Musings from Lythos

Spring 2026 Roundup

Rayman Origins

I've never actually played Rayman Origins. I've played most of its levels because they were included in Rayman Legends - a game that I thoroughly enjoyed but have not played since its launch on the Wii U in, uh...checks notes 2013 - but that game has no real context for Origins' levels. They're unlocked semi-randomly from scratch cards, and while I applaud the effort, Legends is clearly more focused on presenting its own content.

As you might expect, when placed in the context of its own game, Origins flows a lot better. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that I DEMAND themed worlds or anything, but if you are going to have them, then you should probably make sure that I'm not playing the desert music level immediately followed by an ice level and then a green, watery cave level. And Origins' worlds are pretty good! The standouts for me were Desert of Dijiridoos and Gourmand Land, with the latter being one of the best food-based worlds this side of a modern Mario game. Ice and fire is a classic platforming staple, but the flavor of "sangria and chili peppers" really elevates what would otherwise be a pretty standard world theme. The water world is fine, but Legends pretty much blows it out of the water with its spy-themed one, so it's not nearly as impressive by comparison.

And really, that's the big story of Origins. It's fine; good, even! By the standards of what was releasing in 2013, it's fantastic and I am genuinely sad that we never really got any more games in the Ubi-Art engine - just compare it to New Super Mario Bros U, a game that I also like a lot and think is unfairly maligned, but is absolutely blown out of the water by Ubisoft's efforts. Unfortunately, it's become very clear in the intervening years that Ubisoft has no real intention of going back to that well (aside from the occasional re-release, I see you "Rayman: Complete Edition"), so this is likely to be all that we get for our unarmed slacker hero. I guess it's better than an NFT collection?

Symphonia

Continuing our tour of the platforming genre, Symphonia is a precision platformer released at the end of 2024. Its big hook is "music" - it leans heavily on classical music for most of its background themes, the main character is a violinist, and the entire world is this steampunk, music-powered monstrosity where the pillars are flutes, the farmlands are covered in spools of thread, and our goal is to reunite the four great musicians to bring music back to the land. But bringing the band back together is no simple task, and while it's not the most inspired platformer that I've ever played, it execute the basics well enough that you'll have a decent time with it.

To the degree that it has a gimmick at all, its main one is the use of the violin's bow as a pole vault of sorts. While there are no enemies to attack, you can stick it into any padded surface (regardless of orientation) to attach yourself to said surface, and launch yourself in a perpendicular direction by tilting the stick appropriately and pressing jump. This allows you to quickly scale walls, give yourself a big chunk of horizontal momentum, or simply ride a floating target over dangerous terrain. It's simple, easily repeatable, and feels great when you're using it to zoom across the screen; a good choice for a platforming gimmick to build your game around, if you're going to do so. That's not to say it's the only one - you'll also pick up the Super Mario Galaxy spin to maintain your momentum in the air, as well as a grapple hook near the end of the game - but generally speaking, they're small upgrades that don't really change much about how you get around.

The game itself is not especially difficult - not only is there an achievement for beating it in under two hours, there's only three major areas outside of the tutorial. While there's a decent amount of secrets if you REALLY want to backtrack through the first two areas once you get the grapple hook, the whole experience is done and over with in 4-6 hours, even if you play at a pretty casual pace. In a lot of ways, it feels like a great "entry level" precision platformer; while it's no Celeste, the challenge level is quite reasonable, and anyone who has experience in the genre should blow right through it with minimal trouble. The only real stumbling block comes right at the very end of the game - there's a chase sequence at the end of the third level that combines a wall that will kill you on touch with cannons that shoot vaguely at your current position, which can lead to a LOT of frustrating moments. The idea itself is fine, but it really needed to keep a tighter leash on the spawn jank, because I had way too many deaths that were a direct result of a cannonball being right where I needed to land or jump, and there's just nothing you can do except shrug and try it again.

The only other thing of note is that completing the secret challenge rooms gets you memory orbs, and turning in certain numbers of them unlocks new gameplay modifiers. I'm not entirely sure why they did it this way - some of them are very silly, such as "the entire game runs faster" or "the main character is now invisible", but most of them are stuff that feel like they should just be part of the game? Like, why is having a double jump relegated to the "assist mode" part of the menu? Surely that would have been a better upgrade than the twirl.

Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness

I love the concept of the Pokemon Colosseum games - rather than deliver a full-fat version of the mainline games, you tell a more directed story with a stripped-down, curated Pokedex and sprinkle in some interesting new mechanics via the Shadow Pokemon. I only had the first game as a kid, and I loved it; maybe even more than the actual Gen 3 games, because it was such a different experience. Some of that was almost certainly the "edgy" nature of Colosseum and XD: Wes (the main character in Colo 1) was older, he was an ex-Snagem member, and the whole thing revolved around stealing people's Pokemon (but it was okay because they were SHADOW Pokemon who closed their hearts and would attack people!), something that was very cool to a 12-year-old. I never did get XD - I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much anyway, considering that while it DOES continue the Cipher storyline started in Colo 1, it also ditches the Snagem setup in favor of yet another 10-year-old protagonist who sets out on an adventure, and that probably would have been a drag for younger me. And now, 20 years later, I can look at it with a more refined game design eye and say that yes, I definitely would not have enjoyed this as much as the first game.

This is not to exonerate Colosseum as some paragon of game design, it absolutely is not. It takes place in the same three environments, the Colo 1 versions of Shadow Pokemon were extremely half-baked, the level curve is nearly as fucked as Gold and Silver's was, and while we now have Abilities, we're still pre-Phys/Spec split. While still mechanically a Gen 3 game, XD does its best to address some of Colosseum's more glaring flaws: the region has been expanded with a number of new locations, it adds back wild Pokemon and in-game trades, it generally increases the number of available Pokemon families from 55-ish to around 100, and it actually iterates on Shadow Pokemon to make them more of a "thing" - more moves, type advantage against non-Shadow Pokemon, etc. Should be a slam-dunk improvement, right?

Unfortunately, no. One of Colosseum's most interesting ideas was that you started around L30, with almost every available Shadow Pokemon being either a second-stage evolution or unevolved but above their evolution level (so they would evolve immediately once you purify them and they level up). Ursaring is neat! Keeping your Teddiursa from L10 all the way up to L30 is less neat, and Colosseum's structure allowed it to bypass that and jump straight to the interesting part of team-building and battling. XD adds the lower part of the level spectrum back in, starting you with just a L10 Eevee, and while it quickly jumps you up to L15 or so after the first couple Shadow Pokemon, it took almost 10 hours (up to the second Cipher Admin fight) just to reach the point where Colosseum started - and I was 2-4 levels underlevelled for that fight when I got there.

The 20-30 level range is one of most brutal stretches for unevolved Pokemon; the power disparity between, say, a L24 Natu and a L26 Lanturn makes fighting back incredibly difficult, and XD gives you A LOT of late bloomers. You get some early-game mons that evolve at a fairly reasonable time (Poochyena, Houndour, Mareep, Shroomish), but some of these placements are just mean: Teddiursa (obtained L11, evolves L30), Baltoy (17, evolves 36), Numel (14, evolves 33), Spheal (17, evolves 32 and 44), Duskull (19, evolves 37), and Snorunt (20, evolves 42). While I hesitate to call any of them a trap, per se (because you can absolutely get away with having an underpowered Pokemon or two), XD is definitely one of the harder Pokemon games, and having that many potential duds on your roster makes the mid-game kind of a slog. Thankfully, once you get past that and everyone hits their evolutions, the game becomes much more interesting with the increased variety of Pokemon available - although it sort of runs into the opposite problem when it unlocks the final dungeon and the game is sort of like "oops we forgot to hand out half the Shadow Pokemon so every other trainer has two of them now."

But really, at the end of the day it's more of Colosseum. Genuis Sonority has refined it, cleaned up some of the mistakes from the first game, and built out some of the stuff that needed some work, but it is ultimately more of the same. XD is unquestionably a better game in that sense, but I think I ultimately still prefer the original. Whatever mechanical flaws it has from being the first stab at this formula are made up for in both the vibes and skipping the boring early-game grind, but if you like one, you'll almost certainly like the other.

Save My Scrap

Save My Scrap is a neat little adventure game released a few weeks ago, in which you play as an android technician making a house call to help repair a very old robot. The owner, Dr. Miomaru, tells you that she's nearly 20 years old and uses a lot of non-standard parts, so you'll have to do a lot of specialized repairs, and making matters worse is that Harima (the android) is very explicit about her end of the deal - she'll let you fix her most debilitating issues, but you can piss off with whatever "upgrades" or other changes you think she might need. Of course, she's an android; you don't HAVE to listen to her. She shuts herself off to charge while you're doing the repair, giving you free reign to make whatever changes you see fit while she's out. She doesn't want you to replace her old, ratty wig but...should you? How about that garbage disposal mouth upgrade that would vastly improve her energy recycling abilities? Dr. Miomaru doesn't want you to install it, but what's he going to do about it? He's not in the room with you when you do the repairs.

