Fall Games Roundup
Another quarter of the year gone by, and somehow, despite the deluge of games that we get hit with every year, I had an entire like...two months(?) where literally nothing that I wanted to play was coming out. That gave me the time to play all of Unicorn Overlord (a game I otherwise probably would never have come back to), as well as a collection of random stuff that doesn't deserve its own write up, so it's here instead.
Sky 1st Demo
I'm doing a writeup on the demo rather than the full game, because frankly? I do not like Sky FC. It took me several attempts to actually finish it (and I only successfully did so after finishing Cold Steel 1 and 2), I do not like either of its main characters, and even in a series known for being a slow burn, Sky FC moves at a fucking glacial pace, to the point where the game itself is largely setup for the stuff that happens in Sky SC. Later parts of the series would be better about having the so-called "setup" games have an actual plot of their own, but this is not really the case here and the game suffers for it. Will I eventually play the full game? Probably, but not until I can get it on sale, and Horizon is absolutely going to take priority if that happens anywhere in the same time frame, so let's talk about what we can play right now.
The first thing I noticed when I played the demo was the visuals - I'm playing on Switch 2, and even with the caveat that this is a Switch 1 game being brute-forced to max resolution and framerate, it looks and plays fantastic. There's some obvious cutbacks in the textures and it does the thing where enemies that are farther away animate less often, but it looks significantly better than either Daybreak game and runs at an almost perfect 60 FPS. I expect that with the actual S2 upgrade applied, these issues would be cleaned up, but honestly? I would have no problem with playing it as-is.
The combat also been updated to something that resembles a fusion of Daybreak and Cold Steel's systems. In the field, it more or less plays the same as the Daybreak games, with rudimentary action combat until you stun an enemy, at which point you transition back to turn-based combat. This still works great, although it does inherit a couple weird bits from the original's combat, most notably how obviously balanced it is in favor of arts. Instead of Daybreak's shard skills, Sky 1st nicks the BP system from the Cold Steel games, allowing you to do either a single or AoE follow-up attack after stunning an enemy, which does feel appropriate - Daybreak's technology is so far beyond what appears in the Sky games that it would be horribly out of place here, and I don't mind what they've done in its place at all. One thing that is really weird though is how lethal the combat feels, even on Normal difficulty. It has admittedly been a very long time since I played Sky FC, but I do not remember having anywhere near this much trouble. Several of the bosses came close to wiping me, and the ability to freely move and attack in one turn makes the NPC escorting that you have to do early on significantly more difficult.
Anyway, those are both more or less unambiguous upgrades, but neither of them are the reason that I didn't really like the game, so at best they made my time with it more tolerable. It's also even slower paced, somehow - not because there's more scenes or anything, but simply because full 3D animation and voice acting is inherently slower than the 2D, unvoiced original. I've seen estimates that say the remake is 10-ish hours longer, and I would absolutely believe that purely based on the voice acting, let alone the longer animations and cutscenes. By the time I publish this roundup, the game will be long since be out and we'll know the answer to most of these questions, aside from maybe "How long will it take them to make a Sky 2nd Chapter?" FC ends on a pretty explicit cliffhanger, and making people wait a year or two for a follow-up would fitting in its own way - I don't know how many people would be willing to jump from the modern remake into 2006's Sky SC, but I suspect it's a lot fewer than Falcom would like.
Voxelgrams 2
If you played the first Voxelgrams, then you know it's essentially "Store Brand Picross 3D." Similarly, Voxelgrams 2 is "We have Picross 3D Round 2 at home," but considering that basically no one makes puzzle games like this, I'm happy to have even a facsimile of Nintendo's classic. For $10, it's pretty much exactly as janky and stripped down as you'd expect it to be, but the core functionality is all there - here's a big block, chip away it and use the clues to paint the right cubes until you get a little figure at the end. It even includes the Voxelgram 1 puzzles (plus all of its DLC), so there's plenty of game on offer here. Like Picross 3D Round 2, its main hook as a sequel is that all of its puzzles use two colors instead of one, but I feel like it's a little less clear in how those rules are implemented. In Round 2 the clues are always considered contradictory - if a cube is supposed to be blue AND orange, then it can be neither and should be deleted - but Voxelgrams takes a complimentary approach instead. Here, clues of different colors can intersect, and if you have a clue that requires two blue cubes with a gap between them, that gap may very well be filled by a green cube rather than a deleted one. It's not HARDER, per se, but it does make the puzzles take longer and make it easier to make mistakes.
