We’re in the era of the cozy game. Developed and published by 5 Lives Studios, Cozy Caravan is the latest entry in the robust low-energy slice-of-life simulation genre re-popularized by Stardew Valley’s 2016 release, and is now available through Steam Early Access.

Similarities to popular games aren’t enough to make a mark, of course. Smart developers know that players wanting the same vibe doesn’t mean they’re looking for identical gameplay. A new game in this increasingly familiar genre needs a hook if it’s going to attract its own player base.

For Cozy Caravan, it’s all there in the name. Players begin by picking an animal avatar, after which they’re thrown into a charming agricultural world where they must travel between rural communities, collecting a variety of crops to sell at a weekly Saturday market, collecting a plethora of side quests along the way.

Life on the Go

Cozy games of the farming simulator variety are all about settling down in one place and making it your own; Cozy Caravan is the opposite, with players leaving their home to take up the mantle of traveling farmer’s marketeer.

Mechanics revolve around exploration, crafting, and upgrading your caravan. It’s here, with its  that Cozy Caravan most resembles other entries in the genre, with good deeds and affection building up into points players can spend on better and faster ways to get around the countryside. Cooking is another major element. Players combine and chop different ingredients to get higher sales at the weekly market.

The game’s tongue-in-cheek writing is as charming as its environs. It’s easy to fall in love with the expansive cast, who deliver purposefully silly dialogue with endearing sincerity. With side quests ranging from fetch quests to quick-timed hopscotch games, the player really feels like they’re part of a community.

Cozy Caravan’s aesthetic is on point, too. Stylized and colorful graphics propel players through the game, creating a friendly atmosphere that’s just a little different than other games out there.

Rolling into the Future

I only had one major crash in the game’s early hours, but the autosave hadn’t kicked in for some time, which resulted in a a frustrating level of repetition. I’d also like to see more variety in NPC dialogue, which seems to be purposefully subbing in for an in-game quest log, with dialogue even joking about it. It’s an interesting way to remind players of the tasks ahead, but when that’s not what you go to talk to characters for, the repetition is disappointing. These issues have every shot of smoothing out before the game’s full release, of course.

While Cozy Caravan’s novel conceit is iterative, most of the game will be familiar to fans of the genre. Many cozy game fans will be happy to find another relaxing experience still mechanics-focused enough to keep players engaged.

With the #farmlife vibes of Stardew Valley and the all-animal population of Animal Crossing (not to mention their distinctive way of speaking), Cozy Caravan’s unique travel-based take on the video game-genre version of curling up with a good book is poised to deliver itself a niche in the cozy market — right next to the vegetable one.

Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.

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The post Cozy Caravan Early Access Rolls into Player Hearts appeared first on COGconnected.

It’s no secret that I like Tomb Raider. 

I have a Tomb Raider screensaver on my computer. There’s a Tomb Raider collection on my shelves. I drive a car with L CROFT plates.  

So, I’m obviously playing Tomb Raider Reloaded, the recently released action arcade game developed by Canadian studio Emerald City Games and published by CDE Entertainment with input from main franchise developer Crystal Dynamics.  

While Tomb Raider Reloaded uses the pre-2013 depiction of Lara — snark and style instead of seriousness and survival — the game embraces modern gameplay rather than getting stuck in the past. Its rogue-like mechanics propel Lara through temples of Maya-inspired temple iconography, aiming for Vampire Survivors by way of Temple Run. 

I Hate Love Tombs

Its bright, stylized art style and endless menu seem like any other mobile game, but the comparison to Vampire Survivors isn’t glib; its one touch controls, rotating upgrade unlocks, and automatic firing resemble a licensed version of the explosively popular indie game, even if Reloaded began development long before Vampire Survivors’ launch. 

I suspect the common thread here is the also-explosively-popular indie game, Hades. The 2020 title’s addictive take on rogue-like mechanics has quickly populated the genre, especially as enough time passes for games inspired by Hades to finish development.  

Tomb Raider Reloaded is like both games in how it presents various weapon upgrades when players level up, allowing them to customize their playstyle with each run. This system is the beating heart of Reloaded. It allows for a compulsively fun mix ‘n match of weapons unlocks that turns fighting mobs into an adrenaline-fueled frenzy. It’s brought me joy waiting for prescription refills, in long grocery lines, and even had me staying on the toilet a couple minutes longer just to see what insanity my newest combo would bring.  

One problem: You have to stop moving to shoot. 

It’s a huge momentum killer to go stationary to do damage when Reloaded’s motion feels so good. In slower runs I’ve even found myself stopping for several seconds at a time as I let the automatic firing do its thing, leaving me disengaged and dissatisfied. 

I Only Play for Sport

But Tomb Raider Reloaded’s biggest flaw is its monetization. I’m playing the Netflix version of the game, which has all its in-app purchases removed but without any of its structure altered. As a result, Reloaded is bogged down with out-of-combat upgrade systems. Just opening the app means seeing a half dozen different exclamation marks point to different icons. 

It feels like Tomb Raider Reloaded has every progression hook known to man. There are daily tasks, timed crafting, active events, and a variety of weapon upgrades, each of which take a different manual type to upgrade. After upgrading Lara’s guns, backpack, amulets, bracelet, two different types of ammo, and mask, I’m surprised Reloaded doesn’t have me upgrading the bonuses on Lara’s belt buckle. 

My only other explanation for this smorgasbord of options is a fear that people will fall off the game. There have been times I’ve opened Reloaded, seen all the notifications, and immediately closed the app to play something else. That’s a bad sign.

Perhaps Not Just Yet, Then

It’s frustrating that Reloaded leans into notoriously toxic aspects of mobile gaming. Overall, the gameplay itself is a lot of fun. Reloaded is challenging and varied, and the roulette wheel of upgrade options keeps the excitement going. 

Best of all, Tomb Raider Reloaded autosaves players’ progress, holding your spot if you must return to whatever task you were waiting for that required you to whip out your phone to begin with. It’s a much-appreciated feature that understands the needs of mobile gamers, but it unfortunately didn’t always work.  

I closed my phone after beating a boss, only to open the app later to find them restored to life. Lara’s health bar, though, was where it had been after the fight, not before — ultimately costing me a run.   

Tomb Raider Reloaded has a lot of potential. Overall, it needs more focus on smoothing out the last of its gameplay issues and less on the progression hooks. Opening the app to that cluttered menu only reminded me that I can get the best parts of Reloaded elsewhere. The same goes for Lara herself.  

The post Tomb Raider Reloaded Review — Mobile Madness appeared first on COGconnected.

When I previewed Hindsight, I said it promised to be a thoughtful exploration of memory, childhood, and family relationships. Creative director Joel McDonald and narrative writer and designer Emma Kidwell deliver on that promise. Hindsight is a narrative exploration game spanning the entirety of a woman’s life through memories that unfold like flower petals.

Hindsight followers Mary, a woman who must sort through her childhood home after the death of her mother. Like most of us, she’s neither an exceptionally good person nor an exceptionally bad one. She’s just a person who had to stop everything in her life to deal with the death of a parent.

On an emotional level, Hindsight hits the mark. Players follow snapshots of Mary’s life from her birth to her mother’s death. We chase childhood memories with her, experiencing defining moments of her past. But we also see some of those soft, formative memories that blur on the periphery, remembered as feelings rather than as visuals or events.

Flowing Through Time

The closest comparison to Hindsight is that it feels like playing a Terrence Malick film. The game is at its best when you let the flow of narration of memories wash over you. This is especially true near the end, where the game morphs away from a more straightforward selection of Mary’s memories. It becomes almost stream-of-consciousness, culminating in Mary coming to terms with everything she’s been forced to confront.

Hindsight’s narrative is so melancholy that it sometimes dragged me down. While there were moments of levity, the overall tone was somber, and that energy suffused every part of the story. Playing chapters back-to-back was sometimes difficult, but I still recommend finishing it in as close to one sitting as possible.

Despite the heaviness, I enjoyed it. Hindsight isn’t just about sorrow. It’s about appreciating aspects of your past, ones you may have missed in the moment. And it’s about focusing in on how to apply what you’ve learned to your future. Things that big are worth working through the sadness. Hindsight not only succeeds, but does so with grace.

Narrative and Interactivity

As a game, Hindsight is on the low end of interactive. At the beginning of each chapter, players have different options that they can lead Mary toward, but it’s really the order of how you experience the game, rather than what you experience, that changes. There are also passing puzzles throughout, simple enough to be built into the flow of the game but requiring players to stay engaged.

Where the game can snag is when that flow is interrupted. Most of the gameplay is formed by finding apertures, or windows into the past. These could be found in anything, from wind chimes to the blade of a knife. Once you locate the telltale shimmer, you adjust your angle until the scene snaps into place.

My biggest moments of frustration came when I couldn’t immediately figure out where the next aperture was. Sometimes they were so small, or in such a strange place, that it took me out of the moment by forcing me to sit and search for the way out.

It’s telling that the most frustrating part of Hindsight is when I was most engaged in the gameplay. The game is more interested in telling its story than entertaining its player. If you didn’t enjoy how Firewatch ended or you’ve called Gone Home a walking simulator, Hindsight probably isn’t up your alley.

With the end of each of Hindsight’s chapters, you choose a different memento to put in your suitcase. You must choose carefully: there isn’t room for everything. It’s a clear, but poignant, metaphor for life itself. We can’t take everything with us, physically or mentally.

Hindsight struggles to find a place within traditional expectations of a video game, but aside from some finicky controls, it achieves what it sets out to do. It’s up to you to decide if that journey sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

***Switch code provided by the publisher***

The post Hindsight Review – Unfolding The Past Through Memory appeared first on COGconnected.

Jackbox releases are more than just games: they’re memories. Released June 30, The Jackbox Party Starter is the newest entry in Jackbox Games’s formidable lineup of irreverent party games. 

My first time with one of Jackbox’s yearly released multiplayer games in England, hanging out at a friend’s flat and trying to make my crush laugh with my Quiplash puns. In the years since, I’ve played Jackbox titles with my Overwatch six-stack, brought it to employee housing at an amusement park, and used it to connect with elderly relatives.  

Played right, Jackbox titles aren’t just games. They’re a facilitator of friendship itself.  

Starting the Party 

The Jackbox Party Starter contains three previous standout titles: Quiplash 3, Tee K.O., and Trivia Murder Party 2.  

Usually, Jackbox releases its games in curated packs. They usually come with five new multiplayer titles that can be played with around 3-8 people. The best part? They only require one person to own the game. Sometimes the titles won’t be new but reworks of earlier games, which is how we come to have the third iteration of Quiplash and the second of Trivia Murder Party.  

I love these games, but this model can make it difficult and expensive to play the games you want. Most people, in my experience, have one or two games per pack they really want, but to play them, you must buy the entire pack.  

It’s fantastic that only one person must own the game, but there’s a drawback. When you’re playing online, you must figure out how to get it so everyone else can see it. If I want to play Monster Dating Monster, my friends and I use my Steam account. If we want to play Tee K.O. we use my besties. And if we want to play Mad Verse City, we summon an Eldritch being. 

The Jackbox Party Starter seems like a response to this. It feels like an acknowledgment that Jackbox Games are getting in their own way with their release model. All three of the titles released in The Jackbox Party Starter are among their most popular games. It’s a great package to entice new fans.  

Before, buying a Jackbox Party Pack felt like a big decision. You picked based on a pack’s strongest titles, never quite happy with the games in other packs that you’re missing out on. Combining three of Jackbox’s most popular games in The Jackbox Party Starter breaks from the pattern, allowing fans to purchase a title containing all winners. 

And Quiplash 3, Tee K.O. and Trivia Murder Party 2 are winners. 

Cream of the Crop 

All Jackbox games are played so that only one copy of the game is needed. The owner boots up whichever pack they have on the console of their choice for the players, who can be virtual or in-person. There’s an option for a non-playing audience as well, which is great for streaming from Twitch. Players use their phones to go to jackbox.tv with a special room code that lets them into the game.

Quiplash 3 is the most updated version of Jackbox’s classic comedy game, where players are given prompts to fill out answers to, with all the answers presented and voted on by the rest of the players, as well as any audience members (which, great for streamers, can run up to 10,000!).  

