Winter Games Roundup
Three more months come and gone, as we spend yet another winter playing through a collection of smaller games. I honestly spent most of this time working on Trails: Beyond the Horizon (which took a nice, breezy 73 hours, much to my dismay), but we've got a few indie gems to talk about. I even enjoyed most of them!
The Messenger
Folks, big news - I've finally entered the wild world of indie games, circa 2018. Sabotage Studio's debut game is a good one...or at least, half of a good one, anyway. We'll talk about the game's problems in a second, because boy does it have some big ones, but can I just say that I love how the game leans into the Genesis-style soundtrack? Most games of this aesthetic lean into the SNES style of chiptune (or just have modern CD-quality music playing and bypass it entirely), so it's a delight to hear those crunchy baselines again. I was never a Sega kid myself, but my grandmother had a Genesis for a few years when I was growing up, and you almost never hear anyone use that style of music anymore outside of a couple very specific franchises (Etrian Odyssey comes to mind).
Anyway, yes, The Messenger. I won't pretend that I know enough about the Ninja Gaiden games that it's clearly inspired by to make any sweeping statements about how faithful it is to the source material, but I CAN say that they made a really enjoyable platformer for what it is. The game is challenging without ever getting stupid, you're rarely more than a couple rooms away from a new checkpoint, and even the boss fights were mostly pretty good - I only got stuck on one at the very end of the first half of the game, and even then I cleared it on my first or second try when I came back the next day. The controls are quick and snappy, the physics work well, and the power-ups do a good job of giving you additional movement options. If I do have any complaints, it's that there really isn't a good way to do midair combat; if you're gliding, you can only attack directly beneath you, and if you're jumping, you can only attack in front of you. Never above, and seemingly never in the direction that you actually want to attack while moving in the air. This is sort of mitigated by the fact that if you hit something while jumping, you actually get another midair jump, but that relies on there being something there for you to hit in the first place, which isn't always the case.
Once you clear each of the game's ten stages, we get the game's big twist - some shenanigans happen and you get set TO THE FUTURE...where everything is now 16-bit instead of 8-bit and the level design becomes a bit more open. I hesitate to outright call it a Metroidvania, considering it generally just involved finding the one new path that you can access in each zone, but in this half of the game, the goal is to collect six musical notes to complete a melody that will supposedly lift the curse on the land and save your village. This is...fine, I guess? It's not bad by any means, but the back and forth is unquestionably a lot weaker than the focused platforming of Part 1. And honestly, there isn't even really that much backtracking? If you go back to the start of the game and then basically work through the stages again in order, aside from a couple instances mostly centered around the Searing Crag, you really only have to go back to earlier levels with new items like...three or four times? Additionally, there are five new areas to explore on top of going through the first-half stages in the opposite time period, and the game does its best to wring as much playtime out of those stage replays as possible; when you DO have to backtrack, it feels like there's about half as many portals that teleport to specific levels as there really should be.
All in all, I 100% cleared the game in a little over 10 hours, so it certainly doesn't outstay its welcome, but it does kinda feel bad when I spent twice as long in the mediocre Metroidvania part of the game. Somewhere in there, there's a really cool Ninja Gaiden game that integrates the new levels for the second half into a more natural second playthrough, but that's not the game we got. It's still a lot of fun! I just wish it didn't have such a big jump between the two halves of the game.
TR-49
Inkle's latest production is part audio drama, part database thriller, fitting in neatly next to the Type-Help's and Her Story's of the world. The framing is pretty straightforward: the game opens with your character (Abby) facing a strange, computer-like device (the titular Textual Reconstructor, TR-49), while your companion (Liam) tells you that we are going to use it to try and find a specific book. There's other stuff going on - chiefly the implication that we're in some kind of fascistic future where people are reborn and live forever - but honestly, I found that to be a distraction from what I actually enjoyed about the game: the act of of finding and naming all 50 books contained within the TR machine.
