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Elden Ring & Open World

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“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

–Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

I’m not the biggest fan of open world games. That’s not meant to be the blanket statement it sounds like. There are games in the genre like Insomniac’s Spider-Man and The Witcher 3 I do enjoy quite a bit, but open word games are hardly my favorite type of game overall. I usually find myself overwhelmed with the size of the world and get burnt out by the length of the games. So when I heard FromSoft’s new game Elden Ring was basically going to be Dark Souls but open world, I was a little concerned. I had faith in the company and director Miyazaki to deliver a great game, but how would they adapt the brutal combat and intricate level design of their Souls games into an open world? In short, they succeeded expertly.

I will state upfront that I have not finished Elden Ring at the time of writing. I’m about 60 hours in, have two Great Runes, and have uncovered about half of the map to my best estimate. But even though I have not beaten the game, I have gathered a good sense of the world that FromSoft wanted to create with the Lands Between. You get a taste of what’s to come from the moment you leave the tutorial cave and see the world spread out before you, the wide open fields,the crumbling ruins, the giant Erdtree shining golden in the distance. It has the trademark rotting splendor of the other Souls game but stretched to a size far bigger than any previous game. But that first glimpse of the Lands Between is like looking at the entrance of a cave. You can see it there, possibly even see a ways in, but you can fathom how deep it goes until you explore further in.

It cannot be understated how large the world of Elden Ring is. The opening areas of Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula to the south are very large in of themselves. Walking across them takes forever if you are not one for fast traveling, but luckily the game gives you Torrent, a horse/yak hybrid creature, for faster travel. You start out a map that is covered in clouds. Traveling into new areas and finding map fragments will fill areas in with more detail. But even spreading hours in these areas collecting maps doesn’t give you a good sense of the full scale of the world. New to Elden Ring are entrapment chests. If you open certain chests in the game and are enveloped by the smoke that spews from it, you will be transported to another area on the map. At least twice, I have opened my map in the game to see where I was only to discover it’s size had doubled, as if your Tarnished never thought to unfold it completely before. But like an ultra greatsword, size isn’t everything if you do not know how to wield it. So what does Elden Ring do with its massive map? Turns out, a lot.

We’ve all heard the phrase “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” referring to game worlds that are massive in scale, but with little to do with them. Oftentimes, games like a Ubisoft open world will just have the same types of missions copy and pasted around the map. ER is a different beast. Sure, you will often see the same types of broken ruins around the map and more than once you will fight repeated bosses, but with a game world this large and an estimated 100+ unique bosses, some reused assets are to be expected. What excites me about the Lands Between is the sheer density in which content is packed. There are things to do and find everywhere. Besides groups of the enemies to fight, there are caves and catacombs to spelunk, castles and ruins to explore, and a load of bosses to fight. Every named ruin in the world has a staircase somewhere in it leading to useful items, chest, or NPC to talk to and every stagecoach you find will have a treasure chest to loot to grab. However, the biggest reward you will often get after clearing out a dungeon is another boss fight and seeing how these are the bread and butter of FromSoft, it’s a fitting reward. 

A lot of these bosses will grind you into ash when you encounter them, so it’s smart to leave them be for a while, whether it be until you level up, get better gear, or just feel like fighting them again. In these times, you will want to remember where they are at. Elden Ring only saves icons for places you discover, not merchants* nor bosses nor stone imps that require a Stone Sword Key to unlock a fog wall. Instead, Elden Ring takes cues from Breath of the Wild and makes the players mark notable places in the world by placing their own markers on the map. It’s a small addition, and one that might irritate other players, but it’s one I love thanks to the sense of agency, discovery, and interactivity. The worst thing an open world game can do for me to lose interest is provide markers and icons for everything on the map. What’s the point and exploring if I know what I will find beforehand? By restricting the information the map shows the player until they discover it and making them mark the map themselves, Elden Ring stays surprising and rewarding to explore well past other games in the genre. 

But a larger world needs something to fill it. With the massive world of the Land Between, there can be a lot of bosses to fight and things to explore, but still have a lot of down time while traveling between them. Here is where FromSoft falls victim to rather standard open world trap: they added crafting. I understand why crafting has been so prevalent in the genre in recent years: a bigger world has more walking to do in it, so why not give the player things to collect constantly while traveling? Crafting is a mechanic that can be done well or poorly depending on the game. Well I wouldn’t say it is handled poorly in Elden Ring, it does come off feeling token and unnecessary. It’s useful to be able to craft things like poison heals and different greases (the game’s version of resins), most of the craftable items are different arrows and things that give you negligible buffs to things like robustness and magic deference. It’s not something I find egregious since you can ignore the materials in a world and not collect them, but it is disappointing when you survive a classic FromSoft item trap–where you grab an item and a bunch of enemies jump to attack you–only to find you fought for your life for a mushroom or something.

I was worried that Elden Ring being open world would lose the FromSoft intricate level design the company has been known for with the Souls game–with shorts opening up to bonfires, pathways leading to previous sections of the maps, and many nooks and crannies hidden in areas. Luckily, this type of level design does return in many castles and dungeons of the game, but like everything else, it’s just on a more expanded scale. Stormveil castle was an absolute delight to explore with its blend of shortcuts, multiple paths to explore, and Anor Londo style progression of walking along roofs and buttresses. It’s always amazing to me when I see a small ledge in a wall and edge along it only to find that FromSoft has put an item or area at the end to explore. Something that would just be part of the building model or without a hitbox to crawl on in any other game is a viable path in a Souls game. Of course, to get to Stormveil, you have to fight through Margit first, and that is no easy feat.

After leaving the tutorial cave, the Guidances of Grace point the player toward Stormveil castle and right into Margit’s lap. Margit watches over the gate entering Stormveil castle and he acts as the game’s first skill check. So the game purposefully leads players into a fight that it knows they are woefully unprepared for, and that is actually a great and very FromSoft bit of design. Basically, the game is showing the player that it is not always best to grit your teeth and run your head in the wall that is the current boss fight you have found. It is not one of the more linear Souls games. This is Elden Ring, a game with a huge open world to explore. So go explore. You will get more gear to use, level up a bit if you manage to keep hold of your Runes, and naturally get better at the game through experience. 