Tee K.O. is a drawing-based game where players are given time to draw anything they want, with suggestions if desired. This is followed by the chance to produce as many short slogans as you can in the time limit. Finally, players can combine a random selection of slogans and drawings using t-shirts as canvases. The t-shirts are then presented to the players to vote on, and the winner proceeds to the next around. You can buy the shirts after the game ends, a fantastic feature. I myself own a t-shirt with a drawing of the globe where the only landmass is Ohio, accompanied by a caption underneath that just says “Wack.” 

Trivia Murder Party 2 is a trivia game à la Rod Serling, set in a gloriously macabre Shining-esque hotel. A fiendishly lighthearted narrator asks players trivia questions where you either answer right or go to the “Killing Floor,” which introduces a series of minigames you must solve in order to avoid imminent slaughter. 

Neither this or the original Trivia Murder Party are my first choice. I’ve always found the minigames too frustrating or random to really enjoy (and I know that’s the point!). However, I’ve also seen firsthand how nuts people go for the murder trivia aesthetic. It fully earns its place in The Jackbox Party Starter as a delightful, polished update to the original. 

It’s hard to speak to the quality of these titles, as they’ve all been released before. Each of these titles are fun and iconic, and a good, if slim, representation of the best games Jackbox has to offer.  

New With the Old

Jackbox Games boasts that all three titles have been updated with new settings and features. On the surface, the biggest change is the sleek, friendly interface that greets players on the title screen. Some of the new features include moderation, subtitles, content filtration, and settings menu upgrades. These updates won’t be obvious for most people, but they will be huge improvements for certain fans, especially streamers. I hope these changes, as well as the all-encompassing localization into French, Italian, German, and Spanish, make it into future Jackbox Party Packs.   

However, these upgrades are so comparatively minor that it begs the question: who is this for, exactly?  

The most logical audience would be people who don’t have any Jackbox games at all: people, who, for whatever reason, have missed the zeitgeist until now. The Jackbox Party Starter is perfect to introduce newcomers to the franchise, but what about once they’re hooked? 

A Few Games Short 

The Jackbox Party Starter has three stellar games, but it’s still only three out a couple dozen. For example, it’s missing many popular games like Fibbage or Drawful. This means new fans will still have to buy more packs if they liked what they see. And because the pack is all previously released games, they risk repurchasing a title. The bite-sized approach for new fans may be a good strategy for some. However, it ignores how bad it feels to buy the same thing twice.  

Maybe the appeal is for people like me, people who have some Jackbox games on Steam and would like them on a console, or vice versa. If so, that seems like a small demographic.  

While it’s nice to see Jackbox Games try to revisit its frustrating business model, this solution won’t satisfy anyone.  

I’ve heard the idea go around that Jackbox should start a subscription service instead of releasing new packs every year. While subscriptions are at an all-time high, I would love to have access to the full catalogue of Jackbox’s endlessly entertaining games. Right now, I squirrel them away one at a time, forever comparing notes with my friends to figure out exactly who has what.  

The Jackbox Party Starter is a great first entry into the franchise, or as separate console addition to a collection. However, its slick presentation and quality-of-life updates might not be enough to appeal to all but the most hardcore of Jackbox fans.  

***A Nintendo Switch copy of The Jackbox Party Starter was provided by the publisher.***

The post The Jackbox Party Starter Review – Reunion Tour appeared first on COGconnected.

Hindsight is a game about memory. Our memories ambush us. Going back to one’s childhood home is willingly subjecting oneself to a deluge of memories. They can be unlocked by something as simple as a cracked porch step or living room carpet. For me, it’s personal. I recently moved back to my hometown, and I pass my childhood just driving to the mall.

Hindsight is a new indie project by creative director Joel McDonald and narrative writer and designer Emma Kidwell. It explores the emotions we feel when rediscovering somewhere from our past. Because of my move, I’ve spent a lot of time reliving memories recently, and Hindsight really spoke to me.

In a hands-off demo presented by Joel and Emma, I was able to see the groundwork for Hindsight. In it, the protagonist, Mary, goes back to her childhood home after her mother dies. The game represents that sudden feeling of unlocking an old memory by treating physical objects around her as apertures, or literal windows into the past.

This creates a back and forth between the timeline of Mary’s life. The player can look into her past, seeing memories that are meaningful to her. Wind chimes may unlock a memory of playing in the yard. From there, Mary might recall learning to ride a bicycle. Each event can take place at a different age in Mary’s past, making it a constant back-and-forth. Finding and exploring these apertures is the basis of moving forward in this game. 

Universal Experience

Joel and Emma informed Hindsight with their own lives, calling it “fictionalized with a kernel of truth.” From what I’ve seen from the hands-off demo, this fictionalization serves to make Mary’s experiences feel nearly universal. 

We’ve all experienced that moment where something resonates from our past. We know what it’s like to be pulled into a memory as we try to recapture “ineffable feelings from childhood,” as Joel and Emma put it.  

The “walking simulator” genre is only getting more popular. While some use the term pejoratively, I think Hindsight has a unique take on the genre by using non-linear storytelling to shake up the timeline. Mary, the protagonist, moves back-and-forth through memories and her current day. It feels closer to replicating how the human brain uses thoughts and memories. It also serves to activate the instinct for exploration in the search for the next memento. 

Hindsight is 20/20

My initial worry is that the project might not be very interactive. However, Joel and Emma explained that the game also has small puzzles inside the apertures to keep players engaged. I wonder if that will be enough to make the game feel more lived-in by players themselves. My worry for Hindsight is that, without enough compelling interactivity, it may make players feel too much on the outside looking in. While Joel and Emma stated this to be their intention, there can be too much of a good thing. 

After seeing the demo, I had enough of an itch for Hindsight that I played the fifteen-minute Packing Up The Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day of Your Apartment, recommended by Joel as an inspiration, as well as Joel’s previous work, the iOS Editors’ Choice game Prune. 

The final game will be released on Steam, Switch, and iOS, and it should be about three to four hours long.

Hindsight looks to be a thoughtful exploration of memory, childhood, and family relationships, and I look forward to playing it in full. 

Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.

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The post Hindsight is a Thoughtful Exploration of Memory appeared first on COGconnected.

Zorro The Chronicles, developed by BKOM Studios, is a combat and exploration-based action game aimed at children. It’s also based on the animated series of the same name.

If you’re reading this as an adult with no kids, same as me, you might ask: wait, the animated show? I associate the masked legend of Zorro with the Antonio Banderas films from the early 2000s, and I hadn’t realized anything major had come to American audiences since.

Apparently, the TV show that Zorro The Chronicles is named after is popular enough to warrant a video game. It came out in 2016 and it was cancelled after one season, but hey, again, I’m a childless adult, so it’s fully possible there’s an adolescent Zorro cult following on the streets. I just don’t think it’s likely, and I’m skeptical there’s enough interest for this game in 2022.

All of this aside, I’m fond of the Zorro franchise, and the first level of the Zorro The Chronicles game had me smiling. The animation is cartoonish and charming, and the combat is simple but satisfying. Enemies go down with cheesy knockout finishes like pulling down enemies’ pants, knocking them into fountains, or carving a Z into their uniform before they fall down in disarray.

It’s s children’s game, but it doesn’t condescend to its players. The player can deface wanted posters around each level, but they take some exploration to find. There are also ‘bonus areas’ in each level that come with an optional objective like knocking three guards into a cactus or sneaking up on them for a stealth knockout.

In this way, it’s a less lethal Assassin’s Creed.

Zorro, Who?

Almost all the story beats are contained in a short description before you start each mission. I think this is a baffling choice: some of the children playing Zorro The Chronicles may be too young to read that text. And for anyone not familiar with the show, it’s not enough context for the events of the game.

There’s a bad guy, and teenage Zorro is the good guy, but that’s all you get for character motivations. You can play as Diego or his twin sister Ines. While I loved playing as Ines, I have no idea who she’s supposed to be, and there’s no exploration.

I just didn’t have any reason to care about what was going on. There feels like an unspoken assumption that the Zorro franchise is enough of a backstory for anyone playing. That’s a very limiting approach for audience appeal, and it doesn’t include me.

A Messy Middle

Based on the first level, I was looking forward to the rest of the game. If my problems were only story-based, though, I’d be happy to let them go. Unfortunately, it had shown me almost everything good there was to see already.

What felt charming at first quickly became repetitive. I gave it some leeway at first – this is a kid’s game, after all. Zorro The Chronicles also has a leveling-up currency for progression, so it’s not like the game isn’t trying to keep things interesting. But even with the new moves introduced, the combat gets stale almost immediately.

I felt like I spent most of my time in the game fighting off group after group of enemies with little variation or interest. Unlike Assassin’s Creed, which has story cutscenes and other things to do in its settings, the stealth, combat, and wanted posters are everything Zorro The Chronicles has to offer.

Fickle and Frustrating

I also didn’t enjoy the optional objectives much. Oftentimes they’d require a very specific action – like the aforementioned knocking enemies into a cactus – with only a small number of guards to use to achieve that. Sometimes I’d have to stop a stealthy approach to try it, and I’d be aiming them towards a cactus only to defeat them directly next to it, losing out on both my stealth and the objective. Having to perfect such finicky feats with imperfect controls was consistently annoying, and I gave up on this aspect of the game.

This was not the only place in Zorro The Chronicles where the controls were finicky. The camera didn’t adjust with the combat, and sometimes I’d be looking at a hay bale or be aimed in the opposite direction of the enemies. I gave up on stealth because the stealth knockout button prompt felt inconsistent, and I was constantly full-on attacking enemies I had been fairly confident I was about to quietly knock out.

I got stuck in the environment more than once. This was immensely frustrating because the game only loads by checkpoints, and restarting them was always demoralizing. One time I was suddenly unable to move right before the end of the level, literally five feet from Zorro’s horse. I had to scoot in the horse’s direction by attacking over and over again until I got the button prompt.

A Disappointing Escapade

There are charming aspects to the game past its initial impression. I considered dropping it early on, but I’m glad I didn’t: some of the later settings are very picturesque, and there are funny moments throughout. While the missions followed a pattern, I could see an attempt at differentiating the levels.

I wish this game felt better to play; I wanted it to succeed. Unfortunately, there aren’t many people I can recommend Zorro The Chronicles to. If your child is a fan of the show, the game is worth picking up, but if you’re a more general fan of the Zorro franchise, it’s worth waiting for another outing – Zorro always rides again.

**PS5 code was provided by the publisher**

The post Zorro The Chronicles Review – Lackluster Adventure appeared first on COGconnected.

I’ll be the first to say it: I’m sick of indie platformers. It’s the low-hanging fruit of the video game world. Easy to market and easy to make (I say, having never developed so much as a photo myself). But Lila’s Sky Ark is not that.

Lila’s Sky Ark, developed by Monolith of Minds, is an indie, but not a platformer, which is already a point in its favor. It’s an action adventure game with the vibrant color palette and interesting world of many of those indie darling platformers I’ve set aside, but it’s based around exploration and puzzles integrated into its environment.

Keep It Basic

You play as Lila, a little girl whose must save Sky Island with her father’s instruction and the help of strange creatures and spirits she find along the way.

To be honest, I really had to think to write this summary. While I was playing the game, a lot of things about the basic premise weren’t clear to me. Why did her dad look like a machine? Why did this magical island exist, and why was Lila on it? What are the Spirits of the Forest? What exactly were the enemies after?

All of these questions are reasonable from the setup of the game, and I did eventually figure out the answers, but it made for a disorienting opening as a player.

What I did understand was this: I was playing as a little girl who had to save her home from some bad guys. That was enough to get me going, and I’m glad I did.

Calling something “unique” has become more of a buzzword than anything, but I mean it when I say that Sky Island is full of distinctive imagery and characters. I was constantly finding new, intriguing scenes and characters, whether it was a giant in a rocking chair, a crying eyeless witch, or worshippers of the pineal gland.

At first, I found the puzzles as disorienting as the story. While I prefer games that integrate the puzzles into the world the way Lila’s Sky Ark does, its instructions on how to navigate its world aren’t clear. I spent a lot of time backtracking because I didn’t understand how to use the map.

