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Game Ramblings #207 – Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

More Info from PlatinumGames

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

This game surprised me in a lot of ways. Unlike Bayonetta, it’s a low slower paced. Unlike many action/adventure games, it’s focused more on puzzle solving. Unlike most Nintendo titles, it has what initially feels like a complicated and confounding control scheme but trusts that its players will put the pieces together. It drops the series’ relatively realistic visuals for a storybook painter feel while also dropping as much of the over the top bombastic elements as a game about witches, demons, and fairies realistically could. If anything could be an anti-Bayonetta yet still exist in the IP, I suppose it makes sense that this is what it would come out being.

The control scheme is going to be the thing that makes most people pause when they look at this and go did Nintendo really allow this? It’s not bad, but it’s decidedly weird. The left analog stick and shoulders control Cereza. The right analog stick and shoulders control her demon. This is active at all times and a camera restriction forces them to be within a reasonable distance of each other. The thing that is unusual about this is that in an action game, splitting focus is typically wildly dangerous. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get into situations where I totally lost a character on screen, because it happened. However, I was often moving the two as a unit because of the mechanics that were chosen.

Cereza’s not really a combat unit in this case. What her powers are focused around is crowd control. She increasingly becomes able to stun lock one to multiple units throughout combat via her magic. This then lets her demon deal out extra damage, or in a lot of cases for my play style allowed me to focus damage on units that were not crowd controlled. The demon also has elemental powers to help specific situations – rock to break shields, water to kill fire, etc – so most of my time in combat was really a minimal portion of my brain dedicated to using my crowd control, then most of my brain focusing on demon attacks.

It surprised me how often this just worked pretty well. The game generally didn’t toss a ton of units at you at one time so losing focus on one of your characters wasn’t generally a huge issue. High danger situations for attacks typically involved boss fights, and in those cases there are lots of tools to deal with them as well. You can re-summon the demon to Cereza at any time and with later upgrades allow Cereza to move quicker when they’re together. This is really what made boss fights click. In those cases, the focus was always just the boss and playing around with their tells to stay out of danger vs using the right elements to open opportunities for Cereza to stun them and get damage in.

Ultimately it feels like combat was crafted for the control scheme rather than around it, and I get that feels like a vague distinction. In this case though, the combat is very clearly tuned toward a situation in which the player doesn’t have as good of focus as usual, so all the tools in play are to reduce the speed of needing to think. CC gives the player more safety and time. Damage buffs reinforce the use of CC. Limited enemy counts allow you to focus both characters on one spot with independent movement. Element requirements give you something specific to action upon that doesn’t involve a change in focus. It is all crafted to enhance the experience rather than a 2.5D combat experience being grafted into a weird control scheme.

The rest of the experience surrounding this is just kind of the cherry on top. There’s a decent upgrade system here to grant the player some feeling of a power curve that they can choose the direction of. There’s some light Metroidvania elements in the environment to make retraversal both beneficial and fun. There’s some light time attack elements to optional dungeons to give some side content to hit. There’s a good mix and rhythm to changes between puzzle sections and combat sections to keep the player engaged throughout. It all just kind of works well. Is it anything mind blowing? Not really. It’s all just kind of done at a high enough standard to not be a detriment, and that’s perfect for what it is.

However, this does bring up a thought that I had the entire time. Why does this game not have couch co-op? All of the entirely practical development reasons for couch co-op to not exist – screen real estate and performance with split viewports, game balance, mechanical oddities, etc – have been dealt with here. You always have two characters, they always exist independently, their UI elements are always present on screen, and there are mechanical reasons for the camera to be forcefully restricted to keep them nearby. Couch co-op is literally a drop in for this design. There are a tiny handful of spots that don’t have both characters playable for story reasons, but even then the mechanics of one or the other player having a short solo experience are fine in context for people playing together. Co-op simply just does not exist, and it’s a shame. This is a theoretically great title for people to co-op since you have two characters with two wildly different mechanic sets to allow players to choose the play style – offensive or defensive – that they prefer.