It's hard to list too many complaints about such a bare-bones puzzle game, but I do have a couple. The biggest one is that the controls are a little janky and it can be hard to figure out the best way to manipulate the block so you can see what you're actually trying to paint and/or delete. I also don't know if this is an S2-specific issue, but the game has a bad habit of hanging for a second when it changes audio tracks. And speaking of the music, it's...weird? Large parts of the soundtrack sound more like ambient themes from like, The Elder Scrolls, instead of more standard puzzle game fare. And this can work, there's a set of pirate ship themed puzzles early on that the soundtrack worked really well with! Unfortunately, that same music was a lot more silly when it was being paired with a picnic spread diorama, or someone's garage - and with only a handful of songs on offer, they get old pretty fast.
None of this should stop you from trying it out, especially if you enjoy these kinds of games. Just be aware that it both looks and plays like Dollar Store Picross 3D.
Marsupilami Hoobadventure
This is a weird one, not the least of which is because it's a licensed game for children, but I picked it up on recommendation from a random review in the last Steam Sale for $2. And it turns out that it's actually one of the best DKC clones I've played in years?
Hoobadventure falls into the same bucket as, say, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, where it's clearly trying to ape (lol) Tropical Freeze, but it just doesn't have the time or budget to get there. This is not to say that the attempt isn't admirable - while it's a little on the easy side (and quite short with only three worlds plus a free DLC one), Hoobadventure plays well, looks pretty good, and hits all the notes that you'd expect from a DKC-clone. The big "innovation" here is that you have an extendable tail that can be used to grab hooks and items from a distance, but otherwise it looks and feels like DKC Returns, for better or worse.
It's only about 2-3 hours long (presuming that you have any experience with the genre) with the DLC being roughly another hour of levels, but for a kids' game? That's perfectly fine. I would infinitely rather give my kid a game like this than something like...I dunno, Roblox or Fortnite, but maybe that's the boomer in me speaking. Either way, even at the full $20, this is absolutely worth taking a look at. For the sale price? It's a gimme.
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
This one comes from the NSO+ Grab Bag, being added to the service at the end of September. I never played any of the Klonoa games when they were current, though I did pick up both the Wii remake of the original (which I really enjoyed) and the Klonoa Collection on Switch a few years ago to play 2 (the original seems fine? It's a bad remake though). That leaves us with the GBA game, a purely 2D entry in the series that has more of a puzzle-platformer vibe than the 2.5D console games.
Compared to the original games, the levels here are broken into small rooms that feel like they were underestimating the GBA's capabilities. The platforming feels okay; the controls can be a little slippery at times, and it's very finnicky about how much space you need to be able to pick something up under tight ceilings, but overall it's a pretty complete conversion of Klonoa's physics and moveset from the first game. The rest of the levels are filled with puzzles, requiring you to pick up (usually) a couple keys and collect 30 gems in order to make your way to the exit door. "Puzzle," admittedly, is doing a lot of work here - they're mostly simple navigation challenges, and mainly lean on stuff like "putting a block in front of a fan to block a wind stream." Each world also has a pair of minigame levels, one being a skateboard level (that plays a lot like a DKC minecart level) and the other being an autoscrolling platforming level.
The game's not particularly long, at 5 worlds with 7 levels a piece plus a boss in each. I knocked it out in about 6-7 hours while collecting almost all of the hidden stars along the way (3 per level). It's a cute little game, one I definitely would have enjoyed if I had gotten it when I was 10, but it makes for a nice weekend playthrough these days too. For a game that I basically only played because it was free and I had literally nothing else going on, you can't ask for much more than that.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
As a child of the 90's, I love Jurassic Park. The first two movies are stone cold classics, but the ones beyond that undeniably have a lot of issues. I actually quite like Jurassic World for showing us a sterile, corporatized version of JP (and how much worse the problems inherent to JP would be if the park had ever actually opened and been successful), but JP3 doesn't make a lick of sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds, Fallen Kingdom wastes half of its runtime on the whole dinosaur rescue plot, and Dominion is nostalgia bait that seems to think giant locusts are an acceptable substitute for a bunch of people getting eaten by a T-Rex.