Later in the game I got the ability to lift heavy objects and jump, but until I got those, I constantly ran into areas blocked off by those abilities. Because I didn’t understand the map, exploring an area only to find it blocked off until a later time was frustrating.

A Psychedelic Adventure

At first, I thought I didn’t like this game, and that I wouldn’t be recommending it. But as I kept playing, something happened: the gameplay started making sense. This correlated directly with the map-making sense. Searching out the next area using the map prevented a lot of the infuriating backtracking.

The fighting in Lila’s Sky Ark is projectile-based. I was always on the hunt for more and better projectiles. The throwing mechanic feels good – although pulling out the weapons from the backpack wheel can take a hair longer than I want – and the boss fights were genuinely satisfying when I finished them.

The projectiles came in the form of different fantasy objects like Titan Eyes and White Dwarfs, all with accompanying flavor text. The whole world, not just the characters, is drenched in this psychedelic palette. Once I understood the lay of the land, I wanted to see more.

There’s so much off the beaten path in this game; it rewards exploration. Because the world is so interesting, the rewards go hand in hand with the joys of looking around for its own sake. It’s a dark and lyrical universe, with great atmospheric attention to the weather, rain effects, and a great soundtrack. Lila’s Sky Ark demands exploration, and it earns it.

And while I described the story as hard to follow earlier, it gets clearer with time. The emotional core in Lila’s Sky Ark centers around Lila’s difficult emotions surrounding her mother, and it’s handled well. Inside all of these swaying mushrooms and sentient animals is something special.

At first, Lila’s Sky Ark made me think I was getting sick of indies in this style in general, not just platformers. But the more I played it, I realized its weak opening was hiding a real gem. Once you dig into it, Lila’s Sky Ark is full of interesting characters, sweet story beats, and engaging gameplay.

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher for review***

The post Lila’s Sky Ark Review – Burying the Rainbow Lead appeared first on COGconnected.

Wunderling DX is a free update to Wunderling, an indie platformer released by developer Bitwave Games released in 2020. It introduces a new world, cosmetics, and other features into the game, giving Wunderling new life in 2022.

The premise is simple: you play a goomba instead of Mario. A goomba who can jump. 

What makes the goomba you play as different, though, is that it can’t control the direction it moves in. The little creature (not actually a goomba, and I’m going to stop calling it that now) moves back and forth without your control. This subverts traditional platformer expectations as the player navigates each stage while working with and around this mechanic. 

Not being in control of your character’s direction makes you get creative. Even better, Wunderling DX gets creative with you. The levels get increasingly inventive and continue to play with the goomba-esque (last one, sorry) nature of the game. Wunderling DX starts its players off with only one usable button – the jump – before slowly upgrading your little lad. Eventually he’s able to zoom around and wall jump, among other bounces. 

I only have one disagreement with the game’s mechanics, and it’s that you die if you don’t consume a flower for too long. Basically, if you get stuck, you’re punished for it. Trying to solve puzzles was frustrating because I’d get interrupted by my own flower-starvation deaths every few seconds. Then, finally, after dying of starvation five times, I’d figure it out, only to die one last time just as I’m nearing the end. It made what should have been satisfying moments incredibly frustrating.

Not all Heroes Eat Vegetables

Many platformers don’t include or consider their plots much, but Wunderling DX has fun with its premise. You play the first level as Carrot Man, a Mario-esque hero with a smart mouth on a quest to free the obviously named Princess Pea. An evil witch evolved your little player character from a basic lackey in an attempt to stop the hero. Technically, you’re the bad guy. But here’s the thing: Carrot Man is also kind of a jerk. I was invested in Carrot Man’s whole deal, and I laughed whenever I was supposed to. Wunderling DX’s story probably isn’t worth playing the game for by itself, but it adds quite a lot to the gameplay and atmosphere. 

I didn’t play Wunderling DX before the big update, so I don’t know what it was like before the new content dropped. I believe the cosmetics are new, or at least upgraded, and I think that was a neat addition. You get cosmetics through bonus chests you can go out of your way to find, rewarding players who want more challenging gameplay with fun clothing.

Wunderling DX is a fun, competent platformer that any fan of platformers will find unique and compelling. But if you’re not already inclined towards platformers, you’re not going to be swayed by this one. I know this because I’m realizing something about myself: platformers aren’t really my thing. I wasn’t invested in unlocking every secret, so I didn’t strive for the extra chests.. The puzzles were well-built and challenging, but I wasn’t in it for the right reasons

This is a personal problem, of course, but it says plenty about the game, too. Wunderling DX isn’t the kind of game-changing platformer that’s going to draw in all kinds of crowds. That said, the story adds a fun punch to the gameplay while its mechanical twist is worth checking out for fans of the genre. If you love platformers, Wunderling DX is a well-designed, inventive one of those. If you don’t, it’s not going to change your mind. 

***Nintendo Switch code provided by the publishers***

The post Wunderling DX Review – A Goomba Surprise appeared first on COGconnected.

Daymare 1994: Sandcastle is a third-person horror survival game that hit the Steam Next Fest this last week. It’s also a prequel to another third-person horror survival game, Daymare 1998. Daymare 1998 was released in 2019 by Invader Studios. Both games are throwbacks to 90s’ era survival horror games. Think Resident Evil, or Resident Evil 4. 

Daymare 1994’s demo throws the player into the action. You control Delila Reyes, a young woman of military descent belonging to an organization named H.A.D.E.S. In the demo, she’s cornered into a large hanger while on the run from energy zombie-esque creatures that have already killed a unit of the U.S. president’s men. 

The energy zombies run straight toward the player, grabbing Reyes on contact. They suck a good deal of health before you can get them off. When they die, they transmit their murder energy to their nearest ally unless Reyes uses her frost wrist gadget to dispel them. I love the frost powers in this demo. My favorite moments were freezing zombies one heart stopping moment away from destroying me, then clubbing them or shooting them at point blank range. 

Mechanics like that show a lot of potential, but Daymare 1994: Sandcastle’s demo has a long way to go. I didn’t play the original, so story wise, I don’t know what’s going on. Of course, the demo drops the player mid-game, so that’s somewhat understandable. I’ve seen this type of game enough times that I struggle to care about Reyes or her surroundings, and the combat wasn’t grabbing me. Despite my reservations, she does have a couple of funny one-liners. There’s a chance that she’s a fully realized character in the larger context of the game, and I hope that’s true. Right now, though, she reads as a flat POV character we’ve seen before.

Disappointing Action

Compelling stories aren’t a must in games like these, but I found the combat disappointing. The delay in switching between weapons and frost in combat makes fighting more frustrating than fun. When playing with a controller, the camera is jerky and disorienting, like you’re still moving it with a mouse. I also ran out of assault rifle bullets almost immediately any time I had them. Forced scarcity is a valid design tactic for games, but here it felt heightened to distract from the same-ness of the enemies. Everyone you fight in the demo is an energy zombie, and freezing them is almost always the solution. 

Retro games can’t just look and play like old games. They have to make an older style work with modern gameplay. I’d like to see more of that in Daymare 1994: Sandcastle. In its current form, it feels like it’s hiding some rougher design and mechanical choices behind the idea of feeling “retro.” I’ve tried not to lean too much on a Resident Evil comparison, but the comparisons are unavoidable, and they don’t come out in Daymare 1994: Sandcastle’s favor. There’s not a lot to differentiate this demo from other clones since RE’s heyday except that it’s coming out in 2022. 

Overall, the demo is clunky and unfinished. If you love these types of games, though, there’s still hope. If Invader Studios can polish their enemy designs and combat, there’s something special hiding in their freezing mechanics. I hope we see it by the time Daymare 1994: Sandcastle releases. 

***PC code provided by the publisher***

The post Daymare 1994: Sandcastle Leads Horror Fans into Familiar Fights appeared first on COGconnected.

When God of War came out, it was one of the biggest releases of the year. Nearly every news outlet put it in contention for best game of 2018. It won many of these nominations, including the Game Awards title. It was a huge console-selling exclusive for the PlayStation 4, and it revitalized the franchise without losing what made it compelling.

Everything I said just now is what I’ve been hearing people say for the last three years, but I’d never played the game myself. Thankfully, Sony Santa Monica changed that by finally releasing God of War on PC.

If you’re like me and you managed to avoid one of the best games of the last decade so far, the story is simple. Kratos is a Greek god of war traveling with his son Atreus through the harsh, cold world of ancient Scandinavia. The player fights using combo attacks with Kratos’s new Leviathan axe and unlocks the open-but-not-quite-open-world with various puzzles. The rebuilt combat is incredibly fun, but the real star is the growing and nuanced relationship between Kratos and Atreus.

It’s a Great Game, Boy

One of the most striking differences between God of War and other triple A releases of the same time is the seamlessness of the scripted scenes. Instead of awkward loading time before a cutscene, the flow of the gameplay and visuals are almost indiscernible. It’s incredibly impressive that I couldn’t always anticipate the moment when the game returns to the player’s control.

God of War accomplishes what all huge game environments should do: it makes the player want to explore. Every time I loaded up the game I planned to get straight into the main quest, but I always got distracted by the nooks and crannies hidden in every corner, lush or barren.

The game’s not completely perfect. The map disoriented me sometimes. I love armor and weapon systems, but God of War had so many different enchantment and rune options that I felt bogged down by them. It’s a sad day when I dread looking at my loadout.

On a less technical level, it’s an intense game. I’m not talking violence, but general tone. I really had to be in the mood to immerse myself in the world of Kratos and Atreus. It wasn’t something I picked up for twenty minutes on a whim. When I played God of War, I was sitting down for a Serious Gaming Session.

PC vs. PlayStation

I don’t want to expound on the game’s original features too long. COGconnected reviewed the game at launch, and you can check our PS4 review out here. The game’s core elements remain the same as they did then. What makes it different is that I played it hunched in front of my computer screen.

I played God of War on a slightly out-of-date gaming laptop. I thought I’d have to lower the framerate or resolution, but I didn’t. This meant I got to enjoy the game at its peak graphics quality, and it ran butter smooth with few exceptions. The game crashed twice while I was playing it, but I lost virtually no progress both times. I also had very few bugs. Looking back, I’m struggling to remember any bugs at all, although I’m sure they’re there in some respect.

Playing God of War on PC took several forms for me. First, I tried to power through using the classic WASD keys, but that only lasted until the first boss fight. The controls felt too clunky and unnatural to me.

After that, I switched to a wired PS4 controller. After my partner expressed an interest in watching me play, I took my laptop off my gaming desk and out to our living room, where she could see the screen more easily. This was the most enjoyable experience yet, and how I finished out the game.

Therein lies the problem. Playing with a controller in my living room? Wow, that sounds like something else I know. The solution I really wanted was, simply, my PlayStation. Long, cinematic games like this just aren’t the types of games I want to play on my computer.

It’s All Subjective

How you play God of War comes down to personal choice. If you’re the type who still mods Skyrim and prefers to play on a computer come hell or high water, the PC experience of the game is for you. If you’re prepared to sacrifice some graphical quality for playing comfort, then you’re better suited to the console experience.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated if the PS5 is an option for you. Making the decision for graphics isn’t the obvious choice it used to be. The differences between God of War PS5 and PC are slight enough that if you prefer to play on console, I’d recommend going that route.

If you don’t own any PlayStation consoles and this is your first chance to play God of War, then this is your call to action. It’s worth it: there’s a reason everyone was obsessed with this game. God of War lives up to the hype, and it hasn’t aged since its release. All the reasons God of War was so good the first time around haven’t gone anywhere.

I’m glad Sony Santa Monica released God of War on PC. The more people who can play God of War, the better. Maybe you’ll end up just like me: one of those people telling everyone how good God of War is. Finally.

***A PC code was provided by the publisher***

The post God of War (PC) Review – Welcome Back, Boy appeared first on COGconnected.

Date Night Bowling’s two-part premise is right there in the title: you’re bowling, and you’re dating. Developed by Serenity Forge and published by Way Down Deep, Date Night Bowling has its players attempting to succeed at bowling, a first date, or both.

When you start the game, you can play alone, versus AI, or against a partner in local two-person multiplayer. There are ten characters total to choose from, but you only start with two (Holland and Jasper: more on them later).

