faea gaming: October '25
Hi, again. I’ve decided to make another structural change to these: I’m getting rid of the distinction between “games I finished” and “games I didn’t finish” entirely. I’ve played enough games recently that make me disbelieve that you can’t have a meaningful relationship with, or make meaningful commentary on, a game that you haven’t completed, which is something that distinction inherently upholds. So I’m just putting these notes down for games I feel I’ve put enough time into to have a strong read on, and where I don’t think my opinions are going to develop that much more than they have already. In practice it’s not gonna be much different, really; I’m just not forcing myself to write about anything I don’t have the full picture for.
Anyway… I had another really weird and busy month, so I didn’t really play all that much, until the end of the month where I started about six games in the space of a week and promptly collapsed under the weight of all of that! Oops!!!!! So let’s just talk about what I actually managed.
Games I Finished
Super Mario Bros.
This is just a really fascinating game, isn’t it? On one hand, it is absolutely an arcade game, and it’s as clear as day as soon as you start moving; Mario is an absolute menace to control, and you’re expected to sink hours and hours into this thing to get to grips with that, going from flubbing basic jumps in a way that looks and feels downright embarrassing, to being able to blast through levels without ever losing top speed. Learning involves playing slowly, playing slowly affords stopping to look for secrets, and this game is absolutely stuffed with them; coin rooms that skip noticeable chunks of the level, hidden 1-up blocks and powerups, which you mentally note and slide into your route to grab even when you’re blitzing through the game. On the other hand, it is absolutely a home console game, which can’t be made clearer than the game’s most iconic secret, the warp zones: a little bit of curiosity (or just internet osmosis, it’s 2025 I’m not gonna pretend we don’t all know what this game is) and you get to skip, like, half the game at once. It’s the most interesting part of the game to me, both because the extent of the reward for finding these things is a very console-feeling level of Material Progression, effectively acting as checkpoints to speed you back to where you were (or further); and because of how that so heavily twists the dynamic of the game. It’s an linearly-structured arcade-style game where you don’t even have to play all of the levels to beat it; I wouldn’t really be surprised if someone found the 6-7-8 zone on their first time through the level. Once you know them, there’s only six levels in the entire game that you have to complete, and in a game where it’s so fun to bulldoze through familiar levels, I think that’s a little bit sad.
Wizardry Gaiden I: Suffering of the Queen
I wanna clarify now that I haven’t actually beaten the game – the credits don’t roll after the first dungeon, and I accidentally stumbled into the second dungeon on some really bizarre circumstances (the final boss didn’t drop the key item needed to formally Complete the first dungeon because my only party member with inventory space died, and I happened to walk into it while trying to find my way back out. If that’s not some “90s RPG that’s actually an 80s RPG” absurdity then I don’t know what is!). But I wanna put a pin in this for now, both because the first dungeon is a clear jumping-off point, and because I frankly don’t have the energy to play an entire second Wizardry Gaiden I right now!!!
It’s a wonderful game – I’m in the process of attacking a longer writeup on the specific moment that really sold me on this series – but what I found more broadly appealing is how many different variables and mechanics there are unintrusive and mainly there to add a little bit of texture and unpredictability. It’s important to remember that Wizardry is one of the closest series to the video game RPG’s primary ancestor – the tabletop RPG – which is why I harp on so much about these games’ mechanics being there to afford emergent storytelling; their ancestors are quite literally storytelling devices. So when something kind of silly and/or annoying happens, like choosing to make a questionable class-swap on one of my characters because I got a really cool-sounding weapon that only that class can use, or my party structure being thrown off because my best character just DECIDED to become good-aligned when everyone else is evil, those moments are this game’s storytelling language; they’re your own story through the game, and it’s probably gonna be at least slightly different to anyone else’s. And I think this game pulls out some really fun moments with its mechanics! Its smaller, less consequential ones are quite charming too – I loved seeing my Bishop being unable to identify a particular weapon, and the fact that they weren’t able to scaring them and inflicting a fear debuff until they returned to town.
