Summer Games Roundup
As we make our way through the beginning of September, I look back on the summer and basically go: "Wow. Did I do anything at all?" Which, of course, is nonsense. I watched a lot of anime for one, and while I didn't finish any BIG games (aside from the first one, which was more of a May/early June thing anyway), I did work through a lot of smaller stuff, especially on the stream. So let's give these games their due, all of which have at least something really cool about them.
South of Midnight
I had a lot more written for this, but I struggled to bring it together into a proper review so I think I'm just gonna do a quick one instead. Taking place in a vaguely supernatural version of the south, South of Midnight follows Hazel Flood, a young girl searching for her mother after she was swept away in their home following a hurricane. Along the way she will both befriend and fight a number of southern tall tales and legends, which is really cool! This is a game that firmly rooted in American culture in a way that very few others are, and I applaud the effort. The voice acting is great, the stop-motion effect used for cutscenes looks fantastic, and there are a number of original music numbers written for the boss fights that directly tie into their personal stories via the lyrics. From an aesthetic perspective, Midnight is just about everything you could possibly ask it to be.
Unfortunately, you then start playing the game, which is when the problems start. Some of them are no fault of the game itself - I played on Switch 2, which is making an admirable attempt to keep pace with the Xbox original, but mostly falls just short of the 30 FPS target. Lighting is a mess, especially indoors, and the texture pop-in is extremely obvious, even with the game installed to internal storage. Beyond that, the game itself is a fairly middling 2000's-era action platformer. It's executed competently, to be fair, but it could have fallen out of a wormhole from 2006 and absolutely no one would have known the difference, for good or ill. Combat's a little on the spongey side, the camera can be a bit of a mess, but the actual platforming is Fine™ when it matters.
The actual plot is pretty ho-hum for what it's worth, as well. While the premise and environments are cool as hell, the actual story that's being told is a by-the-books coming of age story where Hazel slowly learns more about what her mother (a social worker) was really up to and why she was never home - with the exceptionally boring answer of "because she was working overtime both to help pay for Hazel's track expenses and to save kids in abusive situations." This isn't a slight against the storytelling, mind you! Despite the mundane answers to Hazel's questions, it serves to show that Lacey had more going on than meets the eye, just as Hazel does now that she's accepted her role as a Weaver to help heal some of the latent trauma in both the people she meets and the land itself. It absolutely works, it's just not all that interesting.
In, for lack of a better way of putting it - "normal circumstances" - South of Midnight isn't really the kind of game that you go out and drop full price on. For $40, it's a little on the short side, and the actual "game" part of it is kind of lacking. But we don't live in normal times, and in the months since I initially wrote this review, Compulsion Games has since been spun off from their Microsoft overlords, and they need all the help they can get. It's a great experience that explores a part of the US and its culture that is criminally neglected in the gaming space (Norco, I guess, is the other major example of a Southern game?), and if the game interests you at all, I highly suggest you give it a try.
Minishoot Adventures
Minishoot Adventures asks a daring question: What if you made Zelda a top-down shoot-em-up? It's a surprisingly compelling question; one you wouldn't think would work all that well until you see how they're going about it, and even then, the concept depends a lot on sticking the landing. Thankfully, I'm pleased to admit they (mostly) do. Even as someone who broadly dislikes this kind of gameplay, they do enough with the Zelda half that I mostly enjoyed what it was doing once I got my feet wet, and for that it deserves kudos.
The way the game is actually structured is almost entirely pulling from the Zelda formula. You have an overworld with caves and secrets littered about, obstacles that you can't immediately deal with, and a quartet of temples scattered around the world that each give you some big power-up that will allow you to deal with said obstacles. It's actually quite remarkable how smoothly they convert what would otherwise be standard shmup power-ups into this format - depending on whether you explore the overworld or go straight to the first dungeon, your first two power-ups are the dash and boost (allowing you cross small rivers and gaps, as well as take ramps for larger jumps). You see unlit torches? Use your Power Shot (which doubles as a flamethrower) to light them and affect something else in the environment.
This works so well, in fact, that there are a few powers that you would think would be slam-dunk inclusions, but are inexplicably missing. The most notable one is a bomb or missile of some kind - there are cracked objects everywhere, so I assumed I was getting an explosive to deal with them, but it turns out that you just use the Power Shot to break those too. It's such an odd exclusion that I have to assume they couldn't find a good way to implement it or just ran out of steam in development. Frankly, the entire game kind of has that vibe - the first three sections are all well-built Zelda loops, complete with sub-objectives to unlock the temples and the closest thing that a game like this can really get to a "puzzle". Unfortunately, the fourth area doesn't have an actual temple (it's collapsed when you get there and you just get the dungeon prize for free), and both the final area and dungeon are essentially just a series of combat rooms. This is compounded in the postgame dungeon which is, again, just a big series of combat rooms - but this time they go on for entire minutes at a time! What an improvement!
I jest, but the game is pretty fun. It's like, 75% of a fantastic experience - and to be clear, that last 25% is pretty rough - and the ideas that it's bringing to the table are neat. I haven't played enough shmups to tell you how much more meat is on this bone, but I can think of at least a few things that you could easily add to flesh it out, so hopefully they get a chance to do a sequel.