Each character has a different bio, personality, and bowling style. You must unlock the rest of the characters by playing them once in the solo mode. Once unlocked, you can nudge them toward their dreams of romantic success. You can also adjust minor details like your ball weight and the amount of oil on the lane.

Date Night Disaster

The first choices I made in Date Night Bowling went wrong. I opened the game for a fun virtual experience of fake bowling by myself and saw the two unlocked characters. As such, I thought those were my only options in the solo mode. I assumed I had to unlock the rest of the characters in the versus AI mode. This is not the case.

It’s not immediately clear that the game’s directive to learn more about each character by playing through their story means that you must them in solo mode. Instead, I took Holland and Jasper into the versus AI mode, forcing the two of them into a nightmarish Groundhog’s Day half-life where they must bowl and flirt with each other for all eternity, only to end with my despair as I wonder when I will make them bowl or flirt well enough to free me from my Sisyphean prison. All this for a faint hope at a single character unlock!

I might have figured out that I was in the wrong mode sooner if the often inscrutable mini-games hadn’t made it hard for me to get a top-tier score on the all-important chemistry meter. We (me, Holland, and Jasper) did alright, always being awarded Good Chemistry, but never spectacularly, and I kept thinking this was because I wasn’t performing better.

I want to like the randomized mini-games, and I do enjoy some of them. They take the form of dating interactions, like “listening to your date,” “catching popcorn in your mouth,” and “winning a stuffed animal from the claw machine.” I’m glad there was such a variety of them, but I constantly had to read new directions scrolling across the screen and some games didn’t repeat very often. The controls were also often finicky. Overall, the mini-game sequences felt somewhat out of my control.

A 7-10 Split

The bowling mechanics are simple enough, although I don’t understand the spin mechanic in real life. This spin deficiency of mine translated straight over to Date Night Bowling. The bare-boned instructions assume their players know how to virtually bowl. This makes characters with spin proficiency borderline unusable for me. It’s disappointing when it comes to mixing and matching characters for spicy dating sim combos.

The pixel art makes the characters and setting charming and it’s fun to see how different character personalities interact. Unfortunately, Holland and Jasper say pretty much the same four lines throughout. Personally, if I was on a first date and the man I was with (named Jasper, likes athletics, has a Macklemore haircut with bonus rattail) told me multiple times that my bowling was “getting better,” I would leave the bowling alley with a first-degree murder charge.

I eventually figured out that I had to play all the characters in solo mode to unlock them. I wish I hadn’t had to go to such lengths to get those unlocks. The joy in the game is pairing the characters to see their dialogue interactions, but by then I was burnt out by how many solo matches I had done.

The local multiplayer is where this game should shine, but the mini-games require a level of precision that isn’t welcoming for newcomers. I played this with my girlfriend, and she had too much difficulty with the controls to enjoy the dating sim elements. For a game that seems designed to be played in short bursts with a partner or a small group of friends, it’s a frustrating feature.

Three Strikes, You’re Out

I wanted to like Date Night Bowling so badly. Its pixel art is very well done, not to mention super cute, and the concept of a dating sim combined with a bowling sim sounded fun and novel. My troubles with the bowling mechanics, the confusing UI, and the amount of time I spent unlocking characters all detracted from the experience enough that I can’t imagine bringing this game to parties.

There’re solid game ideas here, and I hope that Serenity Forge’s next title will bring all these elements together. But for now, while Date Night Bowling isn’t rolling complete gutterballs, it’s not bowling any strikes, either.

***Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post Date Night Bowling Review – Tinder Troubles appeared first on COGconnected.

Sludge Life is a first-person adventure game made by Terri Vellmann and doseone where your primary objective is to tag as much graffiti as possible (for the beginning at least). Really, this is a setup for exploring a factory/town/grimy sludge island teetering on the brink of collapse, and this is a pretty cool setup. With a title screen modeled after old computer desktop backgrounds and a player character named GHOST, Sludge Life is going for a very specific Grunge Aesthetic.

And you know what? Overall, Sludge Life achieves that Aesthetic. Well, at least I think it does, since I’m about the last person you should go to when it comes to deciding whether or not something is Authentically Grunge, to the point where I’m not even sure I’m correctly identifying the subculture Sludge Life is going for.

Also, that was the last time I’ll use the , I promise.

While I may not be versed in what exactly is going on with the fashion sense of the taggers in Sludge Life, I like to think I can do a better job of describing the world they inhabit. When the game starts, the youthful tagger GHOST that the player embodies wakes up in a shipping container where they have clearly been spending their sleeping hours.

With some simple controls for crouching, jumping, and tagging clarified early on, you’re set up to explore the maze of cargo, the disinterested workers who manage it, and the sludge itself that forms the basis for this world. The universe is simultaneously deeply unclear and strangely familiar, and that’s what part of keeps it interesting.

2 Cool 4…Well, Me

I made a bold claim about being able to describe this game’s setting, but I’m already failing to live up to it. There is some kind of sludge-based economy and/or factory, the workers who make the sludge go-’round are on strike, and everyone is generally dissatisfied with their lives no matter how many cigarettes they smoke or banana slugs they eat. Their world is trash enough already that few care about and even less try to stop the small army of taggers making their way around the industrial refuse.

Tagging really is the main motivation early on in the game, as tagging increases your reputation and cred among other taggers and is the only clear objective starting out. This changes as you go on, but I found tagging to just be the means of motivating me to maneuver the setting, earning Sludge Life a place among the Hall of Walking Simulators (sorry, I lied). Personally, I love exploring in games, so that’s usually a badge of honor in my book.

A lot of smaller studios often rely on retro and/or 2-D graphics to hide their difficulty in creating more a contemporary look, but this game doesn’t feel cheap. Its use of bright colors against the backdrop of dingy industrial layouts and the ever-present layer of grime makes it memorable and fun, and the low stress, chill vibe of the game makes it perfect for when you want to pick something up for ten or twenty minutes at a time, something I often had to do while playing during a cross-country drive.

There’s so much going on in the game, too. Every time I turned around (when I wasn’t hopelessly lost) I felt like I was discovering or unlocking something new, including major mini-games or interactive features for the title screen. I feel like I could play this game in its entirety again and still have missed things—and not in that annoying, “ugh, I can’t believe I need to go back” way, but an organic one that keeps things fresh.

I feel like getting too detailed about any events or scenes would be to deny anyone who hasn’t played it the single most exciting thing about Sludge Life, an aspect that I’ve completely failed to get across: SLUDGE LIFE isn’t just stylish. It’s also funny as hell. There were so many times I would be playing and just felt like I had to turn to my partner and show them something that was happening on the screen.

“Look,” I’d say, showing them a man talking about a giant deuce he found. We’d both laugh. It was beautiful. It was love.

This humor isn’t just dialogue, either. There are visual gags as well, so many of them that this is one of the only games where I took advantage of the camera feature constantly because I just loved so much of what I was looking at. Also, I needed to take a picture of all the cats.

Pobody’s Nerfect 

The game isn’t perfect, of course, and its flaws are frustratingly central to the core of what makes it fun. I don’t have a very good sense of direction in real life or in video games, so I spent a lot of time just sort of wandering in circles because it felt like trying super hard to unlock or see everything right then would be a betrayal of the game’s overall vibe. Because of that, things got a little tedious as I circled the places I knew and only occasionally found one of the new locations, where things would open back up.

Part of the reason for my trepidation was also my fear of falling from a great height. Playing the game on Switch was not conducive to roaming, because the controls aren’t very precise. This matters less when you’re a few feet from the ground, but when you’re high up and you fall because you couldn’t gauge the distance of a beam, it’s considerably more frustrating. I was usually able to let it go because I just went and did something else—flowing with the vibe, you feel?—but this made problems later on as the story got more involved. I wish the controls had been more precise because this is much of the reason I haven’t gotten all of the endings yet.

One final gripe is that the character designs are…well, it’s good that all of the characters have the lip designs they do, not just the non-white ones, but the optics on cartoonishly large lips are not great. My first interaction with an NPC was with a black worker on strike who had extremely large lips, and it was some time before I realized this was how everyone looked. My partner glanced over while I was talking to someone and immediately pointed out the same issue. I don’t think it was intentional—especially because you can decide whether or not GHOST pees standing up, which I think is both cool and well-done—but the historic use of designs like this should be kept in mind when designing characters.

That said, I really enjoy playing Sludge Life, and I plan to keep picking it up now and then to enjoy the atmosphere of the world that Terri Vellmann and doseone have created. It’s exciting, not disappointing, that there’s so much left undiscovered for me, and I can’t wait to pick up GHOST’s world again, only for some dour fast-food employee to tell me to get lost. Gladly, I’ll say, in this hypothetical scenario I have created inside a video game for myself.

I’ll gladly get lost.

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post Sludge Life Review – Respecting the Vibe appeared first on COGconnected.

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” –Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World.

You may think this quote is about the cyclical nature of humanity…and it is. But it’s also about FromSoftware games. Every time one comes out, whether it be Souls or Sekiro or Bloodborne, we have the same conversation about accessibility in gaming, only for the discussion to slowly fade away, readying itself to strike once again in some distant future.

On one side of this debate is the belief that all games should include multiple difficulty levels because easier levels mean greater numbers of people, including but not limited to players with disabilities, will be able to play more games. On the other side of the debate are those who believe that creators should be able to create what they want and that games based around intense difficulty and skill are, when done well, developed with these components in mind and therefore should not be forced to cater to everyone. And so the Wheel turns.

These arguments hit many of the important points about accessibility, but there are other angles to consider. Accessibility in gaming is not just about making games playable by as many human beings on Earth. Or, if it is about that, there are reasons for making them accessible. It’s important to recognize and understand the social contexts that contemporary games are designed, created, and published in.

For example, anyone with more than a passing interest in gaming has heard the statistics about how, contrary to long-held beliefs, women are very present in gaming! A vague statistic saying that the presence of female gamers is hovering around 50% has existed in my brain for years. While I’m not exactly sure of the statistics, it’s clear that women in gaming have become considerably more visible in recent years.

The Path of Daggers: The Games Women Play

But we value the types of games women often play differently. Thus, even when women are present in gaming at large, they’re still excluded from major segments of the gaming community. If you ask a self-identified gamer to decide between Grand Theft Auto 5 or Candy Crush, they are much more likely to pick GTA as the “real” game.

Devaluing the games women play is not a recent trend, even if it’s easiest to identify in the supposed legions of Farmville-playing housewives. For most of my childhood, there were video games, and there were video games for girls. Her Interactive’s line of Nancy Drew puzzle games says it right there in the developer’s name, and I doubt a lot of men were picking up the Barbie or American Girl doll games that were so formative in my early childhood. So many women I know completely light up when you mention the Nancy Drew games, and these women don’t consider themselves gamers.

The same goes tenfold for The Sims franchise, which is definitely the most beloved game series among all my female friends who do not consider themselves part of any gaming community. My girlfriend finds gaming culture intimidating and yet has 4,000 items of custom content downloaded while managing to keep her computer and her game running, a skillset in a league of its own.

A Crown of Swords: Women in Online Gaming

But while women have played games, women historically haven’t been welcome—and often still aren’t—in many online gaming spaces. Games that require voice communication over the Internet make women easily identifiable targets for harassment, which leads to a lot of women avoiding online multiplayer shooters altogether. Even though things are changing, a history of exclusion doesn’t disappear overnight.

While the harassment women receive in gaming is well documented, the secondary effect that excluding women from certain types of games often goes unaddressed even as it continues to have a major impact on gaming today. I’ve seen it myself. While I consider myself a life-long gamer, I had never gravitated towards online multiplayer games or first-person shooters, something that held true even when I started writing about video games. Until I started playing Overwatch, that is.

I’m not alone in this, either: Overwatch was the first team-based shooter for many women, or the second if they came from the somehow-still-around Team Fortress 2 player base that was hobbling along in 2016. Overwatch’s characters run the gamut when it comes to skill level. By the time I started playing the game a couple of years after its release, it was common for any identifiable women, gender being judged on voice or username to be ridiculed for playing any non-healing role. Women can be Mercy or Lucio or Medic, but god forbid they choose Hanzo.

