Recent reviews by Marimo

EDIT 2 AND HOLY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥

HOLY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥

JUST FINISHED THE GAME....

AND HOLY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

NO WAY THEY PULLED IT OFF!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This is the perfect "Waiting-for-Silksong-but-nothing-is-as-good-as-Hollow-Knight" game out there.

Edit 1 - some people said I was downplaying the game by saying it might not be as good as hollow knight.

To clarify, I am just saying that - this game is so good that since playing Hollow Knight, this is the only game that has scratched the itch of Hollow Knight with its precise controls, fun combat and bosses and everything else.

Oh man!

This game is just incredible.

The colour pallet, the controls, the bosses, the environment and heck the music.

This is some of the most perfect feeling controls since Hollow Knight and that is saying something!

As a person who was a part of the early Alphas/Betas, this game has only gotten better with the final release.

Fully recommend to any fans of Ultrakill - it just feels juicy and visceral.

First impressions review

Not sure how people are not able to get into it, especially the first boss. It isn't easy, it just requires you to reconfigure your mindset.

From Soft games have always been about adaptability and throwing stuff at you that makes you uncomfortable.

You can see that I have 1.5 hours at the time of this review, out of which 10-15 minutes were spent messing around with my mech after the first boss and about 20 minutes were spent going "DAMN" at the movement mechanics.

This game is very clearly focusing on movement kind of like Sekiro focused on parrying (at least from my early impressions)

Pros:

+ Great movement
+ Super Satisfying game feel
+ Combat is a lot of fun, especially shooting enemies while dodging their missiles or just ramming into them with full blast thrusters

Cons (more like nitpicks)

- Camera can take some time getting used to
- The flight initiation sound effect could have been given more oomph
- UI could have been designed better - yellow is the stagger bar which could have been the health bar since you see yellow more distinctly among the sea of blue-ey UI
- Wish they had better restrictions than the red-taping

Art is pretty much where this game pulls you in.

This feels like an indie game pushing hard on AAA tropes. For example:

- The tutorial segment has fake tension where bullets are flying around but they never hiot you. The tutorial segment dumps you with controls on the first gameplay moment.
- The double jump is super contextual where you need "Sony exclusive" wall to use the ability.
- Everything in the environment that is interactable needs to be highlighted because the world isn't organic enough for the player to distinguish.
- The enemy telegraphing is not great and the controls feel janky because they do not respond fluidly.

And this is from the first 20 minutes or so of gameplay.

Ghost Song: Long spoilery review: A Functionally Monotone Game That is Padded and Needs a Structural Redesign To Be Good

I just finished Ghost Song. And I have 25/42 achievements on Steam, so I did a fair bit of exploring. There is a lot I want to say about this game and that already implies that I will get into spoiler territory for the game.

TLDR and final thoughts if you don’t read: What exists of the game currently would still need a couple of months to rebalance, tweak and polish the entire experience. But even that won’t make the game good or exceptional. There is a functional game here or rather assets of one that need a proper redesign from scratch in order to be good.

With that out of the way:

I do think that the game is not that well designed . It suffers from the common western trope of - just putting a lot of things together that might not even be cohesive.

For example - why does the sprint mechanic exist? It serves no purpose in combat or in platforming. It feels like they slowed the player character down just to add the sprint ability and pad out the game since it also consumes stamina. If the base speed of the protagonist was that of the sprint mechanic OR if the sprinting did not consume any stamina, the game feel would remain unchanged. In fact, either of those would be a QoL upgrade.

And this is a microcosm of the entire game. It feels bloated for the sake of dragging playtime.

A Padded Main Quest:

The main quest is essentially a fetch quest that is MASSIVELY padded.

You have to get ship parts from 5 extremities of the map which is the main quest and the game basically forces you to make your way back to the hub area from the extremities of the map. Since you can’t carry two ship parts at the same time and can’t fast travel while carrying the ship parts (game logic), it feels padded. It doesn’t feel thought out honestly.

In one case, there were two ship parts that were very close to each other, but I had to go through 60% of the route at least 4 times because of the design.

Without the padding, the game length would barely be 4 hours.

Since we are talking about the map, another problem is the empty rooms. There are wayyyyyyy too many rooms that exist for no reason. For example, while fighting the first quest boss (the spear lady in my case), you have 2-3 completely empty rooms between the last save room and the boss. It almost feels like I have to go through antire walking segment to get to her. And this is the case with a lot of bosses where the save room is placed between 3 rooms of either emptiness or fodder enemies and the boss.

And I am NOT saying that empty rooms are bad. A lot of games do this to build atmosphere, but with Ghost Song doing it for every boss, it becomes a pattern and hence loses impactful. Even outside of the bosses, there are many empty rooms or rooms that are too big for no reason.

Compounding upon this, players will notice that the game hasn’t been cartographed properly. 90% of the rooms on the map don’t show details within the rooms, but for some reason, there are some parts of the map that show roughly how the platforms are placed. Makes me feel like they released the game before it was completelyu finished.