Mind Diver
Mind Diver has, at the very least, an interesting premise: you're in charge of a missing persons case, and your main avenue of investigation is searching his girlfriend's memories by way of a technology that allows you to literally explore her broken and fragmented memories. To start with, all you know is that Sebastian (her boyfriend) attended a party the previous night, and now he's gone - and it's up to you to figure out what happened to him, and where he is now.
This process largely takes the form of exploring little memory dioramas, brief snippets of their life together ranging from "the moment they first met" to "scenes at the party where he disappeared." Each one gives you a snapshot of what was going on in their life at the time, but something is missing - as indicated by a big purple blob somewhere in the scene - and it's up to you to investigate each diorama (usually there's three or so available to you at any given time) and figure out what it is that belongs there to restore Lena's memories. As you work your way deeper into her memories, the scenes get more complicated, and you get a better sense of what's been going on between the two of them and what might have happened to Sebastian. It's actually a pretty good setup, mechanically!
The problem is that all of this hinges entirely on two of the least likable people I have seen in a long time. Lena is a journalist, a bit of a workaholic, and is entirely unsympathetic when Sebastian has a major loss in his life. Sebastian himself is kind of a bum, doesn't seem to be making any effort to get himself together after said tragedy, and actively lies and goes behind Lena's back when questioned about what he is doing. The people that he's seeing for support are at least vaguely cult-y (or at least cult-adjacent), and he has the audacity to ask Lena if there's still a chance for "us" when the whole thing is all said and done. Frankly, I'm torn between saying that they deserve each other and saying that everyone involved needs to go their own ways because a whole lot of bridges have been burned.
The whole game has a very "my first game" feel to it. From what I remember, it started as a student project and was expanded out to a full commercial release - which, if true, would explain an awful lot about the whole experience. It's Fine™, and I probably wouldn't play a hypothetical sequel without some heavy convincing, but it's not bad as far as debut projects go.
Neva
From the developers of Gris, it's another artsy platformer about death and grief, except you have a dog this time. Like, that's it, that's the entire pitch. There's more to it, obviously, but at the end of the day, it's MORE of Gris - and if you liked that, you'll probably like this too.
Unlike Gris (in which you generally put the world back together as you collected the various "colors" and processed her grief), the world in Neva is falling apart due to death and decay in the form of a black corruption. A young girl and great wolf are fighting back against these forces, but the wolf is killed in the prologue, leaving the girl to raise the wolf's cub - the titular Neva. Each of the game's four chapters comprise a season and the cub grows with each passing one, starting off as a pup who can't fight enemies and needs you to clear a path for them to do the platforming, culminating with Neva being just as large as their mother was, and just as capable in combat. It's very The Last Guardian-esque, with the caveat that our protagonist is at least mildly capable of fighting herself.
Like Gris, the whole thing is pretty ho-hum mechanically. The platforming is very basic, with your standard kit of abilities, and the combat doesn't fare much better. It IS better than Gris' implementation (in the sense that it has proper combat at all), but what you're getting is a very limited three-hit combo with a dodge roll and a down-stab. It does make the semi-interesting choice to tie your health regeneration to combat, which isn't nothing - if you can land six hits without taking damage, you'll regenerate one of your three health pips, which otherwise only come back at Neva's equivalent of bonfires. Is that better than simply forgoing combat altogether and being a straightforward platformer? Jury's still out on that one.
Ultimately, it's okay. I didn't dislike it or anything, and getting the little "achievement flowers" that are scattered throughout the game was an interesting challenge, but I don't think I would ever play it again - nor was I particularly motivated to play the "Prologue" DLC. $2 wasted, I guess? Maybe, but I'm not gonna cry over spilled milk.
Shattered Divinities
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but what we have here is a combat-focused Metroidvania with Dark Souls elements. And as much disdain as that sentence brings me to type, Shattered Divinities does a pretty good job of minimizing the pain points that the genre sometimes falls into. It's not very hard or very long (~6 hours for 100%), aided by a very generous map system that causes rooms to change color once you find everything of note in them - something I would love to see implemented in more games.
In theory, the exploration being so straightforward is supposed to counterbalance the combat, but the difficulty is tuned so low that it really doesn't matter. You get so many options to expand your capabilities - by the end of the game, you can have up to nine charms equipped, to say nothing of the game's incredibly overpowered Divine Sigils - that the only way it could possibly keep up would be if it tried to go for an absurd endgame difficulty spike like Hollow Knight, and it absolutely does not have the chops to pull that off. I played on the third difficulty (of four, "Hard"), and outside of one or two specific bosses, I pretty much steamrolled the entire game once I got in the groove. In a funny way, this completely changes the game's vibe: what's clearly supposed to be a soulslike experience instead turns into a comfort food game where you either need hubris or to be playing on the hardest difficulty to encounter any serious challenge.
On the story side, it's pretty much exactly what you're expecting - all the major bosses are either fallen gods or abominations made by them, and they have to be defeated to end the age of gods and usher in the time of men. Your character (and the people in your safehouse) are all homonculi created to kill the gods because they can't do so themselves, but all of this is juxtaposed against big, colorful spritework that struggles to convey the seriousness that the plot is going for. It's hard to be too concerned about the fate of the world when the last boss you fought was a sentient pile of tumbleweed, you know?
The end result of all this is a great weekend game. It won't take long to power through (especially on anything lower than the highest difficulty), it's fairly easy to get both endings, and the story that it does have is pretty neat...if a bit overdramatic for everything else the game is doing. For $10, you could do way, way worse.