That’s right: as absolutely ridiculous as it sounds, hundreds of hours playing Overwatch made it clear that 1950s housewives stereotypes have somehow translated into video games. Healing is for girls, while DPS is for boys. It’s Barbies versus action figures for a new generation. And so the Wheel turns.

The Gathering Storm: The Skills We Value

The defense that abusive gamers on the Internet would likely give to this is that women, based on their personal and subjective sample sizes, are just not as good at playing DPS or damage-based characters. As a deeply average McCree main who never seemed to get any better, I found myself extra frustrated when I played Overwatch because I felt like I fit the stereotype of a bad female DPS player every time I missed a headshot.

He’s the thing, though; McCree is a twitchy character, which means he requires fast, accurate reflexes to perform well while playing. So let’s assume for the sake of this argument that men are generally correct in their assessments that “women just aren’t as good” at DPS characters like McCree. Instead of taking it for granted that the X chromosome is what provides sick PC gaming skills, instead, let’s ask why men might be better at twitchy DPS characters than women? Why might the Overwatch League have had so few women in it throughout its run so far (one, it’s had one female player, shoutout to Geguri)?

It’s not about chromosomes (if you genuinely thought it was, please, seek help). It’s that the best Overwatch players have usually been playing twitchy shooters their entire lives. At the same time, the games women historically trend towards aren’t valued or judged on a competitive, monetary scale. No matter how much time I spent honing my gunslinging skills, I didn’t have the decade(s) of experience in Overwatch’s predecessors necessary to really bring home the gold.

I promise this is not about my own dashed Overwatch League dreams (if I ever had any, please, past me, seek help). My average skills are not the baseline: some women do have years of experience in twitchy games despite hostility from men in the genre, while others never experienced that hostility. In contrast, others are virtuosos who can pick up a new gaming genre and instantly be good at it. As a whole, though, women are societally disadvantaged in competitive twitchy gameplay.

The Great Hunt: The Desire for Exclusivity

And really, why does it matter if someone beats a game on easy that another player beats on hard or expert? Their victory doesn’t take away from someone else’s. Perhaps it’s because if anyone can play any game, then anyone gamer can’t immediately say they’re “better” than someone else by virtue of having completed a specific title. They no longer have bragging rights.

This desire for exclusivity, provided by games designed to be difficult from the ground up, often stems from an instinctive human gut reaction of “but if everyone can play it, I won’t be better than anyone else.” Sure, there might be genuine concerns about devaluing a game’s mechanics or gameplay elements, but for many people, the core issue is that they like gatekeeping when they’re on the right side of the gate.

Gaming is supposed to be a hobby, at least for the vast majority of us without major e-sports contracts. No one without a giant ego considers themselves “better” than others at watching TV, and few people argue with someone who doesn’t like a specific show because they got bored. They’re not usually blamed for disliking the show: the fault lies with the product for not being interesting—or accessible enough—to the consumer. TV is art: so are games: but when we exchange money for them, there’s a contract between the developer and the player that they will meet in the middle. For many people, difficult games aren’t meeting them in the middle.

The Gathering Storm: The Role of Accessibility

This history of exclusivity at great cost has a clear effect on gaming dynamics today. When recent games like Sekiro: Shadows Die exclude those without the Sick Gaming Skills to beat their game, there will be reasons why those gamers couldn’t beat the game. A lot of alienated FromSoftware players are inevitably women who don’t have the lifetime of experience needed to pick up Souls game mechanics as easily as their male counterparts, and so male players, seeing mostly other men, will continue to believe that women don’t like or aren’t good enough to play difficult games.

This exclusion punches down, vindicating male gamers as “better than” those that just couldn’t cut it, ignoring a history of exclusion that prevented many people from gaining those skills in the first place.

Accessibility in gaming is about making games playable on many different fronts. It isn’t just about disability or bringing games to younger players (both laudable goals in their own right!). Accessibility is also about acknowledging how excluding women and other minorities has created hostility for societally othered groups in gaming spaces. This has devalued their gaming experiences, focusing on the ones they’ve been excluded from instead—and then blaming the excluded parties for not being good at the games they’ve been kept away from!

Insisting on the validity of skill-based twitchy games perpetuates the same gendered gatekeeping that’s been around for decades. We’ve come far enough that saying women can’t play based on their gender itself is obviously bad (or you’d think it would be…), so relying on a skill-based argument while ignoring all the social contexts behind the popularity of certain types of games is just a new version of this gatekeeping. And so the Wheel turns.

Lord of Chaos: Artistic Expression and Gaming

I am not saying that women aren’t skilled at playing video games. They are. Those games are simply not valued, and they’re not the games people recreate with higher and higher difficulty scales until it becomes a genre unto itself. In fact, it’s borderline impossible to earn a living off the games women are often good at, at least without a Twitch account.

But what about art for art’s sake, right? People can create whatever they want. But it’s worth asking why people want to design games that rely on the difficulty in the first place, as well as what it says about the games that get popular. When I look at that moment of conception, to why people are driven to exclude others in prioritizing difficulty, so much so that it becomes an integral component of gameplay, I get that urge for creation myself.

For example, I’d love to see games with high difficulty scales based on mechanics used in the misaligned or sidelines female-marketed genres. (As a thought experiment, only, of course, since it would be antithetical to my beliefs about accessibility in gaming if games like this were actually created and marketed with no difficulty sliders.)

Basically, I’m asking what a very, very difficult version of a Sims game would look like? Or how good Dragon Age 4 would be if its gameplay heavily depended on the personal choices a player makes in sidequests—what if the player loses major tactical and leveling advantages because they fumbled an emotional moment or tried to skip a cutscene, to the point of failing the game? What about a Nancy Drew game where the puzzles rely on the player’s instinctual, decades-long understanding shared by the primarily female fanbase of Her Interactive games?

I doubt any of these games would be well received or widely popular, despite them integrating difficulty as a core mechanic into their gameplay. Naysayers of accessibility argue that this integration is artistically valuable, but these games wouldn’t appeal to the main demographic that applauds challenging gameplay because they don’t reward the types of skills that mainstream gaming culture has traditionally rewarded. Thousands of games come out every second of every day (that’s a 100% accurate number, look it up), so I’m sure there are games out there like the ones I have posited, but they certainly don’t garner the same kind of attention FromSoftware games have.

A Memory of Light: And so the Wheel Turns

It will take time—decades, even—for large groups of women to gain the 3l173 g4m3r sk1llz in genres they have been traditionally excluded from. There are two ethical courses of action moving forward. The first is to facilitate online environments where women feel comfortable being average—sometimes bad, sometimes good, and all human—for long periods of time. Just like anyone else. Eventually, some of these women will evitably, as the kids say, (said? probably past tense by now) “git gud.” After all, the male McCree mains at my skill level likely never felt like they were misrepresenting their entire gender whenever they had a bad game. The second is to start valuing all games and all of the gamers who play them as much as gaming culture values male-centered gaming experiences traditionally.

Until then, accessibility is the way to go. It levels the playing field by recognizing that everyone comes into gaming with different experiences. Some women will have lots of experience with twitchy shooters or Soulslikes, and many won’t. Some disabled gamers will appreciate additional features, while others won’t want or need them. Some gamers will have never picked up a controller before, while some will claim to have been holding The Duke in the womb. Their poor mothers.

Ultimately, we need to recognize the social and cultural contexts for all of these audiences, understand how toxic, sexist behavior has led to the widespread exclusion of women from many gaming populations, and respond to these issues by using what we’ve learned to inform future endeavors. The advantages of including people nearly always outweigh the negatives. Bold words and bolder claims, I know, but this is what accessibility is all about.

Also, add Waluigi to Smash.

Robert Jordan said that.

The post Examining the Ugly History of Accessibility in Gaming appeared first on COGconnected.

The Unexpected Quest is a recent fantasy adventure game by developer Rionix originally released on Steam and now available on Nintendo Switch. It’s a strategy/management sim where you play as a group of dwarves trying to get their lives back together after a disastrous shipwreck and you collect the friends, tools, and resources you need to do so. While The Unexpected Quest might not garner much shock or awe, it makes for a fun and welcome addition to the wonderfully expansive genre of Switch games called “games to play on your couch while you’re watching something else.”

I’m not saying that to be dismissive: Hades is in that category for me, and Hades was my favorite game of 2020. And while I doubt I’ll say the same for The Unexpected Quest by the end of 2021, I did have a fun time playing it. This is largely due to its gameplay, where the basic mechanics of the game are simple and effective. You collect food, materials, and money, which you need to destroy obstacles, explore, and hire soldiers to kill monsters. You point, you click, you collect, and occasionally you fight. It satisfies the monkey urges in my brain, especially when I finally get past a puzzling or expensive part of the terrain. There are genuine puzzles as well, and every level is meticulously designed to allow the player to strategize, hoard resources, and try to decide what route you want to take as you sally forth.

Some of the gameplay elements were a little finicky for me, though. I often had trouble with the controls, especially after an update that took effect about halfway through my playthrough. I now had to use my cursor to use items, which only worked about a third of the time, leaving me to watch a veritable army’s worth of my very expensive soldiers be cut down for want of a health potion. The constant rearrangement of items in my inventory was a drag because of the inefficient way I had to arrange my chest.

Sometimes I would be rewarded for going an unexpected route with a cool weapons upgrade or some extra materials, but I would equally as often find myself with no money, no materials, and no food; sadly destined to sit there and watch my mills respawn food like I was waiting for a pot to boil. Alternatively, sometimes I would get extremely stuck and find myself constantly collecting materials as I gazed at the map, wondering how to escape the situation I found myself in. The combat is still a work in progress as well, while the inability to assign soldiers more specifically than one per enemy caused a lot of unnecessary deaths in my camp.

Am I Out of Touch?

There is always the point where I worry that it is I that is hopelessly bad at gaming. I fear becoming Principal Skinner, famous for once saying, “No, it is the children who are wrong.” But I think there is real value in only having average skills in certain games: I can tell you that I, as an averagely talented person in the genre of strategy management sims, hit quite a few periods of minor to moderate frustration in The Unexpected Quest that detracted from my experience. Despite all this, I stand by saying the game is an overall fun experience. But I just don’t know what to do with this game’s story. The cutscenes drag, and that’s sad since they aren’t especially long. I could not tell you the plot beyond the broadest details, and it is bizarre to me how involved the story seems to be considering how little it was needed. And when it comes to The Unexpected Quest’s setting, think The Lord of the Rings. Now stop thinking. You have found the setting.

There are dwarves, and mages, and elves, who are maybe the mages and maybe the archers, and there are plenty of swordsmen. Pretty sure there isn’t a woman in sight, though—although considering the source material, that checks out. At one point I’m pretty sure I spotted the exact guard-towers from the entrance of Minas Morgul. I get that Tolkien is a fertile breeding ground for fantasy ideas, but just because it’s popular doesn’t make it cool. I wanted to skip every cutscene, but I didn’t, because it felt like my duty to watch them. They’re honestly difficult to follow because the characters speak gibberish and their lines are subtitled, which gets quickly exhausting as they detail the next stage of their inscrutable plan. If you play this game (and if you’re looking for a fun diversion, I don’t see why not), skip them. You don’t need to know why you’re collecting crystal shards to get the endorphin rush of doing so.

The Unexpected Quest (for a Mobile Port)

The last major point I want to hit is the graphics. I really like the art: I think it’s a very picturesque game that uses its style to its full advantage and comes off as cheerful and inviting. However, I was shocked when I discovered this wasn’t originally a mobile game ported to Switch.

I tried to play the game with my Switch docked exactly once, and I couldn’t follow what was happening on the screen because everything was so small. It was much better undocked, but that’s not how I prefer to play, and it still was a little straining on the eyes even on the smaller screen. I still feel like I’m being gaslit as I endlessly search for evidence that, yes, this was a mobile game at some point. I haunt the Steam page and endlessly type The Unexpected Quest into my phone’s app store, wondering where it is, trapped by this phantom limb this port should be.

Once again, I am not trying to be dismissive: I think mobile games are a hugely undervalued type of gaming, and I think I would have enjoyed this game to its maximum if I’d been able to have it on a phone screen. Yes, I know the Switch is portable. No, I am not bringing it to a doctor’s waiting room. I knew a guy who brought his 3DS to college classes, and I am not trying for that look.

