i was overwhelmed by your collective emotion.

I'm currently forcing my mother to watch Mythic Quest against her will (if she gets to the quarantine episode and still isn't feeling it I guess I'll let her off the hook then), but I keep forgetting to make sure Plex is running before I leave for her house, so I've been burning various Apple TV+ free trials to facilitate it. Currently: An Apple One free trial! Which includes a month of Apple Arcade! So I went through that library and found five games I had heard of and wanted to play! And then they were all trash!

Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls: I think I was expecting this to be a port of like a classic 90s Castlevania game, although admittedly in retrospect that was based on nothing. Anyway I got through the opening tutorial and into the main hub area and immediately was like THIS JUST LOOKS LIKE A BULLSHIT MOBILE GAME? So I stopped and did some research and it turns out it was designed as a bullshit mobile game with a million different currencies and counterintuitive progression to maximize microtransactions, and even though they stripped those microtransactions out for the Apple Arcade release the structure that was built for them is still there, and it sounds like the game sucks so I dropped it.

Overland: Okay I really thought this was like an emotional narrative game about a road trip? Once again, in retrospect that was based on nothing except I guess the cover art. Turns out it's a roguelike strategy game. I played like five minutes and then went back and listened to the relevant Waypoint segments to see if it sounded like it was worth powering through my initial disinterest, and even though a comparison was made to The Flame in the Flood (another roguelike surival game I was initially disinterested in, but one that won me over!) they overall made it sound pretty joyless and punishing so I bailed.

The Pathless: I think I'd still like to play this on console but playing it on my phone was just a trash experience.

Cozy Grove: Apparently this is very similar to Animal Crossing which is a huge validation of my decision not to get Animal Crossing! I played twenty minutes and then deleted it.

I've also never been so insulted in my life as when I opened Cozy Grove and Apple Arcade was like YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'D LOVE? JENNY LECLUE DETECTIVU, THE MOST INFURIATING GAME EVER MADE:



The Last Campfire: So I actually did play this one all the way through! It was Fine. The puzzles were very Breath of the Wild shrine but like, super dumbed down. There were only a couple I found particularly challenging, none of which were for a great reason:

1. There is an ability you can where you can move metal objects around (okay MAGNESIS), but there's no consistency as to whether a movable object is still movable once you're standing on it. I thought you couldn't move stuff you were standing on (after...not being able to do it repeatedly) so I got stuck on a puzzle that relied on you doing it.

2. There are a handful of puzzles that require you to move an object around a grid a lot in such a way that it will face a certain direction when it lands at a certain spot. (So like, you can roll a cube, and one specific side of the cube needs to be on top in a specific square on the grid.) I think I'm just not good at whatever 3D visualization you need to be able to do to master this, because I just kind of trial and errored it all the way through rather than actually "solving" anything.

3. Consequently I was so used to that approach didn't realize that one puzzle I was TRYING to trial and error and getting increasingly annoyed by actually had a fucking answer key in another room, until I got sick of trying to bruteforce it and looked up the answer.

Other than those, the puzzles were fairly straightforward - they would have felt better in a game that was puzzle-only with no exploration, I think, because there just wasn't much to them so they didn't feel like a meaningful was to progress.

The game was cute but I think I'm just burned out on abstract fairy tale/fable type games that use cutesy fantasy settings with placeholder characters and heavy-handed narration to tell a generic story about accepting death or whatever. It's been like seven months since Child of Light, the last time I went through that, but maybe the Spiritfarer annoyance is still with me.

anyway ( screenshots )

Inscryption is a game I would not have played had if it weren't for how enthusiastic everyone on Waypoint got about it - the people who were already into card-based video games and the people who usually don't want anything to do with card-based video games were all unanimous about loving it. That was enough to get it onto my endless to-play list (shut up, 180 is A Normal Amount Of Games To Want To Play), where it probably would have stayed forever, except Waypoint was also streaming Inscryption, and I wanted to watch those but I didn't want to be spoiled for the game. SO it was my special post-Christmas gift to myself, and under current rules I AM allowed to buy a new game as long as I play it immediately, so I did, and lo, it was good.

It really is best to play Inscryption unspoiled, so if you're wondering if it's for you, there is a spoiler-free review here.

The gist is that you find yourself held prisoner in a cabin by a shadowy figure who's forcing you to play a card game - for your freedom, for your life, for his entertainment before your inevitable doom, who knows. Every time you die, you start over from the very beginning, but the game will give you tools to ease your way as you restart. As you progress towards your eventual victory, it becomes clear that there is a lot more going on than you understand.

I had an incredible time playing Inscryption - the learning curve felt impossibly steep in a few places, which was frustrating, but it was usually just a matter of realizing one or two things. Inscryption's not especially interested in making your life difficult - it'll throw some new gameplay at you, you'll need a little while to get your feet under you, and then you're good to go. I wish I could live forever in the couple of hours when I felt the first third of the game solidifying under my feet, the experience of mastering it and seeing my progress accelerate accordingly was really thrilling.

Narratively, I loved a lot of what Inscryption did, and I respect how big it swings. It didn't totally land for me in the end because I think my narrative priorities were just so different from the dev's, but I still got an ending that was beautiful and poignant even if it wasn't the main event.