A lack of polish:

When I say polish, I am talking about the minor things like I did above with the map.

There was this one point in the game where a platform was visibly too high to reach with a single jump. My initial visual response was that I could not reach it. But due to instinct, I tried anyway before realizing there was a platform below it that was hidden behind the environment asset which I could use to climb on top. This is present right at the start of the game and is a thankfully a one-off thing, but there are many little things like these that could have really been avoided with more time in development.

Pacing Issues:

I find it quite poetic that the animations of the game essentially represent the game’s design philosophy.

Keep in mind, I do not have issues with the animations. They look fine for a puppet animated game, but they don’t feel impactful because there isn’t enough of a feeling of acceleration or deceleration (if that makes sense).

The entire game feels like it's on one note. There are no highs and no lows. There is no sense of pacing - building tension, middle, and then climax. This extends to the story, combat, boss designs, and everything else.

You could find important items just laying around that are just there in the environment with no indication beforehand.

With the story, I never had a sense of escalation either. I just had to go to these places, find the parts and would find side characters muttering about in the environment. There was no change in the world. It doesn’t help that the music for the most part is flat or just ambient. There are a couple of cool tracks, but I can’t think of one that’s stuck in my head or that made me go "WHOAAA!"

Also, the story simply ends with a…. “Huh that’s it moment?”. Maybe I did not get an alternate ending (?), but from what I have read, the endings don’t have that much of a difference.

I don’t really see it having any redeeming points if I am being honest. A lot of the things besides the art feel average or not thought out.

Some other points that I feel need to be addressed.

• This could very much have been programmed for a mouse and keyboard rather than just being a keyboard-only game.
  
• The weapon that allows you to shoot baby insects is OP as hell and can clear bosses and hordes of enemies very easily while you sit out of range.
  
• The blue LEDs that temporarily are there in the room during vertical transitions feel cheap
  
• Dialogues have no skip/fastening when not in comic panel mode, so you need to listen to them as you wait for the dialogue to finish. Basically, voice-acted dialogues can’t be skipped, but text-based dialogues can be skipped
  
• The boss that gives you double jump is weirdly designed. You can also shoot the boss from outside the combat arena where it can't attack you and basically cheese it hard.
  
• Key upgrades like core upgrades that better your healing amount are just randomly placed
  
• Hitboxes were wonky and the amount of stamina dashes consume de-incentivizes close-quarter/melee combat
  
• Another aspect that de-incentivizes close-quarter/melee combat is the lack of proper telegraphing from enemies

The praise this game is getting is unjustified and there are way too many good games released this year for them to be ignored. There are many MVs in 2022 that deserve more praise if Ghost Song is getting an 88 on metacritic.

• Lone fungus
  
• Trash quest
  
• Zapling bygone
  
• Islets
  
• Haiku The Robot etc

Are all far better designed games.

Despite its steep learning curve, once you get a hang of the controls, it is a super fun game to play. It basically recontextualized everything that I, as a metoidvania fan, took for granted - jumping, wall grab etc etc.

There are some minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that can come in the way of players, but given that the game is in early access, I am sure the developer will fix them eventually.

Mechanically, the game is solid and is certainly an ideal games for fans of the Metroidvania genre and/or Getting Over it.

7.8 hour update:


This is going to be my musings and a lot of it is from the discord server, but this is what I think. Full review coming when I finish the game:

This is by far one of the most unique experiences I have had since Nier: Automata narratively and it feels a lot like that game. It has that self aware game design motive that Nier had.

If you have seen the video by SkillUp on Nier Automata, he says that the game is like a street performer. To keep the attention of the crowd, the performer has to have a good set of skills that are surprising and fresh.

This is exactly the spirit I feel in Biomass. The game constantly surprises you and turns over your expectations.

What it does well:
-World Building
-Exceptional sound design (STRESSING ON THIS POINT)
-Engrossing Atmosphere
-Personally think that the combat is satisfying af
-Great OST

Where it stumbles
-A few bugs, only one person till now faced game breaking bug
-Couple of balancing issues (As per dev, I felt it was fine)

So far, I am enjoying the game and if it goes along like how it is going, I think it will be one of the sleeper hits of 2020. Will make an updated review when I finish it (Currently 8 hours into the game)

The worst part is that I can't talk about the best moments of Biomass without spoiling the experience. It's like Nier's E ending or the sequence of the robot village waving white flags. You can't say what's special and why it is special without giving it the entire context of the game.

As I had written in my Nier Review on Steam, this game also follows the same principle of "Imperfect Perfection". It is flawed in some regards, but it also uses the strongest elements of video games as a storytelling medium to string a narrative that can ONLY be told through a game.

Doom Eternal was supposed to be 2020’s best FPS, but Ultrakill is definitely taking that spot for me. This is not a dig at Doom Eternal. Ultrakill is just that good.

Read more here:

http://gamingpurists.com/ultrakill-early-access-preview-doomslayers-power-fantasy/

Game: Gives me 100 solutions to any enemy encounter.

Me: Blink goes brrrrr