I am so happy to see Elden Ring doing so well both critically and financially. As a huge fan of FromSoft, I’m glad they made a hit and will be able to make games for the next foreseeable future. But beyond that, I’m happy that the game is clicking with so many players. Between Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild, I hope the industry takes notice of how their open worlds are designed–being deeply explorative and letting the player discover things on their own without automatically plastering markers on the map, giving them a ton of things to find and do. Much like how Dark Souls created a seachange for games because it was unique and fresh, I truly hope that Elden Ring does the same for the homogenized open world genre.

*This was updated in a patch while writing and now the map does show the locations of merchants.

BioShock Infinite & Elizabeth

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A fact about that I don’t think I’ve ever shared on this blog: I love birds. I think they are very cute, silly, and interesting creatures. One thing that’s helped me through the pandemic is putting bird seed out on my apartment’s window ledge and watching the sparrows, pigeons, and cardinals come and go as I work. So when I first when BioShock Infinite when the HD collection released, I was thrilled to learn I could utilize the power of birds with the Murder of Crows vigor. With a simple press of a button, I could fire a blast from my hand and watch as my unholy crow army pecked my enemies to death. It is by far my favorite vigor in the game and one of my favorite powers in any game I’ve played. But BioShock Infinite is such a fantastic game, that summoning birds to fight with me isn’t even my favorite thing about the game. That honor goes to the character of Elizabeth.

When Booker DeWitt (an absolutely fantastic 1912 name) finds himself in the floating city of Columbia and at odds with its leader, Comstock, he has one mission: find the girl and wipe away the debt. The girl in question is Elizabeth, daughter of Comstock, who is found locked in a giant statue with observation windows and science equipment watching and monitoring everywhere she goes, everything she does. This is because she can open up tears, or rips in the fabric of reality, to other places and times, or possibly completely different parallel universes. The majority of the game is played after breaking Elizabeth out of her prison, trying to escape, being caught up in class war, confronting Comstock, and ultimately discovering secrets about Booker and Elizabeth. 

At first, Elizabeth seems like she is just going to be designated as BioShock Infinite’s damsel in distress, a mere MacGuffin to chase after. Surprisingly though, you rescue her from her tower imprisonment within the first 3rd of the game. While Booker is the main character, the playable character, Elizabeth is the protagonist of the game. They both have the common goal of escaping Columbia alive, but their reasons are different. Booker wants to wipe away his nebulous debt, and Elizabeth wants to escape active captivity and dreams of seeing Paris. But the reason that I find Elizabeth a stronger character than Booker, the reason that my eyes and ears are always on her when important story moments happen, is because she is the heart of the story. Booker is the extension of the player, he is the muscle and does what must be done in order to survive and escape, but Elizabeth is the of the game, the one questioning the morals of what they are doing, and the more interesting character for it.

Elizabeth starts out the story very naive. Being locked in her tower all her life, she has never experienced the outside world for herself, only having read about it in books. She more closely matches the player’s own curiosity and wonder while exploring Columbia throughout the game–taking quiet moments to look around, examine things, and comment on the propaganda plastered over all the walls. She is a well defined character who is caring, intelligent, resourceful, and helpful, and she is characterized in a multitude of ways through her speech and actions. When you enter the slums of Finkton, where the poor working class people live, she wonders what system has led to such wealth disparity and what they can do to help. When she sees Booker gun down Comstock’s men for the first time, she is openly shocked and that uneasiness with killing never really goes away, but is more accepted as necessary to survive. Even when Elizabeth kills Fitzroy in order to save an innocent child, she is appalled with herself, shredding her bloodstained clothes and cutting her hair in mourning. A trope, yes, but effective since it shows her conflict with her actions and is one of the major turning points in her arc.

There is a bitterness in Elizabeth during the middle of the story. Coming out of her tower bright-eyed and hopeful, she is faced with a world full of cruel people–Comstock, her own father, studied her and was seemingly prepping her as a weapon, Fink exploits the poor for cheap labor, Booker himself lies to her to get her to come willingly on an airship saying that he will take her to Paris. She is rightfully angry, jaded, and seeking revenge against the ones who kept her imprisoned. But something happens when she and Booker destroy the siphon and she has the use of the full extent of her reality altering power. She is now able to open ways into other universes without the need of a tear, she can seemingly see all universes at once, she understands that choices that were or will be made are already made, and she understands that Booker will become Comstock at some point in the future. She accepts the weight of her powers, accepts the consequences of her actions. Multiple Elizabeths from across the multiverse come together to drown Booker–the only friend she has ever had that wasn’t a giant bird thing–and the game ends in one final piano note.

It is a dramatic, sorrowful way to end a game that offers some truly fun and bombastic gameplay. On the surface, BioShock Infinite looks to be just another BioShock, but there are subtle differences. The original game leaned more into the horror element and was a much slower game as a result, Booker can only hold two guns at a time and will need to pick up new ones dropped by enemies when out of ammo, and, while they fulfill the same function, there are less vigors than there were plasmids and all the vigors are combat focused. However, the biggest difference in the gameplay again lies with Elizabeth.

BioShock Infinite’s gameplay can basically be divided into two types: exploration and combat. During the quiet moments of exploration, the game moves the story and characterization of Booker and Elizabeth further. They chat about the things they see, what events just happened, and what they need to do to achieve their current goal. They will often come across locked doors or safes and Booker relies on Elizabeth to pick them, her having read up on lock picking during her time in the tower. These will often lead to more money, a fusion for upgrading Booker’s health, or a new piece of gear to equip. It’s worth picking every lock you come across because the game gives you more than enough lock picks and any door necessary for progression needing to be picked will not consume any of your resources. Elizabeth can help find useful things laying around too, often pointing out a lock pick or more ammo and a glowing halo will illuminate them for the player. She also helps decipher code books for Booker, leading to more stashes of goodies, and will occasionally throw money to him that she found laying around. It’s not a lot of money ever, but it’s endearing seeing Elizabeth flip a coin and Booker catching it. Exploring with Elizabeth is always a pleasant time, but it’s in combat where she really shines.