The Final Stretch

But back to the game. I don’t know what’s going on with the graphics that makes it feel like it should be on a much smaller screen, but if that and the minor inventory, finicky controls, and gameplay issues are handled, it’ll be a more polished version of a pretty fun game. Thankfully, the technical issues seem likely to get fixed since there was an update (sadly, for the worse) while I was playing, but I worry more about the story—if you want to include one in your game, commit to it.

The Unexpected Quest mostly looks good, mostly plays good, and I would mostly recommend it. I don’t know if I’ll remember the game in a couple of months, but I still had a good time with it, even with all its frustrations. It might not be a glowing recommendation, but if you have a fantasy itch to scratch and a little money to blow, hey, why not?

The dwarves are calling your name…

…it’s hard to hear them through the rubble, though, and their voices are soft. They want you to come see what they’re doing, but they don’t want it bad enough to yell. It’s a little insulting. Also, they’re speaking gibberish. You dig at the rock for a little while and give up pretty quickly. Netflix is asking you if you’re still watching, and you need to make dinner. The Mines of Moria it is not.

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post The Unexpected Quest Review – Dangerous Business, Frodo appeared first on COGconnected.

I’m sure I’m the first person who’s going to tell you this, so I’m just going to lay it all out there: 2020 wasn’t a great year. If there’s any collection of 365 days that needed a good surprise, it’s these. I hope you can forgive me for relying on the specter of 2020 to open this article, but these games are hopefully enough to banish it long enough to get some quality time with your gaming console of choice.

And now, COGconnected’s Best Surprises of 2020.

7. Fuser

It’s been years since Guitar Hero and Rock Band dominated the industry. There was a time you couldn’t go to a party without being tempted into picking up a plastic instrument and being made to feel like you, too, could be a musical genius. As someone who misses that era pretty much every day of my life, I’m glad to see Fuser and other games like bringing the rhythm game back to popularity. With Fuser, you don’t need any of those expensive accessories: all you need is a controller. In-game you play as a DJ just starting out, and the freestyle mode really lets you go wild with the music-making controls. Fuser is a rhythm game for a new (and so far, bad) decade, and that’s a welcome surprise.

6. Maneater

Did we expect a game where you could play as a shark? Not really. Do we love it? Yes, obviously. It might not be perfect, but Maneater is both comical and emotional, overcoming its flaws to leave a long-lasting impression on players. Obviously. Because it’s a game where you play as a shark. This might not be a completely new concept, but it’s playing as a shark is like the Spanish Inquisition: you can never expect it.

5. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

The existence of a Hyrule Warriors game in itself isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that it’s actually good. As we said in our review, “Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity succeeds on two separate fronts. This is a prequel with the narrative heft required for a game in the Zelda franchise. But, this is also a Musou/Warriors game that twists that formula into something unique and engaging.” If you really hate that formula, you might still bounce off, but for everyone else, it’s safe to give this one a try.

Click over to PAGE 2 for the top 4 surprises…

The post Ranking The Seven Best Video Game Surprises of 2020 appeared first on COGconnected.

]]> https://cogconnected.com/feature/seven-best-gaming-surprises-2020/feed/ 0 https://cogconnected.com/review/past-around-review/ https://cogconnected.com/review/past-around-review/#respond Thu, 17 Dec 2020 21:14:46 +0000 https://cogconnected.com/?post_type=review&p=261549 When The Past Was Around is a point-and-click adventure that takes a short trip into a world more charming than our own, piecing together a narrative that shows how beauty and tragedy go hand in hand.

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]]> When The Past Was Around Review

Some games are fragile bird’s eggs: easily broken if handled poorly. Writing a review for these games can feel like picking those eggs up without gloves, just praying that you won’t drop them. When The Past Was Around, a point-and-click adventure game developed by Mojiken Studio, is one of these games, and I hope I can do the delicate nature of this title justice without cracking any shells.

When The Past Was Around follows Eda, a girl who wears her hair long and her pants high-waisted. The game explores her relationship with a mysterious owl man who is good at wearing dramatic shawls and playing the violin. Saying much more than that immediately gets into spoiler territory, but you unlock the missing details in your story through point-and-click puzzles, a gameplay mechanic as old as time—or at least computer games.

I would recommend playing this game in one sitting. It’s about an hour long, so that shouldn’t be hard. Of course, thanks to a cross-country drive, I ended up splitting it up into two sittings anyway, and while I found the story to be poignant and memorable, I think it would have landed at maximum potential if I’d been able to enjoy it as a cohesive piece. In that and many other ways, The Past Was Around feels more like a visual novel than a straightforward point-and-click adventure game.

Smelling the Roses

If it’s anything like a visual novel, though, it’s one that invites you to take your time. Even though the game is short, it still feels like a full story is being told, and you’re always invited to enjoy yourself when you scroll around the screen. This is in no small part due to the visuals. The art style of When The Past Was Around is just gorgeous in a soft, friendly way. Eda seems like a girl who tweets about her growing collection of succulents and how she’s turning into a wine mom before her time, and honestly, I love that for her.

Every artist who worked on this project should be proud (although they don’t need me to tell them that). This game’s art immediately communicates a sense so specific I find myself Googling things like “synonym for cozy.” Even in the tense moments, I get a full sense of this comfortable and overall kind world that Eda and her owl man live in, and I’ve rarely seen something this style represented in games. It reminds me of one of my other favorite games, Eastshade, which is totally different in art style but also communicates a sense of peacefulness. Basically, all of this paragraph is a synonym for “I love this art so much” and maybe also “all I want to do in video games is vibe and look at pretty things.”

In keeping with the narrative, the point-and-click problems unfold like they belong in a slightly alternate reality to ours. A lock’s combination is solved with a sheet of music or you use nearby birds to get past a gate. This whimsy makes the off-kilter story more immersive, but this works both for and against it. Sometimes the solution to the puzzle is a cute idea that proves bizarre and frustrating in motion. These moments are brief, but they contribute to a general sense of confusion that sometimes happens at the most non-linear points in the story—and the story is pretty non-linear.

I found myself asking many times throughout: is this a metaphor? Is the owl man a metaphor? Is the violin a metaphor? Are the shadows a metaphor? At one point I threw a bunch of shit around the room, look around, and asked: is this a metaphor? And honestly, most of the time? The answer was yes. Most everything is either a metaphor or could be mistaken for one. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. I think the story could have been a little clearer in the beginning—it was sometimes hard to tell what was now and what was, well, before now—but it overall worked and did a good job of cutting straight to the heart with its emotions. I can easily forgive some minor missteps in story and puzzle arrangement because of how well the game works overall.

When The Past Was Around tells a story without uttering a single word of dialogue, using simple but beautiful music and a masterful, unique art style to communicate it. If I’m falling back on popular buzzwords too much when describing it, know that it deserves better. Better yet, make yourself a cup of tea, wrap yourself in a familiar blanket, and find out for yourself.

***A PS4 code was provided by the publisher***

The post When The Past Was Around Review – Cozy and Compelling appeared first on COGconnected.

I knew better than to review Chicken Police – Paint it RED! directly before my final papers were due, but the second I saw the trailer, I couldn’t resist. What’s better than a noir mystery where the detective is chicken…and his partner is also a chicken? There really is nothing better than the opening, which pans to a big empty city and a lonely black car, only to zoom in to reveal a chicken in a leather coat. That’s everything to me. And please watch the trailer: it’s amazing.

Chicken Police is like Humphrey Bogart meets Zootopia. First of all, that’s an insane sentence and I’ve glad I’ve reached a point in my life where I get to write it. Second, what this means is that Santino Featherland, a close-to-retirement detective looking for a smoke on New Year’s Eve is exactly like you expect him to be, except, of course, the aforementioned being a chicken. The world isn’t just a carbon copy of ours, though—while it is similar in many ways, the city the game takes place in has no real-world match.

Every character in the game possesses a regular human body and an animal head with some feathers, fur, or scales on their body. The art style is unique, with photorealistic bodies with animal heads pasted on. Don’t worry: if you want to see how their bodies work, you will, because there’s lots of tasteful animal nudity. 

Dead Birds are Heavier Than Broken Hearts

The noir setting is the strength of this game. The story revels in the genre, gleefully recreating familiar noir tropes with animal twists. It’s a lot of fun to explore Clawville and to meet the various characters and see new locations. The narrative never forgets about the animal nature of the characters, so it doesn’t feel like it would be the same game without that aspect even though the plot is pretty basic noir fare. 

I guessed the final twist about three-quarters of the way through (there’s a point where they introduce the existence of a new character where it’s almost impossible not to), but I was still invested in finishing it. Where I got a little tired was with some repetition of the theme—it’s difficult to keep a hard-boiled noir going for half a dozen hours without the story getting a little fatigued. The narrative clearly pokes fun at the genre (my personal favorite was a bar counter with “Where did all the colors go?” scratched into it), but even with all the joking it eventually gets monotonous. 

The only mechanical aspect of the game that drove me nuts had to do with the dialogue. In many games, the player can click through the dialogue because, when you press the skip button the first time, it’ll immediately give you the whole line instead of making you wait for the scroll to match up with the characters speaking. However, if you’re a fast reader and you’re playing this game, you’re pretty much screwed, because if you mess with the dialogue at all it’ll immediately skip both the voiced narration and the matching caption. There are also small but persistent spelling and grammar errors that should have been caught by a good editor. 

The developers must be somewhat aware of the dialogue issue because you can replay the whole conversation you’re having at any point, but this is quickly tiring, as it doesn’t get rid of the initial issue: having to listen to entire swathes of dialogue without being able to read through it quickly. 

And these characters sure do like to talk. Part of the reason I got a little sick of the noir setting was that Marty and Santino constantly—constantly—comment on it. It’s a double-edged sword because this probably wouldn’t have been an issue if I could just read the dialogue at my natural pace, but there was so much repetitive banter between Santino and his partner Marty that sometimes I wanted to throw a brick at them, preferably one tied with a red ribbon that said something ominous on it written in blood. One has to fit the aesthetic, after all. 

Sleeping the Big Sleep

A narrative decision I question was the issue of animal equality between species (I told you it was like Zootopia!). There’s species tension between prey and predators, as well as mammals versus insects, the latter of which are oppressed and forced to live in ghettos. The real-life analog is pretty clear, and the characters’ constant joking about other animal species is grating because they would explicitly call each other out for being racist. 

Call me too sensitive, but if you’re going to set up a world with a system of oppression and then have characters joke about it a ton, to the point where they call each other out for not being “politically correct,” then I’m not going to like it. I don’t think the motivations of anyone creating the story were bad, I just think the temptation for making lots of animal jokes when your characters are all people with animal heads was too much to overcome, and it harmed the story because of it.

So we have main characters constantly making fun of each other and then loudly exclaiming, “Hey! That was racist!” And remember, it’s not like someone’s species doesn’t have actual consequences in Chicken Police, as people, including the main character, make sweeping character judgments based on one’s species. 

When a suspicious snake turns out to be a good guy, it should be a learning moment for Santino, but the constant joke battles versus the plot means that the whole game is split between wanting to tackle serious issues and wanting to make another joke about a rooster’s comb. And before anyone throws a brick at me, when a story spends as much time talking about inter-species racism as this one does, it’s a fair critique.

To Say Goodbye is to Die a Little

This is a difficult game to review because its strengths are also its weaknesses, and while I clearly have a lot to complain about, I think it’s in the Dragon Age way of, “I liked it so I want it to be better”—and Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite game of all time. Chicken Police – Paint it RED! has style and panache in spades. The worldbuilding is interesting, the puzzle gameplay was fun, and the voice acting was very strong throughout. I like Santino Featherland and his partner Marty, and even more amazingly, I like a bunch of the side characters too. I’m obsessed with Archibald, the gangster with an impeccable French accent. 

But unfortunately, despite the love and humor that went into it, the annoying dialogue mechanics make the repetition inherent to the genre stand out. Still, I want to see more of Clawville: there’s still time for this dirty city to turn over a new leaf. 

Oh, just one more thing: if any of the developers ever read this review, I saw those Cowboy Bebop references and I loved them. 