The actual gameplay is as straightforward as it gets: you enter a 4 digit code consisting of the author's initials (TR, CC, etc) and the year that the media was published (1896 becomes 96, 1911 becomes 11, etc), and if it matches something in the system, it'll pull that page up along with a note from either Cecil or Beatrice (the people who actually constructed the machine) that briefly explains what the book/letter/poem/etc is and why it's important. But just finding the book isn't going to cut it - you also need to name it, and that's easier said than done. Names are often found separately from the books themselves - usually in a related note by Cecil, but sometimes it's mentioned in a copy of a Literary Review magazine or hidden in the notes for another work by the author (most commonly in the form of something like "this work, a sequel to [author]'s [previous book name]..."). This is a lot of fun! There's a lot of subtle connections to be made, and you've really got to pay attention to the flavor text to piece everything together. The game's internal fiction is very funny in places, and piecing together what's actually happening with the world at large is really neat once you get there.
The game's main problem is that it just does. not. shut. the fuck. up. For a game that's otherwise only about 5-6 hours long, it spends the first 30-60 minutes with Liam constantly calling you to be like "Abbi, this is really dangerous. We shouldn't be here." "Abbi, a car just went by, I think they know we're here." "Abbi, they found us. We need to get out of here as soon as possible." And this was WITH a patch that reduced Liam's yapping! I shudder to think what it was like at launch, because I spent almost the entire first hour ready to quit the game if it didn't just let me play it in peace. Thankfully, once he gets through his entire spiel, he tells us that we're specifically looking for a book called "Endpeace" before shutting up for good unless you need a hint. This part of the game was great! Unfortunately, once you DO find Endpeace (and start to realize what it is you have to do in order to actually finish the game), Liam is captured by a soldier, who then proceeds to pick up where he left off, constantly calling you to be like "I know you're in here." "I've already shot him, and I'm gonna do the same to you when I find you." Yeah, thanks, I know, now shut up and let me find these last three books.
There's other stuff to mention here, but none of them are really all that important. The actual story itself is equal parts a meditation on the power of literature and even just words themselves to shape our reality, and a really, REALLY unsubtle critique of LLMs and Generative AI - the books that were fed into the machine were done so by literally tearing them apart and feeding the pages in one by one. And honestly? For $7 it's hard to critique it too harshly - even if the focus on the story had ruined the investigative aspects (and to be clear, it doesn't), it's not like I was out $20 or $30 over this. On the whole, I think it was pretty mediocre - it wasn't bad, but there are several easy opportunities to improve the experience and it wouldn't take much to get it up to snuff. In a way, it's actually kind of funny - the improved production values, voice acting, and a proper framing story were probably intended to be the things that made it stand out from its more basic cousins like Type-Help, and those are the things I hated about it the most.
Öoo
Öoo is a deceptively simple puzzle platformer. You play a caterpillar whose body segments explode, and the entire game is built around two specific interactions: place a bomb and explode a bomb. You wouldn't think that there's that much ground to be covered from such a simple set of commands, and indeed, the game does start a little slowly. For the first couple levels, the game teaches you the various interactions that you can do with one bomb - you "jump" by exploding a bomb beneath you, you can boost yourself to the side by standing next to a bomb, and there are some puzzles that revolve around knowing when to leave a bomb behind so you can explode it later.
When the game introduces the second bomb, things get really interesting. You get double jumps, left and right side boosts, manipulating bomb stacks to move up and sideways at the same time, and eventually even carrying bombs on your head to destroy something without breaking the floor beneath you. This is by far the coolest part of the game, and each of the 9 levels introduces new ideas and techniques on almost every screen without ever having to say a word. And they're pretty lengthy levels! Even if you're picking up what it's putting down pretty quickly, there's still about three hours of content here (and deeper secrets if you REALLY want to look for them), so it's a nice, solid afternoon game. While no one will confuse it for a great epic, it's exactly as long as it needs to be, and no screen is ever "wasted" or feels like filler.
There's very little to say about it that isn't immediately obvious from just looking at the store page, so if it looks like your thing at all, give it a shot - you won't be disappointed.
