faea gaming: August '25
Hello, again, and happy September. I've decided to make a little change this time: to keep things a bit neater: I'm not recording anything for "Games I Didn't Finish", unless I'm convinced I won't actually finish them. As well as keeping the entries a little bit shorter, it also means I won't have to awkwardly try not to repeat myself whenever I do finish them. I think this was how I planned to do it initially… oops! Anyway, there's a lot of games this month, so let's talk about games this month.
Games I Finished
Cave Noire
Lovely little thing – basically a classic roguelike restyled into a light puzzle game that you can play for, like, 5 to 10 minutes at a time. All the RPG elements are basically removed and combat is disincentivised to a point where it’s primarily about navigating around enemies on fixed movement paths, and proper item use for the situations where you get stuck – despite some very annoying luck-reliance on higher difficulties, the puzzle-y nature of its movement makes it work generally very well as a proc-gen game. There’s four different objectives to pick that all slightly change up how to approach the game, and each one has its own scaling difficulty – starting out easy and very quickly ramping up to fiendishly satisfying through both needing to fulfil more of the objective to win (and by extension having to dive further down), and making stronger enemies (and items!) appear higher up in the dungeon. Each run is 15 minutes at absolute max at the highest difficulties, with the lower ones being much quicker, so it’s a really nice little pick-up-and-play thing. They even give you a medal if you clear the higher difficulties… wahh
Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams...
It’s more NiGHTS, so it’s good by default :) I like the unlockable picture gallery… I got a really cool picture of Claris. I feel like you could leverage locking silly cosmetic unlockables like that behind score/performance to try to gently encourage people to attempt to play at those levels. I’m sure I’ve seen games do things like that, but I can’t think of any :(
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
I hardly ever remember my dreams to any extent, but the few times I do they’re very mundane; a mirror of aspects from my day-to-day life built from clashing memories that all feel individually familiar. So while it feels like “dreamlike” has become an adjective synonymous either with “beautiful” or any form of surrealism, I think Link’s Awakening’s dream world is far more compelling as one through its subtlety: it’s largely very familiar Zelda motifs, with icons sucked into the world from nondescript childlike imagery and the broader Nintendo subconsciousness and sprinkled through the world in a way that doesn’t draw any attention towards any of it. And its unwillingness to tell or record the names of much of anything, combined with its monochrome visuals making everything lack a level of visual clarity, makes a lot of the individual entities in the game hard to place definitively, even when they’re recognisable.
Umm but unfortunately to experience the genuinely really cool theming I had to play the Zelda game, which I’m now convinced I just don’t have the capacity to enjoy very much :( The amount of times I got stuck running in circles for ages hunting for one particular room in a dungeon that I need to backtrack to, or one screen on the entire map that I need to find again to progress, or needing to find something very specific and missable that I actually needed to get for progress… all those frustrations just aren’t made up for by the rest of the game – it all feels a bit too perfunctory for me to ever feel particularly excited to play or progress. But… there was a mid-lategame sweetspot where the dungeon crawling was genuinely pretty fun: fairly intricate and challenging layouts without being too “running in circles because I can’t remember where the room I need to be in is”-heavy. And sometimes it spits you out in an area you haven’t been to in a while, and gives you the space to run around sucking up a bunch of secrets that you couldn’t get earlier or had forgotten about. And I think that’s helping me understand what people find fun about these, even if I’m not sure I agree.
Atopes
It’s heavily built around a main story idea, which is IMO an incredibly straightforward theme told in a way I… personally found very odd and hard to appreciate. (The below screenshot goes hard, though.) But it’s an incredibly ambitious meta multi-game multimedia project whose execution still charmed me most throughout most of its couple hours of runtime, even if I didn’t really care for what it was saying. The individual games are kind of dumb and silly but I think it’s a very bold statement to lead off with an stg that becomes completely unreadable and lets you statistically trivialise it with like five minutes of effort
Madō Monogatari 3
Finally playing 3 after a five-month break really made me realise how much I love these games. In 2-4 hours, they all individually manage to feel like complete and incredibly dense dungeon crawlers (complete with annoying enemies and stuffed full of kinda-mean but clever navigational puzzles), and with a ton of unique texture: the incredibly bright artstyle and really captivating sprites, and its conveyance of RPG info through anything \*except* numbers (rather, through colourful text, UI elements or even music changes). Playing through this alongside the ~30 hours I sunk into SMT1 only highlights how much these games do with such little time!
Pikmin
Funny how my weirdest relationship with a Nintendo game is Pikmin of all games, the one that has the absolute highest amount of disparate parts that I love: the focus on RTS-lite multitasking, the overarching time limit, the uncomfortably-peaceful atmosphere, the really sweet writing, the fact that all the Pikmin are easily-distractible fucking idiots that have to be babied excessively in order to get them to do anything. I’ve always just had a really difficult time actually *playing* it, since I always find the motions of the game a little bit too slow and meandering to distract from all the things I should otherwise like about it. And that was exactly how I was feeling for the first half of this playthrough… but at a point, it all sort of clicked? I’m not really sure why – maybe the timer’s lenience helped, because blowing past it made me feel kind of good at videogames lol – but I kind of just stopped being bored by it, and ended up having a really good time! There’s still bits that sort of irked me – some of the bosses and puzzles felt like they took a lot of time or effort for how perfunctory the actual execution felt – but ultimately came out of this feeling pretty good about it.