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post Chicken Police – Paint it RED! Review – Caught in the Coop appeared first on COGconnected.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is developer Edelweiss’s newest game, a mix between an action side-scrolling platformer and a 3-D farming simulator. While those two genres may sound strange together, it’s an accurate way to describe the game, which simulates the life of a spoiled goddess who, along with a rag-tag group of unlucky humans, has been banished to the Isle of Demons.

She has a warrior god dad and a harvest goddess mom, so she’s equally suited to both growing crops and slaying demons. I would estimate you honestly spend about fifty percent of your time doing both—exploring the island with your magical scarf that functions as a climbing tool and carefully planting individual stalks in your personal rice field.

Sakuna grows more powerful with every rice harvest, which contributed to the gameplay loop that firmly established itself early on. As Sakuna, you scout out the land, clearing areas of demons to make the area safe for the humans you’re charged with keeping safe. This, along with clearing a set of objectives in each area, raises the overall exploration level, which usually eventually unlocks the next plot hook.

Sometimes I found myself unable to get to that point until I raised my strength, which meant I had to wait for the rice to finish. And you do farm that rice from stalk to finished product, planting, fertilizing, drying, husking, and grinding it each time you do a cycle of plants. There is no more satisfying sound in-game than Sakuna saying, “It looks pretty good this time!” (Not a direct quote, I listen to music while I’m playing).

Rice, Fight, Repeat

The gameplay loop both drives the game and drives me crazy. Sometimes I wake up in the beautiful island sunrise and want to go demon-hunting, but I need to till the soil for the approaching harvest. Sometimes I want to finish up the harvest so I can take on a particularly difficult beast at night when the enemies are harder, but the rice is taking its time on the drying rack.

Especially later on, the days often feel too short. I’ll just be getting to the end of a level when the sun will go down and I’ll suddenly have no hope of winning. I also feel more and more limited in which special objectives I can target to raise my exploration level, as there are a few goals that remain unclear to me. It’s a little frustrating and a little tedious, but I stayed up later than I planned to several nights in a row because, “If I just get one more harvest, I’ll be able to go after that giant deer at night, and that’ll let me…” and so on.

I did look through my menus to see if I could figure out what I was missing, but there is a lot to Sakuna. There are different buildings you go to in your home base for everything, and different humans to see about your weapons, armor, and rice fields, and a half dozen different menus. Most of it is easy enough to learn, but when I started the game, I knew I was committing to an investment of my time—and I still didn’t figure everything out. There is so much game to play, and I didn’t want to waste my time on menus or reading about new combos I could do.

The story is fun, but it isn’t unique. Sure, I haven’t heard the premise of a goddess getting kicked out of heaven to a stinky island with a bunch of humans, but the humans themselves don’t exactly make me think hard about anything. They don’t have to, of course, but man, I have seen every one of these characters before in Japanese games—the bumbling samurai, the clueless foreign woman, the thieving orphan, the lovesick girl, and the clueless child. Their arcs are well-trod ground. And the frequency with which these character arcs interrupt the gameplay! It seems as though the developers truly believe I’m eager to see the completely new concepts of: woman cooks, man works, boy makes tools, girl makes clothes.

The Road (Not) Taken

Not everything has to be subversive. But there does come a point where something folds so easily into the status quo that I roll my eyes. Sakuna wants to hear about her parents falling in love…but the boys want to hear about the battles! All the character arcs roughly follow the same path you expect them to if you’re familiar with Japanese period dramas.

I’m not completely heartless. There is a real sweetness to the evening dinner that completes each day (and gives the player bonuses based on the types of food you’re eating), and I do actually like the individual characters. Coming home to your mountain base is a joy every night (even when I’m mad that it is, in fact, already night). Sakuna’s arc is handled a little less obviously than many of the others, and I like seeing her character grow as she learns how to interact with others.

Coming home helps when it’s such a beautiful game, and not in the AAA “I can see every pore on your face” kind of way. There is a sense of style and understanding of what the game wants to portray, and every time you come home in the evening you can hear the crickets chirping and see the sunrise dipping over the horizon. If it’s the middle of the night, you can look up and see stars.

The art style is vivid and manages to not look realistic but still be immersive, and the simple act of being Sakuna and exploring the visuals around me is enough to want to keep playing. In some ways, the game reminds me of Animal Crossing games, where the loop slows me down and keeps me engaged in the little wonders of life around me.

Oh, to be a harvest goddess, stranded on the Isle of Demons, thinking about the stars…

…and how soon I can finish the next batch of rice so I can finally get rid of that deer.

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin Review – Slaying Rice and Planting Demons appeared first on COGconnected.

October was a month full of waiting. Americans were waiting for the election, gamers were (and still are) waiting for the release of next-gen consoles, and I was personally waiting for a gaping maw to erupt out of the earth and swallow me whole. While we all waited, October 2020 had surprises for us—both good and bad.

The Best

Jackbox Party Pack 7

I remember where I was the first time I played a Jackbox game: crammed into a tiny flat my friends shared while I studied abroad in England. Pretentious thing to say, I know. But Jackbox Party Packs have a reputation to uphold: fun, engaging games that make you laugh and cry in equal measure (the crying should also be from laughter). While Jackbox Party Pack 7 is still missing the online multiplayer feature the franchise so desperately needs, the new array of games (plus the classic Quiplash!) are mostly successful. They only need one ingredient to make them work: friends. If you have those, “this party pack is a no-brainer to have in your library and is guaranteed to keep everyone busy while putting a smile on their faces.”

Crash Bandicoot 4

It’s been a long time since we had a Crash Bandicoot game (…that wasn’t a remaster). And it’s been even longer since we had a Crash Bandicoot game that we actually wanted to play. Finally, with Crash Bandicoot 4, Toys for Bob has hit that delicious middle ground by making a game that’s both fun to play and nostalgic in a way that doesn’t feel like pandering. With intelligently crafted levels, improved gameplay modes, and lots of collectibles, there’s enough content that minor issues like cutscene rendering are outweighed by the game’s sheer enjoyability. Our reviewer puts it best: “Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is going to be the best Bandicoot-based game you’ve ever played. I’ll bet my Wumpas on it.”

Hades

Oh, Hades. She’s the talk of the town these days, you know. And we’ve liked her siblings before her, too. This time, though, Supergiant has really hit it out of the park both critically and commercially. The story and gameplay loop of Prince Zagreus trying to escape Hades has been incredibly compelling to a lot of people, and our review concluded, “Hades is without doubt one of the best roguelite games to date, a new high point for Supergiant Games, and a dark horse contender for game of the year lists this fall.”

Head over to PAGE 2 for the worst of the month…

The post The Three Best and Three Worst Games of October 2020 appeared first on COGconnected.

Where do I begin with the saga that has been playing Projection: First Light? This review, due to unforeseen circumstances (including a hurricane-caused power outage) took longer to complete than I could have guessed.

Well, first of all, it’s a puzzle platformer published by Blowfish Studios. The hint, though, is in the title of the developers: Shadowplay Studios. Projection: First Light is a game set in and defined by shadows. The story follows Greta, a little girl who, after wreaking havoc in her own world, escapes to the shadow puppet theatre and learns about herself with the help of shadow puppets from across the world.

I have a hazy memory of playing this game during PAX West 2018 and being impressed by it then, and while I don’t know what its development has gone through since then, I was happy to have it back in my hands. Its visuals are stunning from the first time that you open it: with Greta and all the objects she navigates around draped in shadow, the background is detailed with soft light reflecting intricate shadow backgrounds as well. I haven’t seen another game that looks like this, and I enjoyed walking into new environments right up through the finale of the game.

Greta Explores Indonesia

Playing as Greta, you manipulate this magical light that appears to her to go through the levels of the game, creating pathways up ramps and in the air where there were none. Of course, the further you go the harder it gets, oftentimes in visually impressive and imaginative ways. And as Greta ventures through this shadow puppet world, she encounters mythological beings from different cultures, helping them complete their own journeys.

You spend the longest time in Indonesia, which had the most digestible story, but there are some later beautiful places as well: I won’t name them, because I think part of the fun of the game is wanting to find out where you’ll go next. The setting is simply the best part of the game. While I was playing it, Projection: First Light was my go-to game to watch media in the background with, and sometimes I watch Sailor Moon just so I would have an excuse to play the game in handheld mode.

Oh, and the music, which is made with instruments designed for shadow puppet performances, is fantastic. It’s a perfect accompaniment to the game, and I paused whatever I was watching so I’d be able to pay better attention to the music and story coming from my Switch.

Greta in Troubled Waters

It’s not a perfect game, unfortunately. Before I ran into any major problems (and there was a major problem: I’ll be getting to that), the biggest issue I had was that the light controls are just very finicky. This is mostly fine, although a little frustrating even when you’re not being timed. However, there’s a late-game stage where you can’t be too slow, and I died countless times because I just couldn’t angle the light into the shadow that I wanted fast enough.

Most of the time, though, I just wasted a little time throughout the game trying to get the light to do what I wanted, which is why I found it best to have something else going on because otherwise, I know I would have gotten annoyed.

The big issue that I had was also a heartbreaking one: I had been really, truly enjoying the game up until this point, and had only the minor gripe about the finicky controls, when there was this tremendous boat sequence. I remember thinking as I played it that the backgrounds and the music and the storytelling in this scene were all my favorite part of the game so far, and it had such a fun and fantastic tone. You could light lanterns in the sky that represented stars as the boat went on, one of my favorite realizations in the whole game. I was feeling great about Projection: First Light.

Then it broke. There was an error message at the end of the level, and I just couldn’t progress. I had to play that boat sequence a dozen or so times, and I even restarted the game trying to get past it. It delayed me playing it for a little under a week, which is when a patch was put out for it, but it destroyed a little of the magic of the game for me, which is truly unfortunate. It might also be why I think the first quarter of the game is the most successful portion. I had other bugs as well, some that caused me to restart entire checkpoints.

Greta Pushes Through!

The rest of the game is worth the bugs, though. The rest of the countries you go to (and the anticipation you feel to get there!), plus the characters you meet, are worth the minor issues. I do think the story gets a little complicated to follow, though, for a game that has no spoken words. Without knowing the mythology in question beforehand, I got lost in the weeds when it came to finer plot points.

The final two lands also felt short to me. I was barely getting used to being there when Greta was leaving! But this feeling: the desire to play more, even after such a frustrating and game-breaking bug had stopped me for so long, is a good sign. The second half of the game had some memorable moments that come to mind when recalling the game (thinking of you, train!), and honestly, overall, I loved playing it.

As long as you don’t run into any major bugs, the most frustrating gameplay elements are the finicky controls, and if you don’t understand the intricacies of the plot, you might get bored waiting through the cutscenes. Despite that, Projection: First Light is worth picking up: it’s a stunning visual display with unique gameplay that usually succeeds in elevating its concept. Also, it’s fun to play. It’s pretty. I liked it.

***A PS4 review code was provided by the publisher***

The post Projection: First Light Review – Well Worth The Aggravating Bugs appeared first on COGconnected.

Witcheye is a colorful retro-style platformer developed by Moon Kid and published by Devolver Digital.  You play as a witch whose spell ingredients have been stolen by an enterprising knight. The form that you move takes shape as an eyeball…you know…a witch’s eye…get it? (cue groans). As this witch-eyeball, you’re able to stop and start your progress with any button, which you can use to your advantage as you move through the classic platforming levels.

The controls are simple and easy to understand. On the Switch, those controls are pretty much just moving around and stopping when you need to strategize. Again, you can do that with any button, so it’s easy to pick up and start playing. I liked the controls on the docked Switch better than the handheld, as I found myself frustrated more often whenever it wasn’t hooked up to the TV.

You move around the world and defeat enemies by bouncing into them, which gets harder and harder as you have to do so in more difficult ways. Most of the time, though, it wasn’t the enemies themselves that stumped me but the diamonds that serve as collectibles. There were several times that I went back to a level to try and find the last diamond, only to give up defeat after bouncing into every surface I could find. Maybe I’m just a failure, sure, but I wasn’t a failure who felt like I could reasonably get all the collectibles.

