fought against the monsters and sailed across the seas to accomplish their goals. While both games have their central, looming threat that acts as the end goal of the game, neither game really has any plot to speak of—no moments of character growth or supplementally story moments to fresh out the story. Dragon Quest 2 has a few, but not enough to keep a player engaged on a story level with the game. These were both early NES RPGs, so it’s understandable, and what the games lack in story, they make up for in gameplay.

Dragon Quest is considered to be the first JRPG. It took inspiration from computer RPGs like Wizardry and made a new style of the genre on consoles with turn-based combat, an overworld with towns and dungeons and random encounters, gaining experience points for battles and randomized stat points upon leveling up, and equipping new gear to get stronger. It’s all common JRPG fare, but it was not as common in the mid-80’s, especially on consoles. It is fascinating to go back to see the genre at its most stripped down and bare. And bare is the first word I would use to describe Dragon Quest.  

I mentioned that the first game in the series centers around the heir of Erdrick. Well, that is the only character you play as in the game. There are no other party members, just the lone hero battling against the forces of darkness alone. Random encounters involve just one enemy popping up to block your path and you take turns smacking each other until someone falls. You have your basic attack, flee command, and a suite of offensive and healing spells. With just one character fighting a single monster at a time, there is not much room for strategy. The most thought you will put into a battle is the best time to heal. It does make the game feel lacking, but the turn-based combat system works as well as it ever has and doesn’t get terribly tedious, although mind numbing at times. It’s still a style of gameplay used today so it doesn’t feel archaic, but there are other things in the game that take over on that job.

Dragon Quest is a slog to get through. The movement speed is sluggish, random encounter rates are higher than they need to be, there are no fast travel spells to return to towns previously visited so the majority of the game is walking back and forth across the over world. I mentioned before that the version on Switch has an option for a quick save. This can be used at any time outside of battle and it’s extremely helpful since the only other way to save the game is to speak with the King at Tantegel Castle. With the slow pace of travel, this would grind your patience to dust if the quick save was not an option. And then there is the grinding itself. Dragon Quest falls into the early JRPG trap of grinding being the only real way to improve your character enough to beat any challenge in the game. Dragon Quest especially suffers from this since the one on one battles lack any real options beside attacking or healing. The last hour or two I spent in the game was walking back and forth in the room outside the Dragonlord’s chamber, fighting enemies until I gained a few levels, and then seeing if I was strong enough to beat the boss.

Unfortunately, Dragon Quest 2 doesn’t solve the issues of the slow movement speed and high random encounter rate, but it does add more places to save, fast travel spells that make traversing the world much quicker, and overall expands and improves on the first game. The most notable change is the inclusion of multiple team members. The party you control is made up of 3 members, all of whom fill slightly different roles on the team by being able to use different spells and equip different gear. They are not quite classes like in the first Final Fantasy game (which wouldn’t be out for nearly a year still), but it adds much more variety and strategy to every battle. Enemies also attack in groups, making battles much more engaging and thoughtful then the one on one happy slaps of the first game. There’s more enemy variety overall and the over world is much bigger with more towns to explore, NPC to talk to, treasure to find, and dungeons to spelunk. At its core, Dragon Quest 2 is the same game as its predecessor, but just larger, longer, and more finely tuned. So then why did I get more burnt out playing the second game than I did playing the first?

The obvious answer is that I played the games back to back and was just feeling fatigued, but I don’t think that’s all of it. The first Dragon Quest was a fascinating game to play, to see where the JRPG genre and the tropes associated with it started—a bit like watching an old movie you’ve seen parodied a hundred times on other shows, but haven’t seen yet. Dragon Quest 2, on the other hand, is much more recognizable as most old school JRPGs that followed after it. While it was released in 1987, it feels more modern since there have been countless other games that have been based on the improvements made in it. It’s strange to say, but the closer Dragon Quest 2 got to what JRPGs feel like today, the less interesting it got. The first Dragon Quest is definitely more dated and grindier, but it still feels much more unique. I enjoyed my time with both games, they are both very charming with their jokes and art style and are both still solid JRPGs, but I found myself enjoying the first Dragon Quest more than it’s sequel. 

It is often forgotten here in North America, but the Dragon Quest series is one of the best selling JPRG series of all time. It’s not surprising though, since the beginnings of the series with Dragon Quest 1 and 2 were very solid foundations. And Dragon Quest is still a series going strong today. While the Final Fantasy series has been moving towards a real time, more action oriented combat style, Dragon Quest is still staying true to its roots. Dragon Quest 11 seems like an ultimate celebration and reminder that old school styled, turn-based JRPGs still have a place in today’s gaming atmosphere.