Presenter Slides
This is literally a university thesis, but the way they use it to express said thesis and their research is really cool, I think. It’s about what they call “counter game design”, being design elements that strongly oppose themselves to current norms in design (particularly illustrating a level of player-hostility). You probably know that this is kind of a lot of what I seek out anyway, and the theory angle of game design doesn’t really interest me personally, but the game plays with those ideas in a lot of really fun and funny ways. And I enjoyed hearing the two developers explicitly lay out their thesis, because they’re clearly passionate about this stuff, and passion is a good thing to have.
Shiner
Basically a puzzle game through its turn-based combat system: you get new moves with specific functions through winning fights, and use them to win other fights; half through clear lock-and-key match-winners and half through creativity. There’s a lot of attacks that felt kind of useless, and the later bits felt like using the same absurdly strong strategy over and over with minor changes per enemy moveset, but not only is the game short enough for it to not be too much of a bother… the strategy itself is a ridiculously funny punchline. Had a good time with this! I think the main character getting visibly injured when they take damage is sad though :(
Pilotwings 64
Aahhh, this is lovely! It’s basically a score-attack game via small sets of missions across three different aircraft types. Each aircraft comes with a completely unique set of controls and awkwardnesses to get used to, and while the missions repeat ideas fairly often, they throw out a lot of fun and silly ideas: bouncing a ball cross-country or shooting down a kaiju, for example; and the repetition doesn’t even matter, because the fun of the game comes from mastering the controls, and mastering the controls is fun!! The score grind comes with a lot of frustration – some of the scoring is really finicky, and there’s the occasional genuinely nasty dud mission – but it’s the motivating sort of frustration, the satisfying kind, the type that makes you reflect on how fun the process was once you come out the other end.
No One Can Stop Mr. Domino
I could.
I’ll lead off by saying this can get sort of frustrating for boring reasons: the turning is really imprecise in a game that demands a lot of precision, and a single mistake can easily lead to a whole stage falling apart and potentially spiralling to a guaranteed game over. There’s also a lot of just mean level design: it’s clearly a game they want you to replay over and over – the continue system implies as much – but the amount of unreactable hazards starts to reach cheap-feeling rather than silly: there’s a balance to be struck with this stuff, and I don’t think they do it very well? It also feels at odds with itself, to an extent: the continue system is good and fun when playing for a clear, but there are meta-unlocks that are only available through individual stage scoring, and grinding stages for those unlocks feels like it’d be much more fitting for a free-play mode than being limited to a stage-based arcade structure.
But, get over all of that and the core of this is really fun and interesting? My gut instinct is to call it an alternate-universe NiGHTS: in how they’re both movement-y games structured around looping through short levels for familiarisation; though unlike NiGHTS which expects you to make as many loops as possible, this game really wants you to make exactly one lap: one to make one giant domino chain to link together as many keys as possible, and then returning to the start of the domino chain to knock them all down. A perfect chain will literally clear the entire stage in one go, but any mistake – misplacing a domino or getting hit by a hazard – will break the chain and necessitate an extra run-through to clean up the mess, familiarising you more with the stage but bringing you closer to timing out. And replaying those early levels after a game over and going from wrestling with the controls to making full-stage chains was a lot of fun, even if the scoring from chains doesn’t actually do anything during a run.
I.Q: Intelligent Qube
ALMOST a repeat of my experience with No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!, except I think the core game is much more fun while my problems with controlling it are much more intrusive. It’s a score-attack puzzler where rows of cubes roll towards you, and you detonate tiles underneath them to remove them; green cubes let you later detonate 3x3 bombs on the spaces you destroyed them, and black cubes have to be ignored. There’s a lot of quick thinking and little bits of nuance here; it’s probably, like, one hundredth of what people who can play Tetris get out of playing Tetris. And as well as giving you your score at the end, it gives you your IQ, because video games are very scientific and important (Mine is 217, which means my opinions are better than yours). I also wanna shout out the ridiculous aesthetic: playing as a guy stuck in the Guy-Crushing Machine, having to fight for his life to not get run over and killed by giant rolling cubes, while being scored by music that sounds like that.