These sort of decisions are what shape the (roughly) 3 hour story. There's a radio that you can listen to on the way over to their apartment each day, and that unlocks a few new dialogue options, but by and large this is a story that goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to. I hesitate to say that it "hits all the cliches" for this type of story, but...well, it does. You've got all the classics:

etc, etc. You get the point. This isn't to take anything away from the narrative being told here, because there are a few interesting themes being explored, most notably one of consent and intimacy. Harima is putting her trust in you on multiple levels; not just that you'll hold up your end of the bargain and not change anything that you shouldn't, but on the far more literal sense of "she is letting you open her up and directly fuck with parts that keep her running." As far as an android is concerned, she is putting an immense amount of trust in the player, and it's up to you to determine whether or not you meet that trust.

I'm leaning on the story here a lot because there really isn't much actual game to work with - each of the repair "puzzles" are pretty straightforward, ranging from "place the tiles correctly so the pattern connects all the wires" to literal spot-the-difference pictures. None of them put up much of a challenge (minus the very last spot-the-difference one, which took me longer than the rest of the puzzles put together), and the variety is...lacking, to put it politely. But whatever, it's clearly just there for flavor and not at all the star of the show. I can forgive a little uninspired puzzle design.

For $10, it's a neat little experience. There's three endings to get depending on which choices you make along the way, so there's at least a little bit of replay value, and there's a bunch of concept art that unlocks once you clear the game at least once. It's a neat way to fill an afternoon, but probably won't last you much longer, and that's fine! It doesn't need to be anything more than that.

Dinocop

Dinocop: The dinosaur that's a cop. Not by choice, mind you - when dinosaurs were brought back into our modern world, they categorically refused to be police, meaning that one had to be specially bred and raised to do so. You and your (human) partner, Mark, are on patrol when you get a call: someone supposedly brought Human Meat into the hotel where they're hosting the Dinosaur Rights Convention, so Mark sets up a security perimeter while you get tasked with investigating this illicit meat claim.

From there, you get cut loose into a Majora's Mask/Outer Wilds sort of investigation loop - every character has a schedule they keep to throughout the day, and it's up to you to find leads, investigate suspects, and find out what's going on with the whole "human meat" thing. That said, it's not really that much of a detective game - the core mystery is pretty straightforward once you start making progress on it, so the real meat of the game is the collection of sidequests that you can solve along the way. Sure, we have to find out about the human meat, but surely we have time to find a child's lost plush toy, right?

The real star of the show is the game's writing, which is sharp and witty without going too far off the deep end. Jan Zero, the closest thing the game has to a real, central plot figure, is a politician for a human-controlled progressive party and is pushing a "Less Dino, Good Dino" policy to work together with the humans in control of government - and his entire selling point is "Well it's a lot better than the 'Kill All Dinosaurs' movement." Meanwhile, the protest group ABI-BLOP is led by brontosauruses who are tired of having their families sold to butchers because "brontosaurus meat is the most ethical meat to consume, since they have so much trouble otherwise adapting to the modern world." There are revolutionaries that you can co-opt into helping the investigation, punk rockers who are way over the hill and can only survive by having gigs booked by the establishment they once railed against, vandals who tag the courtyard with "ACAB - Even Dinocop," and waitresses who are just ready for this convention to be over and for all these assholes to leave. It's unhinged in a good way, the kind of writing that can effortlessly go from a shitpost about how you shouldn't be named after your job because now you're a janitor (briefly changing your name Trash Dino) to a line about how the police are fundamentally corrupt and even someone doing their best to help is at best a useful stooge to them.

Suffice to say that the writers' positions on societal ills is...not subtle.

As a game, Dinocop is kinda whatever; it's very much An Experience™, the kind of thing you watch someone else play and have a good time, but would never actually sit down and play yourself. As the person who was doing the playing, it's...fine. For $15, I finished the main plot in a little under 10 hours (although I could probably double that if I wanted to go clean up all the side missions), but I would guess a third (or so) of that time was spent going through the motions of the cycle, which is always a peril of these kinds of games. Pick it up on sale if you really want to give it a try, imo.