And I think that's all I have to say without spoilers!

( you really destroyed the moon... )

Me playing any Ubisoft game for the rest of my life: Hey, those are the MythicQuest people!

Ummm I don't know what to say about Child of Light. It's a platform RPG, so you're running and jumping (mostly flying) and figuring out how to get into out-of-the-way areas to find chests and items, and you're also fucking around with player stats and managing a party and partaking in some turn-based combat.

It was fine! I didn't really like it but it moved along quickly enough that it didn't really wear out its welcome. I wish they'd made it more worth my while to play around with the combat more, but I started in the harder difficulty, got annoyed with that when I got game over during the first boss fight, switched to normal, and then when the second guy who joined my party was a ROCK MONSTER I was like oh this dude's going to help me beat the shit out of people and I just never bothered with another party member after that. Not to be like EVERYTHING SHOULD BE EXACTLY LIKE CHRONO TRIGGER (although it should) but I think that's a good model - three active members in a party (protagonist + 2) instead of two (protagonist + 1) gives you more room to play around, and requiring that certain characters be used for certain story missions means you have to try out new people when they join your party. I was just like THIS DUDE MADE OF STONE IS MY GUY NOW and I never looked back! IDK if the mouse or the jester with depression or the dwarf or my sister or whoever else was in the game (I sincerely don't remember) were any good. Maybe they were great! But I had stone guy so I didn't care. Then I had to leave him behind and go back to Austria where I found a new dude and that dude had a 10% chance of instant killing on any action so even when stone guy came back it was like...sorry stone guy, this maybe Irish dude is my BFF now.

I feel like this game was a fairly straightforward fairy tale but AROUND THAT there was this bizarre framing device set in the real world, and for whatever reason that was just TOO MUCH for me and I have decided I don't understand the plot of this game at all. She was the princess of Austria. Her mom died. She got a stepmom and some stepsisters. Then the princess died. Except it turned out her mother was the Queen of Light from another world and had placed a protection spell on her, that if anything ever happened she would wake up in the mother's world instead of dying in the real world? So she wakes up in this fantasy world and goes on a journey to get the moon, sun, and stars back from the Queen of Darkness or whoever, and...listen all that was very straightforward but the part where she could go through a mirror and just be back in AUSTRIA was very fucking weird to me. Then there were all these letters I kept finding where some lady was like "oh I crossed from Manhattan into this world" like THIS IS THE TWELFTH KINGDOM OR SOMETHING? And I kept waiting for an explanation on those and NOPE!!!!!!!!!

Also 99% of the dialogue and narration in this game rhymes. The 1% that doesn't rhyme is a running joke about one character (the non-depressed jester) who consistently fucks up opportunities to rhyme (think "everyone is merry and hearty / while we all enjoy this fiesta" which is not a line from the game but might as well be) and EVERY TIME someone will be like "I think you mean party" like JUST LET THE JOKE STAND IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO IT!!!!!!! Anyway the rhyming fucking sucks and I think it could have worked MAYBE for the narration (WHICH I WISH I'D KNOWN WAS CAROLINE DHAVERNAS) but having it for the dialogue was just exhausting and really kept me from buying into the story.

There were skeleton horses which was cool. The flying was a game changer but it did make the environments weird to navigate because there would be these huge open sky areas with like one floating scrap of paper in them but I still felt like I had to explore them completely.

Since I already burned through all the shortest games in my backlog, my new way of tricking myself into feeling like I'm making more of a dent than I am is to focus on knocking out entire consoles. AND WITH DONKEY KONG, I AM DONE WITH MY 3DS. Like, not forever obviously, but I have now beaten every single game I purchased for it. Catch me going absolutely apeshit buying new stuff around the holidays in a giftcard-fueled "the 3DS eShop will be closing sometime soon" frenzy but until then: I'M CAUGHT UP.

Donkey Kong! This was the 1994 Game Boy game, which basically takes the premise of the arcade game and expands it to a full-fledged platformer with about a hundred levels. No cut here because there's nothing worth cutting, but it was really good! The difficulty mix was great - there were enough easier levels that I racked up an absolute shitload of extra lives (I think I peaked at 61?) but enough harder ones that I always felt like I was only a couple of tough levels away from burning through all my lives and losing that safety net. It was a little frustrating in parts (visually I couldn't always tell what was and wasn't a boundary in water, it's from 1994 so it assumes you're learning the controls from a manual, etc etc) but overall just a really well-constructed platformer.

Also, Donkey Kong has a dump truck ass.

Super Mario 3D Land was Fine. It was Fine! It was a perfectly Fine way to sit down and pass half an hour at a time before the game was like "don't forget to take a break! :D" like fuck off Mario you're not my real dad.

I bought this game three years ago when I first bought my 3DS and I played it for like an hour and it was Fine so I lost interest in it in favor of things that were Good. Actually, as it turns out I am learning in this moment that the 3DS keeps DETAILED USAGE LOGS THAT NEVER EXPIRE? Holy shit why doesn't every device I own do this. I LOVE RECORDS!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway it looks like I bought the 3DS, tried this game for about fifteen minutes a couple of times in the first three weeks, then picked it up for another fifteen minutes three months later, and then didn't touch it again until three days ago.

( it's a-me, mario )