But what made this this sort of a frustrating experience, is… The camera angle makes it really tricky sometimes to see where your bombs are in relation to the grid, so I found myself accidentally clipping a lot of black cubes with bombs because I couldn’t really read the grid. And having to divert so much focus to the back parts of the grid made it really easy to lose where the character is… and getting hit by a block automatically forces the grid off the end of the stage, breaking a lot of the stage, and instantly drops the same grid back on. And getting clipped by a block near the end of the grid, if not killing you outright, also means having to run all the way back up to catch up to the *new* grid that already started moving as soon as you regained control. Both of these were the main ways I was messing up – I otherwise found survival fairly calm until the last three stages – and the punishment is a really horrible feeling for the sort of mistakes they are. So, I got my clear, but I don’t think I’m gonna be sticking around for scoring.
Art Style: PiCTOPiCT
So, Art Style is a series of mini puzzlers for WiiWare and DSiWare that I learned about a good while ago, but since I’m in a puzzle mood, I decided to give them a crack (at least the DSi ones… I’m not setting my Wii U back up for these, sorry!!!!). And, while most of them I’ve found pretty unappealing so far, this one is cool! It’s a falling block game where you grab and place blocks with the stylus, and can place them anywhere on the screen to match with falling blocks of the same colour – if a group (i.e. more than 1) of your blocks matches a group of falling blocks, it clears the columns of all matched blocks; any that land without being cleared settle as moveable blocks. Fairly standard stuff; what I like about it is both the low skill floor, thanks to placing anywhere, and there’s some pretty interesting dynamics with the block economy: sometimes groups need to *not* be cleared as to not clear *too* much, and not have enough blocks left for more hectic parts of levels; and the necessity of juggling actually clearing blocks with moving others out of the way, if the screen gets too full. Not a fan of the NES retro nostalgia blast aesthetic, but they did dedicate two entire levels to Devil World. Maybe this is Devil World propaganda… maybe I’ve got to go play Devil World.
The harder levels are really hard!!! There’s a point where I was getting frustrated with the precision of it – misplacing a block can just be an instant loss sometimes, and I’m playing on a small screen that’s been a little bit miscalibrated for a very long time – but that’s not really the fault of the game. But it’s like, “I stormed through the rest of the game in about an hour, then one level TOOK me about an hour” type of difficulty spike. Great if you’re a fiend for this – I might be, to be honest, but I genuinely hurt my hands kinda badly grinding the last two levels, so I think I ought to take a bit of a break…
Games I Haven't Finished
Shin Megami Tensei
Accepting this as the autobattler that it really is, rather than pretending it’s a game where you’re expected to actually make decisions mid-combat, made this game’s motions a bit more palatable (though maybe not “fun”; it was still an absolute ordeal, to be honest) – it’s less about what you’re doing during combat (because what you’re doing is loading up status bullets on your best spread gun and winning almost every fight without trying) and more about planning how to approach particular encounters. Because some groups will risk destroying you if you autobattle – what if half my team gets charmed and I have to sit and watch them kill each other? – so the game becomes a case of identifying those enemies and a suitable countermeasure for them. Spells always go before attacks, so if they aren’t spellcasters they can be locked down with Mazio or Mabufu. If the danger comes from spells, it might be better to negotiate or try to recruit one – recruiting one means they can always be avoided (save for on a full moon), but can’t be done when opposite alignment; repeated negotiation is riskier, but *somewhat* learnable and lands a lot of useful extra resources. And if all else fails – either risk the fight, or hope escaping works!
Anyway I uhhh got so bored that I didn’t finish the game and watched the endings on youtube 😭 I don’t think I’ve ever done that before in my life… but my main motivation past the, like, ten hour mark was to experience the storytelling and how it compares to the later SMTs I’ve played. I don’t think the story is all that impressive, but I think its constituent parts make a lot more sense here than in any of the eight billion times I’ve seen them regurgitated since. Contextualising alignments as two extremist positions responding to real-life WW2, gives it a lot more weight that it’s actually about something, and grounds both alignments as positions you absolutely do not want to be taking sides . Though, under that reading I don’t really like how hard it is to not accidentally fall into law/chaos since staying neutral still is the Mechanical Centrism of just being neither, especially since the main character is a silent avatar protagonist rather than a written character – I know exactly what stance I want to take, but at times it feels like the game itself is getting in the way! In my rewrite of shin megami tensei one for the super nes the protagonist will be an absolute stupid fuck who intensely believes everything that anyone says to him and the challenge of the game is to not let him get talked into destroying humanity it will be awesome
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. Since I’ve spent an awful lot of the past few years cycling through tons of new games, I think I’m going to spend some time replaying some of my favourite things I’ve discovered, and trying to form stronger relationships with them. It’s cool to experience new things, but when you get through it at the rate I’ve been, and your mind starts asking you to stop, it’s probably a good idea to listen… plowing through things like that makes everything feel kind of disposable at times.
Anyway, please support me on my Substack if you’re reading this and like what I do (I’ve also got another bigger piece in the works) – it’s free, and always will be, and seeing tangible support for my writing helps to keep me motivated. Also… have fun with the new comments box! I used a widget from here, so full credit to them for making it. I would, ideally, like to be fully independent, so having ways to directly interact with people outside of external sites feels pretty important. I'll format it later, though. See you next month ~♡