Elizabeth is not an escort that needs to be protected like Ashley in RE4. She can look after herself in a battle so the player can focus on the enemies trying to kill them. Much like the money, Elizabeth will often shout to Booker in a fight and throw him something useful. It’s determined on what is running lower, but Elizabeth can give Booker more health, salts, or ammo when he needs it. It is on some sort of cool down though–seems like she can throw the player two things in a fight before needing time to do it again–so you cannot rely on it too heavily. She will also revive Booker if he falls during battle, getting him back on his feet a safe distance away so he can get back to the fray quickly. Elizabeth is a great ally to have in scrap, especially when you remember she has Omega level reality warping powers.

Littering most combat arenas are tears that Elizabeth can open to bring something into the world to help Booker. Whether it is some cover to hunker down behind while you get your bearings, some much needed medkits or a weapon, a skyhook to get a better vantage, or an automaton in a good position to flank the enemies, a well timed tear can change the flow of battle dramatically. It’s a brilliant way to tie gameplay and story together, and it’s only a shame that there are no fights to be had when Elizabeth has access to the full extent of her power and is going all Dr. Manhattan on time and space.

Although Booker DeWitt is ex-union busting, Pinkerton scum, he’s an enjoyable character to control with his cynical, jaded outlook, his pragmatic and nonsense approach, and his truly awesome name. But he is not the reason I play BioShock Infinite. It is Elizabeth that I find the most interesting and endearing character of the game. She could have just been another damsel in distress, another escort the player has to throw themselves in front of in battle to protect, but she isn’t. She is a fully realized character–a determined, intelligent, and also tragic one. And the fact that she is not just relegated to be part of the story, but also aids the player in the gameplay is a great bit of design that makes the player feel even more attached to her. It worked on me, at least, since Elizabeth is one of my favorite characters in any video game ever.

Spider-Man (2018) & Web Swinging

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I’ve loved the character of Spider-Man ever since I was a kid watching the 90’s cartoon. Recently, I’ve been getting into comic books and Spider-Man was one of the first stories I started reading. There’s something about Peter Parker and his superhero alter ego that I find very relatable—his unbreakable spirit and optimism, his genuine joy and fun had with being a superhero, his down-on-his-luck life that will never let him get too far ahead of his problems. He is a very human character to me, much more so than many other popular superheroes. But I’ve never really played a Spider-Man game until Insomniac Games released Spider-Man in 2018. Games with the character always seemed to float around the middle of the road in terms of opinions on them—never truly great, but not often terrible either. It’s strange because Spider-Man as a character has a built in unique selling point that should fit perfectly in the world of video games: his web swinging. And this was the first aspect of Spider-Man that clicked with me and helped me realize what a great game I was about to play.

The most important thing about the web swinging is to be fun and feel good. Since you will be zipping around New York all the time, the game has to make sure that the movement mechanics never feel tedious, stale, or complicated. Luckily, Spider-Man nails this aspect. The web swinging is simple enough for anyone picking up the game to do, but has enough depth and nuance for people who want to spend hours just swinging around and taking in the sights. Continually swinging is as easy as holding down the trigger, but knowing how to get the most speed or distance based on where in the arch you release and jump takes time and focus. 

Once you have mastered the web swinging in the game, it feels satisfying just traversing the city just seeing how fast you can go, how high you can get in a jump, and how long you can go without touching the ground like a extreme sport version of the floor is lava. Perfecting moves like pulling yourself to a corner or pole and immediately jumping off for more speed, the quick turn while running on a wall, and the quick recovery jump takes practice and you really have the sense of getting better and filling out the role of Spider-Man the more you play. Some of these moves have to be bought with skill points after a level up, which is a little disappointing. They help with the flow of web swinging as sort of mid-air combo extenders that I would have liked all of them to be available from the beginning of the game. They are not necessary enough that I ever felt satisfied using the skill points to purchase them, nor are they complicated enough that I see a need to lock them off to players in the beginning. But once you have them, you have more tools in your web swinging Swiss Army knife. And those do come in handy once the game decides to test your skills.

Every once in a while, Spider-Man likes to put you through your paces with web swinging challenges. Some bosses have to be chased through the city and caught before you can punch them. Taskmaster devises a series of challenges for Spider-Man to prove himself at but he appears and you can punch him and a good chunk of these require swinging through hoops while chasing down drones. And, probably my personal favorite series or challenges, Spider-Man can chase after pigeons flying around buildings, but not to punch them, to bring them back to their owner. These challenges test every aspect of web swinging from speed to distance to height. They can be frustrating at first—I had the hardest time catching up to the Shocker when you first fight him early in the game—but they act as a great way to practice web swinging through gameplay and show you how much better you get as the game progresses.

When I first saw Spider-Man, I honestly wasn’t that interested in it. It looked like an Arkham game (which I hadn’t played at the time) dropped into a Ubisoft styled open world. It was the map that really lost me at first. I’ve been growing less and less interested in open world games as I grow older. Ubiosft style worlds are a major reason for this as I’ve grown so sick of accessing towers or certain points on a map only to scatter samey missions and busy work around the world for me to do. But I underestimated how much Peter Parker’s web swinging would help with the tedium that usually comes with this sort of world design.

Web swinging is fast. You can travel hundreds of feet in seconds and you don’t have to worry yourself with traffic, crowds, or stamina like those walking plebs on the ground. You can travel across the entirety of Manhattan in minutes, meaning nothing you could want to do is ever very far away. Unlocking the map in Spider-Man requires hacking a police tower first, revealing that section of the island and giving you a slew of missions and collectibles to hunt down. The web swinging in the game makes these extremely easy to get too, though, both by the speed you can traverse the map and the inherent heights you can reach. Where a collectible high from ground level in an Assassin’s Creed game or even Breath of the Wild requires a lot of fiddling climbing, Spider-Man swings in already stories up and can easily run up any vertical wall to the top. The ease of movement across the game map and the general fun of web swinging meant that I never got bored or burnt out doing everything. In fact, I would often put off going to the next story mission just to swing around, enjoy the view, listen to J. Jonah Jameson rant about Spider-Man, and catch pigeons or foil crimes.