I’m not gonna say it’s all perfect: the crawling itself got a little less interesting to me as the game went on since the dungeon pretty much matches your own party’s strength, which means pulling out a lot of insta-death/status attacks or party-wipe spells later on; and its main progression flags were a bit too obtuse for me in that Early Adventure Game sorta way that I’m not really acclimated to. But it’s still absolutely palatable if you’re familiar with the motions of other early RPGs. It’s just a great time!! Wizardry impresses me more than anything just by having lots of cool little mechanics that add a particular sort of groundedness and texture that even other seminal RPGs wasted no time in chucking out as soon as they could. If I have to become a Dragon Quest hater in order to champion games like this, I’ll do it…. I will carry the torch………
Mushihimesama
the feminine urge to walk directly into an entire screen’s worth of bullets and not get hit by any of them simply because you believed that you could……
yeah this owns. this really really owns. Both the previous times I’d tried this game were on Original Mode, which I’d now go as far as to say feels like an awkwardly tacked-on easy mode. Going to Maniac was a complete transformation – going from like “I don’t really get why people like this so much?” straight to “holy shit”. I don’t really know how to dissect shmup Game Design very well, but there’s a few things I’m particularly enjoying: the bullet cancel mechanic is really cool, encouraging letting as many bullets pile up on screen as possible for scoring without being too much of a distraction from the core of it all; and player and bullet hitboxes being so tiny that you can kind of just move through anything if you manifest hard enough, and in turn the difficulty feels mostly about pre-positioning against fast bullets while dodging constant streams than it is about micrododging – because micrododging in this game is really easy! Also, the boss patterns are just really cool??? There’s nothing as intricate as a good Touhou boss in terms of how you actually have to move, but it’s not Touhou, so that’s not really an issue… and to be honest, the visual splendour of them does come very close.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
This is really cool :) I’m a really big fan of the depth in such simple combat here. You see the diagonal walls, and the game sort of aggressively teaches you that you can bounce your yoyo off them, and I was thinking “oh, is that the Thing I’m going to be doing over and over until I win”. But the best way to use diagonals is to off-string throw your yoyo, since oftentimes rooms are set up to let it bounce around infinitely, but that leaves your character unable to deal direct damage… BUT the empty yo-yo string deals stun and knockback, which is sometimes more ideal than damage. It leads to a game with a lot of genuine planning and decision-making when it comes to combat, as well as a little chaos… sometimes you really don’t want to pick up the yoyo again, but it’s somehow managed to fly back into you!, and now you have to figure out how to scrape your plan back together.
It’s also the first Zelda-ish game I’ve played to have puzzling that I genuinely enjoy? All the puzzles are little sectioned-off rooms that just involve applying your simple moveset in interesting and creative ways – oftentimes you’ll learn something new about your toolkit from hitting your head against a puzzle for a while, and since the moveset you use to interact with the world is the very same you use in combat, sometimes you walk away with a new trick you can apply during fights. And the looser puzzles can often just be done, like, blatantly wrong… more than a few times I’ve walked out of a room thinking “I wonder how I was actually supposed to do that”. There’s an art to that – too much power in your kit and it can stop feeling like you’re actually solving anything at all – but so far it’s a line the game’s been riding wonderfully.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t feeling the game too much in the first few hours. It’s very much a product of 2025 Game Design – the main things that were gnawing at me were an excessive amount of automatic map marking (the game really just lets you miss nothing), and the penalty for death being very small: a percentage of money lost (that goes down the more you die in the same room), and the option to just hop back in and try again. And you know me, I have a Wizardry game listed on the same page; I really like when games push back much harder for failure. But, this is a GBA pastiche, right? It’s pretty up-front about that. And after a couple of sessions, I swapped over to playing on my Deck, to have as a game I poked away at for about half an hour before bed; sessions not too different than if I were playing on my GBA on my work commute. And it really all falls into place there: you can open up the game, hop straight in to do like two or three things which are all individually really satisfying!, and then switch it off feeling like you’ve done something. Map markers in particular often just feel like I’m being dragged around to see All The Content, but I don’t mind them as a reminder for what there is to actually do, when I’m playing sessions so short that I just might not remember myself. This stuff is all context dependent, and it’s good to challenge your biases from time to time!
Look Outside
EARLY IMPRESSIONS: yeaaaaa im really really Really into this so far. Post-COVID “cosmic horror by way of global catastrophe/lockdown anxiety” is already a winning premise but the survival rpg bits also feel really well-considered so far. Game punishes you for playing too safe by literally not allowing you to save until you take a few risks, and rewards you for playing reckless by giving huge exp bonuses for staying out for longer without going back to the safe room. The resource management is giving RE1 wayyy more than it is a typical RPG – no free heals, every attack is a potential resource spent – and it’s all grounded by very mundane activities between crawls – cooking, showering, brushing teeth, leisure activities – that both feed back into the crawls, and require deeper crawling to be fed. Lots of fun RNG, surprises, jumpscares (these are good btw) and other events. Alsoooooooo… the body horror rules (big fan of the guy who has Infinite Tooth Disease, and spends his entire conversation obsessively brushing all his new teeth), and I love that you can commit to being an anxious shut-in by just. not engaging with the game at all, and wasting the entire game away in your room. I’m doing that on the side. It’s as boring as it sounds but very apt that you can just do it anyway.
Stray Children
YES... HA HA HA... YES!
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. I don’t have much of an outro this time, other than to signpost the Touhou 11 article I just wrote; please go check that out if you haven’t, I’m very very happy with it. See you next month ~♡