This isn't really intended to be deep commentary on the franchise or anything, but the sequels pretty much all face two major problems: first, dinosaurs (though cool as fuck) are not new or awe-inspiring anymore. In 1997? Hell yeah. But in 2025 they're just another movie monster, and this is something that Jurassic World understood (for better or worse). The second - and far more fixable problem - is that of location. I am so goddamn sick of people going to Isla Sorna and Nublar. "Oh there's another undocumented research facility that's abandoned now and dinosaurs are running amok--" Shut the fuck up. Stop going to Death Island! It was true in 2003 when JP3 fell flat on its face, and it's still true today. Again, this is something that the World movies (for all their other faults) actually understood - the other half of Fallen Order that takes place at the mansion is by far the best part of it, and even Dominion leans on this to some degree. Moving the dinosaurs into our modern world, and how it affects both us and them is the only part of the last two movies that was compelling at all, and Dominion wisely ends on showing us a world where the dinosaurs are just out there now, a perfect jumping-off point for a new JP storyline.
Naturally, the first ten minutes of Rebirth show us A) a research facility on a THIRD fucking island and B) give us a text crawl that bluntly states that actually dinosaurs can't survive outside of a very narrow band near the equator so they all died except for the ones on those islands. You wanted a new story for this franchise? A new direction to take these creatures and their effect on our modern environment? Go fuck yourself, they're all dead now and they can never live anywhere else. Not that I was particularly fond of her to begin with, but Claire's entire storyline over the course of the last three movies? Gone. Throw that shit right in the trash, it was all completely pointless. This is Rise of Skywalker levels of petty retconning.
Anyway, once the actual movie starts, we find ourselves following two groups of people making their way to the latest island of deathtraps. The A plot follows Zora and a band of fellow mercenaries (plus a nerd in WAY over his head) who are heading there to get three dinosaur blood samples for a pharmaceutical company's heart medication. Meanwhile, the B plot follows a dad and his kids out on a boating trip - things are a little rocky between them, but after their boat is attacked and nearly sunk by a dinosaur, they get rescued by the mercenaries and ultimately everyone ends up on the island when the mercs' boat gets run ashore. From there, everyone tries to make their way to the old InGen facilities so they can call for help and get the hell off the island.
This is not inherently a bad setup if you HAVE to do another InGen dino island (though we must be clear: they didn't), but this implementation absolutely does not work, in large part because the two halves simply aren't compatible. The mercenary group ranges from "assholes whose hearts are in the right place" to "just assholes" and a large part of the promise here is "you are going to watch them get eaten by something 20 feet tall and it's gonna rule when it happens." But every 10-15 minutes, it smash cuts over to the heartwarming family drama where the biggest thing at stake is whether or not the dad will accept his daughter's shitty boyfriend. They might be on dinosaur island, but you already know they're not going to kill the kids; the youngest one adopts a baby triceratops for god's sake. This ruins the tension of the entire movie, because you know pretty much from the word "go" who's going to live and die, with the only question being how long it takes to happen.
Also, unrelated to anything happening in the plot, the new super dino is fucking terrible? Like, I'm sorry, but look at this thing. It has six limbs and a giant orb on its head! Even if you grant that the island that they went to was explicitly making weird dinosaur hybrids, that thing isn't a dinosaur - it's a reject from Gareth Edward's Godzilla movie. To steal a line from my good friend Iro, it is the product of a producer going "What if we made a dinosaur that was fucked up?" and then circled "fucked up" on the white board, like, three times while he looked around the room for approval. And it doesn't even show up until the last 15-ish minutes of the movie! You get an obscured look at it in the prologue at the start of the film, and then it's just gone until the very, very end when it shows up to eat one guy and half-heartedly chase the survivors away from the island.
The haters have said that the franchise has been dead since The Lost World - maybe even after the first film, depending on how extreme you want to go - but is the first time that I think I genuinely agree with them. There will inevitably be another sequel to this mess, and I'll probably watch that too (even though I really shouldn't), but do not give them a cent or a second of your time for Rebirth. This is, unequivocally, the worst movie I've seen this entire year.
Nikoderiko: The Magical World
Slipping in just under the buzzer, we have another pretender to the DK throne. Unlike Marsupilami, Nikoderiko has a bit more pedigree to it; while the former was made by devs that are best known for the Smurfs games, Nikoderiko is an indie project that brings significantly more budget and polish, as well as a few more household names among the staff - most notably lead composer David Wise.