Some crimes that can pop up on your patrol around the city involve chasing after stolen cars as they careen down the  road, but every crime break up ends with punching mooks. The combat in Spider-Man is complex, insanely fast, and provides many tools and techniques to consider in the heat of the moment. I really liked it after I got the hang of it, but it’s the one part of the game that web swinging informs the least. Sure, you can swing around the battles like some sort of spandex clad Tarzan, but it’s not efficient at all. But this doesn’t mean that the webs themselves are not utilized in the heat of battle. Webs are used to get effect as means of disarming distant enemies, incapacitating foes by sticking them to walls and the floor, and, my favorite, as a great way to close the space to mooks to continue a combo. These implications are well executed, but I feel like there could have been more options of movement by web swinging around in the middle of the battle.

There are a few times where swinging and fighting are more closely tied together, mainly when fighting airborne enemies, and it leads to what might be the highlight of the whole game for me: the boss fight with Vulture and Electro. Since both these enemies use their powers to fly high above the ground, you must similarly say high enough to fight them. This leads to an absolutely thrilling fight above a factory where you will be using the smokestacks, cat walks, and tall buildings to continuously swing around stories from the ground, all while keeping tabs on two different enemies, dodging attacks, and dishing out damage until they are defeated. It’s such an intense balancing act of swings, attacks, and last second dodges that had me (to use a much overused phrase) feeling like Spider-Man.

5 Favorite Roguelikes

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The term roguelike is an interesting one. It was originally created to describe games similar to the 1980 game Rogue, a dungeon crawler with randomly generated levels, turn-based combat, and permadeath with nothing carrying over from run to run. Now the term has expanded to include any game with randomly generated levels or encounters and permadeath. Some folks have extreme ire against the term being used in such a sweeping manner, debating online that the term should be roguelite instead. While I do have my own definitions for what both roguelike and roguelite means, they are just my personal definitions. My opinion on the debate as a whole is that it doesn’t really matter. Genre names are more limiting than anything else and language is a continually growing, evolving thing so terms often become bigger than originally intended.

But this is all to say that I love roguelike games. I love when a game in the genre succeeds at still feeling fresh after dozens, or even hundreds, of hours played. I’m fascinated by how the games all have their own sort of gameplay language they use to speak to the player. I adore getting lost in games that are so heavily mechanics driven, playing run after run, and learning a little more about the game each time. I wanted to take some time to discuss a few of my favorite games in the genre. Keep in mind, I haven’t played every roguelike. Some major games I’ve only played little to none of would be FTL, Risk of Rain, and Nuclear Throne. And honorable mentions going out to Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Into the Breach—all of which are incredible games, but feel to me to be games with roguelike elements more so than roguelike games. But with all that out of the way, let’s get into my top five favorite roguelikes.

#5) Hades

Hades released last year to instant critical and fan applause. It topped many best of the year lists and has been a commercial smash hit for developer Supergiant Games. And I found myself on the outskirts of this celebration, however. I picked up Hades the day it released on Switch and loved the gorgeous art direction, the intense and lightning quick combat, and expressiveness allotted to the player when building a run from boons offered by the Olympian Gods. However, I found myself less interested in the story and characters as most people seemed to be, preferring to just hop back into the next run. I was disappointed in the lack of gameplay benefits the relationship system brought. Neither of these are bad things really, just things I didn’t particularly care for in the game. Hades is incredible, no doubt, but it came out pretty much the same time as another roguelike in 2020—one you will be seeing later on this list—which devoured all my free time of a few months. 

#4) Streets of Rogue

Streets of Rogue is a fantastic little game with incredible depth. As a top down, 2D immersive sim, each floor tasks you with completing certain missions like neutralizing a target, stealing from a safe, or escorting an NPC to the exit of the level. How you complete these missions, though, are completely up to you. You can hack enemy turrets to fire upon their owners, use vent systems to poison a building full of hostiles, sneak around all guards, or just go in guns blazing and killing everyone in your way. What makes the game great is the options given to the player and how the game world reacts to them. Some classes immediately hate each other and will fight on sight like the members of the opposing gangs, thieves and police, gorillas and scientists. It leads to some of the most chaotic situations a roguelike can offer and some of the highest satisfaction too when everything goes just according as planned.

#3) Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon probably has the best moment-to-moment gameplay out of any game on this list. It’s face-paced, brutal, and an absolute blast to play. Shooting down enemies, dodging bullets, sliding across tables, and rolling through pots and boxes all feels incredible due to the insane amount of polish in the game. Enemies are all expressive and easy to spot, things explode into clouds of pixels that then cover the floor, and every gun has a unique reload animation. And everything in the game is a gun. The enemies are bullets, the bosses’ names are gun puns, the guns you can pick up are reference guns in movies and games, there’s even guns that shoot smaller guns which in turn shoot bullets. The difficulty is set higher than most roguelikes I would say, but it feels so good to play that you will find yourself loading up another run again and again and a gun and again.

#2) Spelunkey 2

Remember when I said that another roguelike came out around the same time as Hades? Well this is it. After not being able to really get into the first Spelunkey, I was shocked how much I loved Spelunkey 2. It feels like a remixed and perfected version of the first game with tweaks, changes, and new additions to keep things fresh for old players and exciting for new players like myself. I’ve never played another roguelike where the player’s skill matters as much as in Spelunkey 2 due to the fact that the item pool is very limited and the game is obscenely difficult, with death often coming instantly and hilariously and with you cursing Derek Yu. It can feel discouraging to get far into a run only for it to end in a second due to a poor jump or misplace bomb, but if you stick with it there are some of the most satisfying challenges to be overcome in the game. I named Spelunky 2 my game of the year for 2020, so if you are interested in a deeper look at what makes it so great, you can find that here.

#1) The Binding of Isaac

This is it, folks. The big one. The reason I bought a New 3DS and a PS4. The game that started me on the road to loving video games. My favorite game of all time. 

The original flash Isaac was one of the first modern roguelikes and helped popularize the genre. The game has been expanded many times—I personally picked it up during Rebirth and after—which has lead to sine wave of quality, but the game is so vast, with some many secrets to discover, hundreds of things to unlock, nearly unlimited synergies between items to learn, all leading to no two runs feeling the same. The game has its own language that it speaks to the player with and it expects them to learn in order to tilt luck in your favor. What started as developer Edmund McMillen wanting to make a smaller game poking fun at Catholicism blossomed into something bigger, something more personal, and one of the most popular indie games ever made. This game means so much to me, and there is so much I want to discuss about it at any given time, that I find it hard to write about because my thoughts get wiped up and spun around like a hurricane. It is my “forever game,” a game I can pick up anytime and anywhere and still enjoy it. Come Hell or high water, from the beginning of Creation until the moment of Rapture, I will always love The Binding of Isaac.