I played this on a whim and came away happily surprised. I’m generally a fan of the Bayonetta series but this was obviously something very different. Where Bayonetta is thematically as anti-Nintendo as they come, this game is for gameplay reasons as anti-Nintendo as they come. However, despite that it all works very well which leads me to believe that this was more carefully considered than I’m imagining. The controls are relatively complex but the gameplay feels tailored toward them. It ends up being an experience that feels like a well thought out package, rather than a game grafted onto a weird control scheme. It ends up just being a really pleasant surprise.

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Game Ramblings #206 – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

More Info from Bethesda

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Xbox Series
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS5

If I were to really explain what this game is I’d probably describe it as a very good stealth game, but an extraordinary Indiana Jones game. Detached from the license this would still be a fun game in its own right. However, its attachment to the Indiana Jones IP seems to have steered it in such a perfect B-movie direction that it elevates it more than I would have expected.

Looking purely at gameplay, this is a winner on its own. I’ve said it before, but I am an absolute sucker for games that let me stealth the entire time, and this is absolutely one of them. The game didn’t even let me have a gun until at least 5 or 6 hours in, at which point I promptly got killed by the next guard with a gun and decided that was not the way I wanted to approach the game. That’s not to say I didn’t ever use guns, but more often than not my play was to turn them around and use them as a stealth melee weapon anyway.

The game just gives you so many good tools to allow melee/stealth to be the way to play. Visibility itself is incredibly fair, with an indicator over enemies when they see you that gives you a chance to get into hiding. It eliminates one of the core problems I have with some stealth games where things off screen or slightly in less obvious lines of sight break stealth. Areas that require stealth generally have a ton of spots to break line of sight, whether it’s direct line of sight breaking, small alcoves to hide in, or boxes to hide behind. Noise isn’t a huge factor, so you can focus on positioning. Basically, as long as you don’t sprint or use the whip you’re probably good on sound. Stealth kills are fast and efficient, and you can hide bodies (or frankly, just leave them and use them as a distraction for other guards).

This is then helped by the disguise system where each world hub has its own outfit that you can find themed to the area. In Italy, it’s a fascist uniform. In Giza, it’s themed to the occupying Nazi’s desert uniforms. In Asia it’s themed to the more jungle-friendly uniform of the occupying forces. What these inherently do is lower the danger of the entire hub and let you easily get through areas that required a ton of effort before, but not for free. You have to go into dangerous areas first to find them and are given the reward of free reign. It’s a perfect way to encourage exploration beyond the golden path.

That said, when I did screw up stealth melee combat was also simple but satisfying. Melee combat is your basic setup of weak attack, strong attack, block, and dodge. What it does have is a fairly good rhythm. You don’t generally get overloaded with enemies, so melee encounters are generally 1v1 or 2v1 at most. Enemy tells are fairly well telegraphed, giving you time to do a defensive maneuver before laying in for a few attacks. Weapons themselves are also easy to find and pickup in the environment, leading to what is usually a pretty entertaining cat and mouse game of getting in a couple attacks, seeing if I can find something stronger than my fists, blocking attacks, then reaching out and bonking someone over the head with a melee weapon. Sometimes it’s a hammer, sometimes it’s a guitar, sometimes it’s a toilet brush. Luckily even in the comedy moments, the melee weapons are still leaning towards unrealistically effective to prevent negative outcomes.

That little thing there – no negative outcomes – is hugely important to how the overall balance of the game played out. Generally speaking, stealth is totally safe and won’t pull other guards. Melee is fairly safe and only pulls guards nearby. Gun fire will pull guards from everywhere. It basically lets you play the game how you want and at what level of danger you want. Stealth is slow, but if you like that type of game it totally works well here. Melee is a bit quicker overall but adds some danger but is totally safe if you’re good at dodging. Gunfire is by far the quickest option but adds a lot of inherent danger to the experience. Generally I would expect that a game wouldn’t be able to do a great job of balancing such disparate gameplay styles but my experience was that they all worked fairly well as needed.

The game does like to remind you that it’s an Indiana Jones game though, and it does it very often. Obviously you have Indy’s whip, and it’s effective here. It can be used as a hookshot for swinging over things. It can be used as a rope to climb up walls when you’re diving through a tomb. It can be used as a weapon to stun enemies. It’s all the things that you would expect in terms of gameplay mechanics to come from such an icon of the series.