As a Switch game, Witcheye felt a little simplistic, and I wasn’t fully engaged with what was happening all the time. But the game is also out on iOS, and I think this game is probably a fantastic mobile game, as well as a great game to have undocked and portable. I found the slightly mindless repetition of the levels to be perfect when I was trying to concentrate on a podcast or half-watch a TV show. It makes me wish I’d played it on iOS, because I think it would excel there.

Double, Double, Toil, and Trouble

The visuals of Witcheye are a big step above average mobile game graphics, although, again, they were a little simple on the Switch. There are all sorts of fun things to look at that often work in tandem with the gameplay, like orange trees that rustle and hide your enemies from your sightline. Sure, it’s nothing completely new, but I really liked the design of the witch and the visual juxtapositions of a lot of the colors.

The opening is short and cute, setting you up to understand the pretty minimal story that’s going on here. For this type of game, though, I don’t need a huge story, just something to push me through the stages. And as long as I had something to put on in the background, I was motivated to play and had a good time doing so. If it was still normal to go outside and travel places, I’d recommend playing this on public transport.

Witcheye is fun, and it’s cute, and it’s got some great visuals and a cool control system. I think it’s the perfect game to vibe to something else with, which is a type of experience that everyone with a short attention span like me needs. Everything it fails in is simply due to being a game designed for another platform, and so I heartily recommend buying Witcheye…preferably on mobile.

***A Switch code was provided by the publisher***

The post Witcheye Review – An Ingredient for an Ingredient appeared first on COGconnected.

Those Who Remain is a psychological horror game developed by Camel 101 and set in the sleepy town of Dormont, a seemingly normal place to live. The story opens with Edward, the protagonist, deciding to break up with the woman he is having an affair with even as he drives to a motel to spend one last night with her. It quickly changes into an atmospheric horror story when Edward receives a phone call telling him to stay in the light—because when he doesn’t, menacing shadow creatures will devour him.

I had hopes for Those Who Remain. I love a creepy motel, to the point where I once booked a motel staycation and brought motel murder mysteries with me to evoke the atmosphere I enjoy so much. So starting off in a creepy motel is exactly up my alley, and I did find myself intrigued by the missing people and the mystery inherent in a phone call telling me to, “Stay in the light.”

Stay in the Light

I personally found the atmosphere genuinely successful. The first mark of a horror game should be: does it scare you? And yeah, I was scared. To be honest, it’s not hard to scare me, but hey, still. In the first few minutes of the game, the suspense and the spookiness of having the dark figures at the edges of the light always looking at me freaked me out so much that I turned the volume down and put on a peppy playlist so I could play without turning the game off every minute and a half.

There are no jump scares, so this fear came from good environmental storytelling in the opening scenes of the game, as well as nice atmospheric touches and a dark, encroaching soundtrack. Off to a good start, then.

Sadly for me specifically, the motel is quickly left behind. Sadly for all players, the story doesn’t live up to its initial promise. After a little while, my fear dissipated and I found myself bored with the events of the game. Those Who Remain quickly turns from a story about Edward trying to find his disappeared paramour and get safely to town to a series of explorations of different places, from libraries to family homes to police stations, which often have abrupt transitions that seem to be necessitated by plot and are orchestrated by plot magic.

A major element of the plot becomes Edward judging the crimes of others. Those Who Remain asks some interesting questions about the morality of people who do terrible things for sympathetic reasons, but I never found myself truly invested in them or Edward’s reactions to them. Edward, while fine enough, never struck me as anything more than yet another sad video game man with a broken family. I also found myself wondering, “Why doesn’t Edward just sit in this brightly lit room until dawn?” enough times that it was distracting. The incentive for him to carry on just didn’t seem strong enough. And the ending out of three that I got just didn’t seem worth all the effort it had taken to get there.

I like exploration and puzzle games, and I didn’t find there to be anything egregiously wrong with the game, but I also didn’t see anything particularly notable either. The only gameplay feature I actively disliked was whenever there was an enemy in the midst. Since Edward has no controls other than walking, the inability to properly hide from the enemy was nerve-wracking in a lame way…and then didn’t end up being a really big deal. The biggest enemy, which is best described as a titty monster with a headlight for a face, seemed more interested in her own feet than she did me. She still killed me plenty of times, though, because I sometimes I was too bored to fight the good fight.

Overall, Those Who Remain is fine. Just fine. It’s not terrible and doesn’t deserve to be hate-played or mocked or anything like that. Edward is a fine protagonist, the eerie atmosphere starts out strong and devolves to fine, and the gameplay is fine. I’m sure a lot of work went into this experience (I say this a lot, but I mean it), but unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything keeping this game safe from the gaping maw of irrelevance.

Love the motel, though.

***A PC code was provided by the Publisher***

Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.

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The post Those Who Remain Review – A Gaping Maw of Irrelevance appeared first on COGconnected.

112 Operator is a management sim by Jutsu Games where the player is a dispatcher in one of several major European cities, serving as an intercontinental sequel to 911 Operator. While I haven’t played the first game, the premise—handling incoming calls and directing police, medical, and fire vehicles to emergency situations in your assigned districts appealed to the management-sim-lover in me.

I chose Paris for my first playthrough, and I was given several arrondissements to oversee, answering calls and choosing, based on the situations presented, how to respond. In addition to having fire trucks, medical responders, and police cars, different types of vehicles are capable of handling different types of situations. You can also train your personnel to be better at specific situations, like technical firemen and first aid specific responders.

Somebody Call 911

I had a lot of fun at the outset of this game: I love managing things, and having all the city’s emergency resources at my disposal was engaging. When you play, you spend the majority of your time getting cut-and-dry emergencies to respond to, like a pickpocket or a carbon monoxide poisoning, which tell you what kind of unit to use. Then there are live calls you answer while doing this, usually two or three per level, where you have to try to talk someone through an emergency situation, just as a real dispatcher would do. These are usually interesting, well-acted, and often don’t have an easy solution. It’s fun, engaging stuff. Also, the city maps are very accurate, which is pretty cool.

Where the game began to fail was the follow-through of this situations. It was sometimes unclear when one of the engaging calls ended exactly what happened to the caller, and finding out after the level ended meant scrolling through a long list of situations you’d resolved to the specific one, only to see an unexciting notification that the person whose life you saved was taken to the hospital. As the dispatcher, you get emails from both work and civilians whose lives you’ve impacted, for better and worse, and it would have been nice if this had been implemented even more to give some closure for the most memorable calls.

The gameplay is simple but good, and I often fell into that great state of mind when playing a management sim where you’re just living in the moment, keeping your head above water while handling everything the game throws at you. However, by the time I finished the Paris campaign, I was honestly a little tired of 112 Operator—there’s simple and then there’s repetitive, and unfortunately, by the end it veered into the latter for me.

The personal storyline for the specific operator you play didn’t really resonate for me, and I was disappointed to discover that it seems like the storylines are the same across all the different cities you can play in, rendering them nearly indistinguishable from each other than street names. I don’t know if this is entirely true, because I didn’t finish my second Madrid campaign, but I did stick with it long enough for the beginning of one of the longest-running plot threads from the first campaign to start, so it seems likely. Because of this, I don’t think the game has much replayability after the mechanics begin to wear thin.

Overall, 112 Operator is a fun game for anyone who likes to play management sims. Unfortunately, when the easy control system and preset stories wear thin, there’s nothing to keep this dispatcher from changing careers. I know the developers are planning to release more content, which will help, but I don’t think that will be enough to completely salvage the experience.

***PC copy was provided by the publisher***

The post 112 Operator Review – Dispatched and Dangerous appeared first on COGconnected.

Femida is a point-and-click adventure mystery game by Art Interactive that has the player take on the position of a criminal judge post-revolution of a formerly communist nation. The protagonist, Demian, has to navigate his own desires to protect his wife and child and find out what happened to his father, while also trying to deliver justice to the people of the newly democratic country. It’s more complicated than it looks, though—every decision made in court could have a personal effect on Demian’s life.

The game is very text-heavy, with the majority of the action being played out in court battles that Demian decides the fate of. There are interludes in the apartment he’s sharing with his cousin (I believe), who works as a doctor and is very insistent that Demian takes his pills.

There are also subplots involving a detective whose father died in the recent revolution, Demian’s mother, who doesn’t seem particularly worried about her husband’s disappearance, and letters to Demian’s wife and child. There’s also a dog you can pet!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a text-heavy game. I love point-and-click adventure games, and I love deciding fictional peoples’ fates. However, the translation from Russian leaves a lot to be desired. When I first started playing the game, the translation errors were in nearly every sentence, although it was quickly updated to fix this issue…except, honestly, it didn’t fix much of anything.

The Revolution is…When?

The translation is still clunky at best—while there are less complete typos (although there are still some of those), there are significant grammar issues and sentence structure problems throughout. I’m glad the developers are working on improving the game, but right now almost all the in-game text is actively working against Femida. A text-based game without the text is almost no game at all.

Perhaps worst of all, the story just didn’t draw me in. When a piece of media doesn’t name their places past vague descriptors like “the country” or “the government,” and the events and people are only referred to as “the Dictator” and “the Revolution,” they are so general that they lose any resonance for me. I thought there were some interesting ideas presented in the court cases themselves, though.

I liked how much Femida tackled difficult subjects, from sexual assault to cannibalism, but the distractions of the translation and the clunky UI really pulled me out of the game and made it difficult to focus on the story. And when I could focus on the story, I found that the interesting stuff was outweighed by the inconvenience of getting there. And honestly? I feel like it’s difficult to fully tackle such serious subjects in one in-game court case, and even if everything worked perfectly, I don’t think I would have been convinced.

Keep the Drama in the Courtroom

The non-court scenes were the least compelling for me. So many characters came and went, and the exposition was so clumsy, that they held no personal meaning for me. Demian’s personal life was confusing, and I made reckless choices just to see what happened, because I honestly wasn’t concerned about his safety or livelihood. There’s some kind of court approval system with the audience approval, but it was difficult to gauge, and I stopped paying attention to it pretty early. When I got a bad ending, I didn’t feel bad about it, and I wasn’t inclined to play it again to see the other options.

I dislike giving such a harsh review to an indie because I know how important reviews are. I know people worked hard with little money on this game, and I respect their labor and efforts. However, I can’t in good conscience recommend this game to anyone I know, and I think it needed, not only more time in translation but considerably more time in development to flesh out nearly the entire game. The only reason I finished this game is that I’m writing this review, and it’s not a long or hard game to finish. Femida tackles a few interesting subjects, but fails on its execution in nearly all regards. The Revolution couldn’t fix everything.

***A PC code was provided by the publisher***

The post Femida Review — Dropping This Courtroom Drama appeared first on COGconnected.

It’s the end of an era, and we’re finishing out the decade with COGconnected’s Game of the Year award for Best Looking Game. Sure, a lot has happened in the last ten years, but let’s be honest, we can only remember the last twelve months.

12. Rage 2

Rage 2 is fun to look at with its gritty Borderlands-esque scenery and colorful weaponry. Sure, its success is dicey, but we’re not here to argue about the quality of the game itself, but how it looks. It’s always more enjoyable to look and kill when the setting works, and Rage 2’s embracement of its junkshop aesthetic lets it revel in its environment. The post-apocalypse is a good look for Rage 2.

11. Mortal Kombat 11

One more or less knows what to expect with Mortal Kombat, so it’s up to Warner Bros. to keep the visuals looking fresh, updated, and exciting for players. Mortal Kombat 11’s design choices might not be for everyone, but for those who could embrace inclusion and improvements, these choices added to an already good-looking game to make it a great-looking one.

10. Sayonara Wild Hearts

The visuals of Sayonara Wild Hearts aren’t hyper-realistic or nostalgic, but instead evoke a futuristic and unique world with its shades of purples, pinks, and teals around its stylized characters. With such an interesting look at a rhythm game, it’s no surprise that Sayonara Wild Hearts is a memorable title.

9. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

There’s a noticeable upgrade in graphics quality with early promotional materials for Sekiro and its release, showing that developers cared about giving the best game possible for their players. This attention means that one can experience Sekiro’s punishing ninjas-and-samurai gameplay with crystal clarity, and lets you see your deaths all the clearer.

Head over to PAGE 2 for more games on our list…

The post Ranking 2019’s Best Looking Video Games appeared first on COGconnected.