Katana Zero / Ghostrunner & Instant Kill Combat

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I recently played through two games that are strikingly similar, those being Katana Zero and Ghostrunner. With Ghostrunner releasing about a year after Katana Zero it’s hard to feel a sense of “hey, can I copy your homework” with the game since it feels like the developers made Katana Zero in 3D. Both games center around cyberpunk narrative where the main character cannot remember their past, both use a katana as the main weapon, and both focus on high speed, precision play. But by far the most important similarity is that both games focus on combat where everybody, both your characters and enemies, die in just one hit. I wanted to see how both games designed themselves around this brutal combat style and see if one outshined the other. 

In my mind, there are three major things you need in a game for this type of franic-paced, one-hit kill combat to work. They are predictable enemy AI, situational awareness in the level design, and extremely tight controls. These help alleviate some of the frustration that can be caused by the high difficulty of games with one-hit deaths. When looking at both games, it becomes clear that Katana Zero is much more successful than Ghostrunner at incorporating these design elements into the game.

Let’s start with enemy AI. Fast-paced, insta-death games, much like stealth games, require enemies to be predictable. This helps the player read them the instant they appear and react occordly. When your character moves fast and death comes even faster, it feels unfair if enemies don’t act in a way you are used to and makes the game feel too reliant on trial and error more so than the player’s skill and reflexes. Both Katana Zero and Ghostrunner have enemies with very predictable AI—if they see you, they try to kill you instantly. While the enemies in Ghostrunner appear to only be alerted by sight, the baddies in Katana Zero will react to shots fired and the crashing of bottles within a certain radius and then immediately go to investigate. This makes them more exploitable, easier to lead into traps or an unexpected fight, but also means you have to take more consideration with your movements. With the level design being all platforms separated by bottomless pits in Ghostrunner, the enemies seem practically welded in place, unable to move enough to lead into ideal positions for the player. There were times in both games too that enemies seemed to respawn in slightly different positions upon retrying a level, completely throwing off the muscle memory rhythm I had built up, but there were times in Ghostrunner where some enemies seemed to fail to spawn at all. This could be a recurring bug, some sort of adaptive difficulty mode, or the dummies just walking off into pits, but it was also baffling and frustrating.

Situational awareness comes from two major things in games like these: the level design and the boldness of the characters. I never felt lost in Katana Zero because the 2D sprites of all characters made them instantly recognizable. Players see what weapons they are holding and will learn quickly how they attack and what will alert the mooks to their presence. At that point, it’s up to the player to react quickly enough and exploit the enemies’ awareness to their advantage. Ghostrunner is more muddy visually with it being a full 3D, cyberpunk dystopia city, where all enemies are guards or robots wearing metallic armor that blend in with the gray steel environments around them. The different types of enemies can be easily discerned after a second, but in a game as fast as Ghostrunner an extra second is death. 

While Katana Zero allows players to use the right analog stick to view the layout of the entire level anytime while playing, Ghostrunner does not let the players preview a level at all. This is a problem because being able to plan out a route is important when only one hit sends you back to the beginning of a level. There’s no way to no what’s coming up in a Ghostrunner beside throwing yourself at it, leading to clearing a section only to be killed by an enemy you did not know about, trying again and again, getting a little further at a time until you’ve seen every challenge in the level, and then you still have to run through it, dodging and slashing enemies apart perfectly, to win. There is so much trial and error in the levels of Ghostrunner, which can work in high difficulty games like Dark Souls or puzzle platformers like Limbo, but in a game that is so focused on speed, it just works as a huge pace killer.

Of course, the most important thing to have in games like these are tight, responsive controls. They are another way to tamper the frustration of instant death since the player will have no one to blame but themselves. Katana Zero controls are as sharp as the blade of the titular katana and feel absolutely great. The character movement speed feels just right, the jump has just the right amount of weight yet floatiness to it, and the sword slash, while having a few frames where you are vulnerable, feels great to master. The only minor issue I have with the controls are the wall jumps. The character has the Super Meat Boy effect where you slide a little up the wall when you jump into one and this leads to leaping on and off walls to feel slightly sticky. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it meant I avoided this technique whenever possible. This slight stickiness, though, is nothing compared to downright frustrating platforming controls of Ghostrunner. 

There are very few FPS games that have done platforming well (Dying Light is probably the best use of it that I’ve seen) and Ghostrunner sadly is with the majority. The inherent problem with platforming in 1st person is the narrow view. When you can only look in one direction at a time, it’s hard to know where a platform is under your feet. You also have no peripheral vision, meaning when you are trying to run up along a wall to run across it, you have no real idea how far you are when you jump. I died countless times in Ghostrunner due to this view. The horse blinders that come with a 1st person view is not so much of an issue in games with more open levels like DOOM or Dying Light since you can quickly choose a different path if you mess up (and more importantly can absorb a few hits before you die), but Ghostrunner’s level feel rather limited. This is partly due to 70% of the areas being bottomless pits like some empty oceans, but the linear feeling is mostly because enemy placements and the stage layouts are placed in very certain locations to encourage an optimal path through them. Even in the more open levels, paths you have to take to keep moving forward and killing enemies feel like set routes. The game has the 3D Sonic problem where the world feels like it was built specifically for the character of the game and not a real, breathing world. The moments where combat is left behind for straight platforming challenges throw the clumsiness of the platforming into sharp relief and it is not flattering; it’s frustrating at best and infuriating at its worst. 

Both games also have one other major similarity and that is a time dilation mechanic—an invaluable power to have when one hit kills you— but again, Katana Zero feels great to use while Ghostrunner stumbles. In Katana Zero, the player can slow down time for a few seconds with the simple press of a button. This works great as a way to more precisely position yourself, deflect a bullet back at an enemy, or just give you an extra second to assess the wave of mooks coming towards you. Ghostrunner, however, uses the ability to slow down time with a few different abilities, most notably the mid-air strafe. This move can only be performed in air. You press a button to slow down time and then you can move your character left or right, but momentum makes any slight tap of a joystick slide you gliding to the side like you were covered in grease. It is so loose and slippery that I found myself being unable to rely on it since my character would slide off further then I expected constantly. 