Love Eternal
If nothing else, I can safely say this: Whatever the actual quality of Love Eternal may be, I haven't played anything like it in years. Uniqueness is a quality all its own, and regardless of my other quibbles with the game (of which there are plenty), it handily clears that bar with room to spare, just from the game's general structure. Steam bills it as a "psychological horror platformer" which...well, it's not inaccurate, I suppose. The game opens with our protagonist, Maya, being called to join her family for dinner. They're serving fish, which she doesn't really care for, but before she can sit down to join them, the phone in the hallway starts ringing. When she picks it up, there's no one on the other line - and when she returns to the dining room, there's no one there either. In fact, when she steps outside, her house is in ruins and she find herself in some kind of...shrine? Dilapidated castle? With nowhere else to go, all she can do is start exploring, which brings us to the platforming.
Now, when I read this description, I had assumed that we were dealing with something...Limbo-adjacent for lack of a better word. Horror really isn't my thing as a whole, so maybe someone out there has done it better since then, but if you asked me to describe a "horror platformer", that's probably the first place my mind would go. That is NOT what this game is; Love Eternal is a precision platformer. Taking more than a little influence from VVVVVV, Love Eternal is built around a gravity-swapping mechanic - but unlike the 2010 indie classic, you can both jump and swap gravity in midair, and even swap again if you hit a crystal on your jump arc. As someone who has played a lot of platformers, this would be an extraordinarily easy thing to fuck up, and to their credit, they more or less stick the landing: the jumps feel snappy and controlled, the gravity swapping has an appropriate sense of momentum in midair, and the platforming sequences are mostly pretty interesting, even if they do get a little samey before it's all said and done.
From there, the game is broken up in a pretty straightforward manner - you spend about 15-20 minutes doing platforming sections, then you stumble upon a mostly clear room which abruptly sends you back to Maya's house where you get another story cutscene. The game repeats this for about an hour and a half before it pulls its next trick, when you enter a door and find yourself in a Japanese adventure game. And on one hand, I deeply respect this because uhhhhh what the fuck? Not only is it a curveball I had no idea was coming, the adventure game format is much more compatible with the ideas that the horror story has been working with. On the most literal level, Maya is trapped in a shrine to a goddess who can bodysnatch people and like...yeah, sure, whatever, but on a deeper level there's themes of strained family relationships, being forced to spend to time with people you don't want to, and worst of all, the power of 4chan rage comics and internet memes.
And really, that's the game's biggest problem: while it does a lot of interesting things, it never really coalesces into a cohesive experience. I think first and foremost, the decision to make the "main" gameplay element be precision platforming hurts the mood a ton - I'm sure someone more pretentious than I am could make an argument about how having to replay a challenging room over and over is representative of having to interact with an unwanted friend or family member, but that's not how it feels to play it. You get a story section that's kind of interesting, then immediately put it out of mind when you spend the next 20 minutes dying to a spike's gigantic hitbox for the 15th time. Even when it DOES switch to something more accommodating to the horror atmosphere the game is going for, it is a complete genre change in a way that will make no one happy - if you enjoy the story, you have to spend an hour and a half doing difficult platforming to get here, and you're going to have to do more platforming to reach the end of the game. If you enjoyed the platforming, then sit down buddy! We're about to spend somewhere between a third and a quarter of the game's runtime on a completely unrelated sequence right in the middle of the game. The whole thing feels like three different games have been stapled together with no regard for they would gel; each of them are competent in their own right, but none of their strengths complement what the others are trying to do.
Anyway, once you finish the adventure game segment, you get spit back out into the platforming section where you have about 30 minutes of gameplay left, and this is the point where everything just goes off the rails. Whatever mood they were going for with the first 3/4 of the game of the game is completely lost as it descends into something equal parts meta, surreal, and horror-comedy - assuming there was any horror left at this point to begin with. I'm all for indie games getting weird, make the game that you want to make first and foremost, but I really just don't understand what they were going for here? At the end of the day, there's probably a reason that I've never seen anyone attempt something quite like this - when your closest point of comparison for game design is Nier Classic, you're more or less in uncharted waters. Whether or not that's a good thing will heavily depend on your tolerance for abrupt genre changes, but I did enjoy the experience on the whole, for what that's worth.