Summer Review Roundup
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
I do not know what made Nintendo put Wind Waker Classic on NSO instead of just porting HD like everyone wanted for literal years, but uh...man. What a game, huh? I love a lot of the game's ideas, but good lord does it fall apart in the back half. Basically everything after going to Hyrule the first time is mediocre at best (or outright bad in several places, frankly), and the OG Triforce Hunt has...aged poorly, let's say. The Earth Temple is a slog that requires you to do a lot of mirror puzzles with Medli, and the Wind Temple... Well, honestly, the Wind Temple is pretty okay? Makar sucks, but you don't need him for nearly as many puzzles as you do Medli, nor does he require aiming light beams (possibly at Link, who will then have to reflect them somewhere else), but god forbid you fall down in the main room accidentally, because it's really stupid to get back up and you're being harassed by Peahats the entire time - vertical level perils, moreso than anything wrong with the actual temple itself. And Ganon's Tower is four lazy rehashes of the bosses, followed by a couple puzzles that just outright tell you the solution and a shitty Puppet Ganon fight.
Thankfully, the game still ends on a high note with one of the best Ganon fights in the entire series, and the first half of the game is still really enjoyable! If I had bailed after Tower of the Gods, it would probably still be my second-favorite game in the series (behind Majora's Mask, of course), but having actually played it all the way through again, I would probably move it down to somewhere in the middle of the pack. It's charming as fuck and looks fantastic, but the clearly unfinished nature of the game is just too much for me these days.
Dear Me, I Was...
Dear Me, I was... is a piece of interactive fiction from Arc System Works for the Switch 2 that released at every end of July, and it's a really neat little experience. At first I was going to call it a visual novel, but it is, if anything, the opposite - Dear Me has no words at all, aside from a poster that says "contest" relatively early on. Instead, we're taken on a visual journey through an artist's life - from her early childhood to an elderly woman - exploring both her personal relationships, her relationship to art itself, and often how the two intertwine. The game is divided into ten chapters across its roughly 45 minute runtime, each exploring a different time period and type of art, ranging from "a set of colored pencils her dad gave her" to "her photographer boyfriend" and everything in-between. And it's surprisingly affective! There were multiple chapters that made me sniffle a bit, chief among them the midgame one that focused on her taking in a stray cat.
Given how short the game is, I won't say any more than that, but I really did enjoy it! For $8, it's absolutely worth giving it a go if you enjoy this kind of experience.
John Wick: The Series
Unrelated to the usual collection of games I've played this summer, my friend and I sat down to watch the John Wick movies. I'd never seen any of them, and unsurprisingly, they're pretty good! They fall into this weird gap where they're so videogame-coded that it's hard to analyze them in any other way, as if someone made a movie out the Hitman universe. As far as a setup for an action movie goes, "literally everyone in NYC (and later, the entire world) is an assassin and there's this big support network for them with rules they have to follow" is a pretty good one, although it became clear very quickly that every time they stopped to explain more of the lore, the movies got exponentially worse. 2 was by far the worst of them for this, as it immediately introduces the whole "marker" system to explain why John has to do this job, and then he doesn't even actually kill the target (she kills herself once she knows that he's there) before devolving into this weird battle royale-esque setup at the end of the movie.
And that battle royale setup never really goes away, even as the movies do get better. 1 is by far the most focused of the movies, as it revolves entirely around John getting revenge on a Russian mobster for his car and/or dog - it's unclear which of them is more important to him at the time. 3 picks up after 2's weird ending and does a pretty good job of turning it into something interesting: after John murders Antonio at the end of 2, an adjudicator from the High Table is going around to everyone who helped him and either killing them in response or just pissing them off in general. This, predictably, ends up pushing folks into John's corner as he and Winston make a stand at the New York Continental against the High Table's forces, and it fucking rules to see Lance Reddick actually pick up a gun and kick some ass after most of three movies.
Finally, 4 attempts to wrap all this up, but is way too long for what it is. The previous movies were all about two hours, but 4 is almost 2:45, and a ton of that extra time is...if not wasted, then at least not used very well. The opening chunk of the movie introduces Caine, the main assassin that will be opposing John this time and results in a battle at the Continental Osaka where the manager of the hotel is killed and John promises to kill Caine, lest the manager's daughter hunt him down herself; not only does this never come up again, the entire sequence could have been cut with no real loss to the movie. Similarly, there is a bit near the end of the movie where John has to fight his way across Paris to a church, and it's scripted really well! It's set to a backdrop of a radio show, there's some excellent musical drops that happen along the way, and I'm sure that if it had been two years instead of two days since I saw John Wick 3, it would have been really cool. But in the context of how and when we watched them, the sequence just drags on. Did we need this? Could we not have just cut straight to the church and saved us all 15 minutes? The only bit of it that made me sit up and yell "Fuck Yeah!" was the bit that was clearly a homage to Hotline Miami with the top-down camera and thermite shotguns. More ridiculous guns for John to murder people with, please and thank you.
If I was forced to rank them, I'd probably go something like 3 > 1 > small gap > 4 > big gap > 2. The Lore is just not interesting, and the whole thing feels like it's an adaptation of some comic that you've never read but they expect you to know about. Hell, this very well may be true, I've never bothered to look into it; Kingsman is another series that I liked a lot that did in fact turn out to originally be a comic, so I wouldn't even be that surprised.
Utter a Name
Released in February 2025, Utter a Name is a mystery game where you're tasked with investigating a mansion and figuring out what happened to all the inhabitants within. The inspiration is extremely obvious - this is an Obra Dinn-like, complete with a monochrome look (a shade of brown, in this case), time bubbles that show you what happened in the immediate vicinity of someone's moment of death, and a system that requires you to have a set of three correct victim names and their killers before it confirms them. Now, to be clear, this is a significantly lower budget affair than Obra Dinn; the game only costs $8, and both the explorable area and visual fidelity matches that scope. Believe me, I'm not shitting on the game because it is low budget - at least not directly, anyway. It's just that unfortunately, a lot of its largest flaws are a direct result of the choices made with that budget in mind.
The game dumps you into things with little fanfare. Once you explore the mansion and see all the time bubbles - which doesn't take long, it's only two floors and a couple hallways with branching rooms - it pretty much just leaves you to it from there. It never gives you any additional information or context, so if you get stuck (which can be a problem, especially late in the game), the game trusts you figure it out, for better or worse. And the "worse" bits tend to rear their head when it comes to identifying the people involved - male characters are especially tough to tell apart, and more than a little bit of our endgame sequence went by as "So I guess that's actually John in the basement? Do we have Lucas and Cyrus backwards?" It also doesn't help that the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The framing story is that of a man hosting the wedding of his best friend's son, but clearly something is going on behind the scenes. When you actually find out what that something is...well, it certainly explains why everyone died, but it does little to provide a coherent motive for the villain. Even having finished it (which took a little over 2.5 hours, start to finish), it's hard to tell what exactly they got out of the whole deal, especially given the number of people who died along the way to accomplish it.
Is it a bad game? No. I don't think it's a particularly good one either, but it's an absolutely acceptable $8 puzzle game, all things considered. But at the end of the day, Tanz's main takeaway from Utter a Name was "We should probably just play Obra Dinn instead," and it's hard to argue with that.