While both the games are very similar, the gulf of success between how Katana Zero and Ghostrunner pull off designing around instant death is vast and deep and dangerous. Katana Zero feels as disciplined as the samurai that the main character emulates. It truly feels like the designers thought long and hard and reworked and tweaked every aspect of the game to ensure it worked well with the speed, difficulty, and brutal nature of the gameplay. Ghostrunner feels like an honorable attempt at best and hypocritical at best. The game demands precision from the player but shows little in the design of enemy AI or controls. If I were to recommend one of these games, it would obviously be Katana Zero. While the story feels like a pace breaker at the beginning, I slowly got absorbed into it and found myself really engaging with the narrative and characters. They were the perfect break to let my brain cool off between intense combat sections. All Ghostrunner can offer beside it’s combat is a stock standard cyberpunk narrative and some of the most frustrating platforming sections I’ve ever played.

Prey (2017) & the GLOO Cannon

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Prey is an immersive sim meaning a lot of emphasis is placed on open-ended missions and level design, exploration for resources, and player freedom while surviving in the space station, Talos I. Through skill trees, you can spec in many different character builds that fits your gameplay style. Maybe you want to avoid enemies all together and be a sneaky hacker or have the many turrets and security bots fight for you after you repair them, maybe you want to face the enemies head on by focusing on guns and the leverage skill so you can hurl sofas and water coolers at them. The game caters to however you want to play, but no matter how you choose to build your character, there is always one common denominator: the GLOO Cannon is the most useful tool in your inventory.

The Gelifoam Lattice Organism Obstructor (GLOO) Cannon was not made to be a weapon; it’s a tool. It’s only through the ingenuity of the player character, Morgan Yu, that it has any use in a fight. The Cannon shoots out globs of foam that stick to surfaces, expanding and hardening into about basketball-sized clumps. Apparently these hardened clumps are called “splats,” but they look more like pieces of popcorn to me so that is how I will refer to them. This popcorn doesn’t do any damage to enemies on its own, but it does slow them down and completely immobilize them after enough has formed on them. The helpfulness of this cannot be overstated since all enemies in the game are extremely fast, zipping around rooms unbelievably quickly. If you do not slow these creatures down, they will quickly close in and take a bite out of you. The GLOO cannon is very useful to hold them in one place so you can go on the offensive. Luckily, besides just being slowed down, enemies encased in the GLOO take increased damage, especially from the wrench. You’ll quickly find yourself relying on a quick GLOO Cannon to wrench flowchart while fighting enemies—similar to the Electro Bolt to wrench combo in Bioshock and it’s just as satisfying here as in that game.

Again, though, the GLOO Cannon was never meant to be used as a weapon, it was designed as a tool and with that comes uses for it outside of combat. The first uses you’ll learn is to use the GLOO Cannon to take care of hazards around Talos I. Since the popcorn is nonconductive, it can be used to cover broken electrical panels shooting lightning out into the room. Once covered, you can repair the panel in order to stop the lightning if you specced into that build or simply walk past it and deal with it again when returning to the area. The popcorn is also flame retardant, so spray it on a burst of fire coming from a broken pipe and you can safely pass. These are all interesting little uses, but they are very situational. It aids exploration by reducing hazards, but GLOO Cannon’s real use outside of combat is how it lets the player access new areas.

The GLOO can be formed on any surface besides glass and is strong enough to even support the weight of a human being. This means that the Cannon can be used by the player to create climbable popcorn staircases to access out of reach areas or rooms that would typically need a much longer route to enter. You may discover this by accident, by missing an enemy and hitting a wall, but if not, the developers left a few examples of these stairs hanging off walls around Talos I. This technique reminds me so much of the wall jump from Super Metroid—it’s handled as a bonus use that helps you navigate the game world in not the obvious way, but players don’t actually ever need to use it to succeed and they may not even ever discover it. It all depends on how involved in the game you get—how far down the blackhole you fall.

Monster Hunter World & Player Knowledge

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I’ve come to learn a secret about myself: I tend to enjoy difficult, sometimes even obtuse games. If a game strikes me right, I tend not to have a problem with taking the time to learn it, its mechanics, UI, etc. Learning a game that doesn’t hand out its secrets easily breeds a special kind of familiarity and satisfaction with the player. Dark Souls and The Binding of Issac are two of my favorite games because of their difficult to grasp or even hidden mechanics. Dark Souls is especially polarizing due to its refusal to explain things to its players. But while Dark Souls might be the prince of obtuse game design, Monster Hunter has always been the king.

I had a friend who laughed at me when I said that Monster Hunter World is much more user friendly than previous games, but it’s true. With a more intuitive quest system, hunter notes displaying monsters’ weaknesses and drops, and upgrade trees clearly laid out at the blacksmith, the game is much easier to parse than the 3DS games I’ve played or even the newest game on the Switch. That’s not to say the game has been dumbed down. Simplified, yes, but the game is so deep that there is plenty it still relies on the player to figure out on their own.

Even before a hunt, the player will have to prepare. This includes choosing equipment if you don’t have a preferred set, but also grabbing the correct items like antidotes if you’re hunting a monster that poisons or nulberries in they inflict blight. The player should also stop at the canteen to eat, which grants stat increases. A seasoned hunter will know the best stat to buff for a hunt like getting more defense while fighting a Diablos, who is a heavy physical hitter. You’ll have the best chance of success by preparing before a hunt and that can be difficult for new players who are unfamiliar with useful items or the monster to choose the best gear. Even learning where things are in the hub takes time. The hardest thing for me when starting up Iceborne for the first time was learning where everything is laid out in Seliana as opposed to Astera.