This, understandably, raises expectations a little bit. Let's start by giving the game its flowers, because it looks significantly better than something like Marsupilami - and easily goes toe-to-toe with Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. Environments are lush, detailed, and colorful, the animations look good, and there's a wide variety of worlds to platform through to a (mostly) solid soundtrack. Each world also has a boss fight with unique mechanics, even if the boss fights themselves vary wildly in quality. The problem with expectations, however, is that you then have to turn around and meet them, and this is where the game falls short. I should stress that I genuinely think this game is fine - it more or less accomplishes what it set out to do, and if you aren't a hardcore DK fan like me, then you will probably enjoy it a lot.
But let's dive into the nitty-gritty, starting with the controls. Nikoderiko's big thing is that it occasionally shifts from a 2D platformer to a 3D one, a la Crash Bandicoot, and this in-and-of-itself is not a problem, but the controls for a 3D platformer are very, very different than one for a 2D platformer. In a 2D game, you expect things to be very snappy and responsive, and while the hero may not stop on a dime and instantly turn around if they have some momentum, they at least (should) instantly respond - and it is immediately obvious when this is not the case. While you can adapt to just about anything, no one is giving LittleBigPlanet or the New Super Mario Bros games any awards for tight controls, and even games that are otherwise beloved aren't immune - just ask Super Metroid and its floaty physics and janky Space Jumps. The problem, however, is when you take those controls and put them in a 3D platformer, you get Sonic Adventure. 3D games need slower, looser controls to account for the extra dimension of complexity, and because it has a seamless transition between the two, Nikoderiko just uses those slower controls all the time, even when it's in 2D. While it's hardly unplayable, it never really feels good, and this was doubly true for me coming off of Marsupilami, which felt great.
The other major complaint I have is that of inspiration. Marsupilami is blatantly trying to be DKC Returns, but it's doing it in a weird, "from first principles" kind of way that doesn't feel like it entirely comes together until the DLC world. While it has the same physics and a few of the same ideas (most notably barrel cannons), the way it paces its collectables is more like Mario World's dragon coins, or maybe DKCR's puzzle pieces. There is no such confusion in Nikoderiko - this is a game that is trying very hard to be Tropical Freeze, and it wants you know it at every turn. Every level has two golden bonus barrels, N-I-K-O letters to collect, and a gem that's hidden reasonably well. All the classics are well-represented: barrel blast levels, animal buddies, rocket barrels and minecarts, silhouette levels, swimming that's identical to Tropical Freeze, and all the while there's a David Wise soundtrack playing in the background. The game occasionally slips in a little Crash Bandicoot (chiefly in the form of its character designs and the infrequent 3D sections), but for the most part it knows why you're here and it is happy to oblige you. This makes its shortcomings all the more striking, because if you're going to go this far to remind me of another game, it had better not be one that I wish I was playing instead.
The other issues I have with the game are relatively small in comparison. One is that while a David Wise soundtrack is always a treat, it's hard to not feel like he phoned this one in. While the music itself is fine in a vacuum, it has a very laid-back sound that rarely captures the right mood for a scene. Some music feels like it came off the Tropical Freeze cutting room floor, while others completely fail to match the energy that they should. That second one is the rocket barrel stage! The ROCKET BARREL SONG for god's sake. Similarly, the writing and voice acting is fine in that obnoxious Saturday morning cartoon way, but that doesn't make me roll my eyes any less whenever they start talking. I also got more annoyed than I probably should have that the true final boss is locked behind collecting every gem in the game, which itself is locked behind getting all 56 Bonus Keys because you need to unlock all the Lost World levels for the final couple gems. You already have to essentially get 100% in order to get that far at all, so it feels like rubbing a little salt in the wound to be like "OH BUT DID YOU GET ALL THE DK COINS TOO? BETTER GO BACK, FUCKO!"
And like I said, none of this is to say that Nikoderiko is a bad game. Almost everything I've said here are either nitpicks or minor flaws in the grand scheme of things, and while the corpus of games that compose the "DKC-like" subgenre of platformers is not exactly overflowing, Nikoderiko is unquestionably one of the best ones available. It's not my favorite by any means - that honor probably goes to Kaze and the Wild Masks (at time of writing, anyway) - but it is probably the most accessible game of the bunch, in both a visual and mechanical sense. If the real deal is too rich for your blood (or you simply don't own the required Nintendo hardware), this is about as good of a substitute as you can get.