Another thing you can do before a hunt is practice your weapon. Monster Hunter World has a training area where you can try out any of the 14 different weapons and even provides combos to perform on the side of the screen. This is a good thing because while some weapons are easier than others, they all have unique combos and qualities that the game isn’t great about explaining to you. I personally main the Charge Blade because I like its speed and defense in sword and shield mode, its power in axe mode, and just the overall variety the weapon brings. However, this weapon is so complicated, with its charging phials to make axe mode stronger and  finicky controls, that I had to look up a few Youtube videos early in my playthrough to get the most of it. Yes, there are actual 20+ minute long videos on Youtube and essays on forums dedicated on how best to use a weapon. A player can get by without knowing all the little nuances of their preferred weapon, but that’s just another mechanic you need to put the time in to learn before heading out on a hunt.

Once on a hunt, the player’s knowledge of the game is truly tested. They will need to track down the monster with help from the scoutflies and fight the monster to submission. After a while, players learn the areas monsters tend to appear. For example: Rathalos will start in the leafy canopy of the Ancient Forest and Diablos can typically be found in the caves of Wildspire Waste. Players will also learn where useful materials spawn in areas the longer they play. I always like to stay well stocked on Armorskin potions, so every time I find an adamant berry, I make a mental note of its location.

An oversimplified way to describe Monster Hunter World would be to say it’s a boss rush game. The core gameplay loop is fighting giant monsters, be them dragons, dinosaurs, or whatever the hell Pukei-Pukei is. Like Dark Souls, Cuphead, or any other game where bosses are a major component of gameplay, the monsters take a lot of learning to master in fights. There are attack patterns to commit to memory, blights monsters can inflict, tells when they are enraged, exhausted, or close to death. The first time you hunt a monster is the most dangerous. You won’t know any of its attacks or inflictions it might cause. But each time a player hunts a monster, they learn a little more, get a little better, until fighting opposing beasts like Nergigante are second nature. Nothing feels as good as breaking an attack swing to dodge a monster’s attack and watch it miss by millimeters.

There has always been a big focus on breaking the monsters’ parts in the series. Things like wings can be damaged, horns can be broken, and tails cut off. This damage doesn’t just feel satisfying to do, but also affects the rest of the battle. The monster’s abilities and attacks will change depending on what have been damaged on their bodies. A monster with damaged wings will have a harder time flying and spend more time on the ground. Breaking Diablos’s horns is a good way to lessen the damage it can do with charge attacks. Learning what parts of monsters can be broken and how that affects them is important to success in a hunt. Barioth is a mix between a saber-toothed tiger and a dragon. It’s also a real bastard. It took me two or three attempts to finally slay this beast, but I learned to focus on specific parts of its body with each attempt. At last, during my successful hunt, I attacked him in a learned pattern. First, cut off the tail because it neuters many of its attack’s range. Second, take off the spikes off its wings to make sure it stumbles while using certain attacks. Finish it by focusing on attacking its head where it is the weakest.

Monsters in the game will start to seem easier, but it’s not in the same way it feels in a standard RPG where your character can take on tougher foes because they leveled up a few times and their stats increased. You get better at Monster Hunter World as a player. You get better at hunting monsters after studying their attacks, you learn how to prep better or collect the materials you need, you’ve mastered your weapon and know how to get the most out of it. It’s an interesting bit of ludonarrative connection that your hunter character in game gains more and more recognition as the story progresses and as you the player become better at playing the game. It makes the praise the characters layer on you feel less like it’s scripted and more like you fought hard through the trials and earned it.

Spyro 1 & 2 (The Reignited Trilogy) – Critical Miss # 9

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I’ve  always had a soft spot for 3D platformers. Mario Odyssey is one of my favorite games ever, I played the Crash Bandicoot games with the N’sane Trilogy, and I played a lot of Gex 2 as a child, even though I never made it far in the game. There was one series I games I played a bunch on PS 1 demo discs, but never got around to playing until now. That series was Spyro the Dragon

Like Crash Bandicoot, the original Spyro trilogy recently got remade for modern platforms. The Reignited Trilogy did for Spyro exactly what the N’sane Trilogy did for Crash: update the visuals and controls of the Spyro games while keeping the levels and mechanics exactly the same. I can’t honestly say whether the levels are exactly the same as the original games since I’ve never played them, but by all accounts based on reviews, they are nearly identical. These are the versions of the games I will be using to review the first two Spyro games.

Both games excel at presentation. The music is ambient but catching and was composed by Stewart Copeland, the criminally underrated drummer of The Police. The visuals got a huge overhaul from the original games and they are gorgeous. Everything is colorful, cartoony, and full of expressive detail. While the games use the same art style throughout both of them, Spyro 2 has more variety with locations which brings along with it more variety in landscapes and enemies, making it the more memorable of the two.

A great thing about the games is that they truly go the full distance in exploring what a dragon can do through mechanics. Spyro has two attacks. He can breath fire at enemies, searing them to a crisp, or he can head butt with his horns and send them flying. Head butting metallic pots and enemies in armor is the only way to deal with them, since fire is deflected by the metal, so the player is constantly switching between attack styles instead of just favoring one.

There are flying levels, which are iconic for the series, where Spyro soars through the air unabated, but in standard platforming levels he is only able to jump and glide with his tiny wings. This was a huge missed opportunity. So many platformers feature characters with double jumps despite the laws of physics, but Spyro lacks one. Even with his wings that could realistically give him another jump in the air, Spyro has a very strict jump arch. This lead to a lot of frustrating moments, especially in the first game. Many jumps require Spyro to be at the very top of his arch to land on a platform but holding charge makes him plummet like a stone. There was some Mario muscle memory I had to unlearn to play Spyro because it’s nearly impossible for me not to hold the run button the entire time while playing a platformer. The player does get a small flutter in Spyro 2 and that lets them make up a few inches at the end of a jump for more precision, but it feels clunky since it requires hitting the triangle button (on PS4) away from the jump. It helps but doesn’t make up for a full blown double jump.

At the bone, the Spyro games are 3D collectathons. Throughout the levels, there are hundreds of gems to pick up with your firefly friend, Sparx, who will fly out to grab gems near you. This is a great mechanic is a 3D platformer because it requires the player to be near the gems, but not super precise, which can be challenging in a 3D space. But the more damage Spyro takes, the shorter the distance Sparx will fly to pick up gems. Sparx also works as a visual indicator of Spyro’s health and is a great example of an integrated UI that I completely forgot to mention in my last post. 

While both games use gems as the moment to moment collectables, both Spyro 1 and 2 have different main collectables that lead to different level design. Spyro 1 had crystalized dragon you need to free from their geological prisons. This is done simply by walking into them. This leads the levels in the first game to be more linear, with a path leading to the end of the level and having most the dragons along the critical path. Levels in the first Spyro game feel akin to the levels in the Crash games. They are linear halls to the goal, but unlike Crash, Spyro’s levels have secret paths that branch out and across the main path.

Spyro 2 has a mission system for the main collectables. To bet a level, you just have to get to the end where a member of the local population will get you a talisman. Once you have all the talismans, you can beat the game. But If you want 100% in Spyro 2, you need to get all the orbs and that is where the changes in the level design spring from. There are two types of orbs to collect, orbs hidden in the levels behind platforming challenges and orbs you have to complete a mission to collect. These missions can vary from collecting a number of items for a character, killing all the enemies in an area, or scoring a set number of goals in hockey within a time limit. This leads the levels to be more open, with many more paths to explore and secrets to find

While both games are very easy to complete, there’s difficulty to be found in each and the difficulty curve is another difference between the games. Each level in Spyro 1 seemed to have one jump or obstacle that was extremely frustrating. Whether is be a jump from across level that needs to be lined up perfectly and drops the player into a bottomless pit to take a life if missed or using the boost paths to run extremely long distances with messing up to make one jump to a new area, there was always something in the first games levels that seem to take much longer than they should. And they come as soon as the first levels.

Spyro 2 has its fair share of difficult missions, but the truly frustrating mission come near the end of the game when the difficulty would be expected to ramp up, and they are more fairly designed. The difficult missions in the game are built around how well the player knows the mechanics of the game and level layouts they take place in. This means to beat them, you don’t don’t have to find a perfect angle to jump, you just need to practice the challenges a few times. I enjoyed both games a good amount, but with its mission based collectathon, challenges designed around the mechanics of the game, and more variety in locations and enemies, Spyro 2 was my preferred game of the two.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Critical Miss #4

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Castlevania: Symphony of the Night came out in 1997 and it was a huge departure for the Castlevania series. It was less linear like its predecessors and more explorative, with a huge open map more like a Metroid game. This lead to the series lending the second half of the genre name: Metroidvania. I was excited to play the game for the first time when a rerelease was announced for the PS4. I’ve always been interested in Metroidvania games. I have gotten through half of Super Metroid and enjoyed it before i got distracted with other games. After I completed Hollow Knight though, I was itching to get back into the genre and I thought I’d take a look at one of the major games that helped shape the genre outside and past the Metroid games.

Right off the bat, the presentation of Symphony of the Night is great. The music ranges from hype-inducing in the opening hallway to creepy ambience in the flooded caves and the sprite art for the enemies are all detailed and gorgeous. Even the few examples of using 3D models, like for the save point coffins and the clocktower that rotates as you ascend the stairs to face Dracula, mesh well with the 2D art and add a whole lot of charm to the game. Alucard himself is the only aspect of the presentation I don’t care for. While his sprite is fluid and well animated, the sprite also seems blurry when he’s constantly in motion and having after effects trailing behind him. It is neat to see the wings of Alucard’s bat form change color depending on what cloak he’s wearing, but his sprite came across messy and less detailed than the world around him.

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The two best things about the game to me are the enemies and the map. Enemy variety in a game is huge to me and Symphony of the Night does not disappoint. There are so many different types of enemies from wolves and skeletons to invisible fencers and floating books the spit out a mass of conjoined skulls. Enemies all have unique sprites, with only a few pallet swaps, and there are many different attacks the player must learn to avoid. Like the enemy list, Dracula’s castle is similarly huge and varied. There are many interesting locations just filled with secrets to find and relics to collect, some of which will open up means of unlocking even more secrets to explore. I got so absorbed into exploring the castle, wanting  to find everything I could, that I ended up revealing 100% of the map before fighting Richter without much trouble. But after fighting Richter, another castle appears upside-down from a portal in the night and the last half of the game is accessible. Unfortunately, this is where the game lost me.

The combat in Symphony of the Night never really enthralled me. There’s not much to it besides attacking and jumping to dodge enemy attacks while using an occasional subweapon. The combat is very basic and when paired with the knockback Alucard suffers when hit it becomes more frustrating than fun. Alucard will go flying halfway across the screen every time he takes damage and it’s obnoxious. Multiple times I found myself entering a room, getting hit by an enemy standing just inside the entry, and having the knockback send me back out the door I just came through. This was just annoying.

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Starting in the reverse castle, the enemy placement seems more haphazard and less considered. Some halls in the second half of the game are so full enemies that do so much damage and send you flying around with knockback that it is highly incentivized to travel through the rooms in Alucard’s mist form, which is horribly slow. Traversing the reverse castle altogether is tedious. Most the platforms to scale are just slightly beyond your jump height, even with the high jump and double jump, that you need to use the bat transformation to just proceed. The bat form, like the mist form, is just too slow so exploring the reverse castle isn’t exciting. It’s dull.

A lot of the issues with the reverse castle could be made easier with Symphony of the Night’s leveling system and RPG elements, a first for the Castlevania series, but they don’t add much to the game overall. In fact, they’re almost unnoticeable. Throughout the game, you will gain experience points and levels from killing enemies, giving you increased stats and health points. You can also find health upgrades and new weapons or armor hidden throughout the castle. Going through the game, leveling up at a steady pace and equipping the best weapons and armor I found, I didn’t notice a change in my character. All enemies in the first castle died in one or two hit and did less than ten damage to me. When I got to the reverse castle, however, enemies took longer to kill and would do upwards of thirty damage per hit. That, along with the room obstacles like sliding spikes on the floor doing nearly eighty damage, the options once you hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle is to either die a lot or move through the entirety of the second half of the game in mist form.  

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After a while in the reverse castle, my interest in Symphony of the Night just stopped. The pacing suffers too much from having to move in the bat or mist forms and the combat isn’t nuanced enough to keep me engaged. I was having fun through the first castle but I wasn’t enthralled by the game at any point. So when I hit the difficulty spike in the reverse castle, I didn’t have the motivation to continue.