However, it’s also the comedy and sci-fi bits that you see scattered around. It’s the twang of a guitar as you whack it over someone’s head or picking up a toilet brush because it’s the only stealth weapon available. It’s enemies setting off traps to their own detriment, leaving Indy safe and healthy. It’s the absolute over the top acting of the Nazi side of the story straight out of Raiders. It’s the fact that the story has teleportation across the world as a core story beat that reminds you that this isn’t grounded in reality. It’s the fact that there’s a pre-Christian race of giants that somehow has its hands in every ancient civilization known to man.

It’s the sum of all these things that truly makes this a great Indy game. It’s not just going full circle and doing a first-person Tomb Raider. It’s Indiana Jones through and through.

The sum of all this is that a great game is already there that is then elevated by it taking the Indiana Jones IP seriously and using it to its advantage. Put this under any IP and it scratches my stealth itch but the way they integrated the things you expect out of Indy brings it to an easy recommendation for me.

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Game Ramblings #205 – SteamWorld: Build

More Info from The Station / Thunderful

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch

I know it may seem weird to play a city builder on console and I can’t say I really disagree. However, one of the things that I’ve been poking around with as UE5 R&D is a set of gameplay systems around top-down grid-based gameplay, so this kind of fit the bill as something I should at least give a look. What this turned out to be was a wonderfully compact city builder that may be a bit on the simple side, but also made sure it was complete before it wore out its welcome.

This has all the pieces to make a fun city builder, but admittedly the city building is the part that I probably spent the least time in. It has some interest in that housing is upgradeable. You go from workers to engineers to aristocrats to scientists in tiers, and each one is its own class of employee for specific buildings. However, it’s all simple. You kind of just do it in order. You have a ton of different building types that generate different resources that leads up to the final resource to shoot a rocket into space. But again, it’s all simple. You place them down, location isn’t really important, and they are all necessary to get to the end game. You again kind of just do it in order.

The real interest of the game for me was the mining section. This isn’t really all that different from the city building in that you’re placing down workers and buildings to achieve a goal but it feels much more nuanced in a positive way. For one thing, placement does end up mattering.

This is a bit of a long-term change over a play session, but placement of where you put things changes pretty drastically over the course of a play through. At first you’re placing down workers wherever they fit and making it work. They all mine manually, they collect resources manually, and you push through. By the second mine level you start getting enemies, so now placement of defenses matters. The ultimate goal is to be efficient with your outgoing money, so catching as many enemies as possible with weapons means fewer costs to defense bots and a better run city. You also get access to conveyor belts at this level. This allowed me to basically automate resource gathering, but with the caveat that conveyors cannot run through pillars supporting the mine ceilings or camps supporting the workers. Again, placement gets more important as does the general efficiency of building the conveyors. By the third mine level you earn teleporters, which now had me min-maxing where I’m placing camps. Camps were far away from resources with a teleport network connecting important spots, then conveyors linked resources automatically to the surface. Maxing the resource gathering let me maximize trading, allowing me to then maximize money generation.

Admittedly part of the interest here is also that you are to some extent directly manipulating your citizens. You’re sending your miners or prospectors or defense robots to the locations that you want them to be investigating. It’s again pretty simple, but even that small bit of interaction is a lot to add some variety and direct presence to how you’re interacting with the game.

The mine section of the game is where I got it. I just wish there was more tying this to the surface game. I want the surface gameplay to make me also efficiently move resources out of the mine and to both workplaces and housing that need them. Right now it’s just kind of too simple. There’s technically resource movers from warehouses to work sites, but the layer of mine to warehouses is automatic. This level brings to mind possibilities from games like Pharaoh or Timberborn where efficient movement of goods isn’t just there but is crucial to a well run city, and I think this is where the general gameplay has the most chance of growth in a sequel.

However, the main reason I was playing was to check out the gamepad integration and this was surprisingly elegant and far more useable than I imagined a game of this type would be. There’s basically two places you can be interacting with at any time – build menus or the world. You switch between them with the press of a button, which served as a really consistent and clean way in both the city and mine segments to quickly change your mindset. This is helped by the build UI going away when you’re in city mode to reinforce the change.

The other thing that surprised me in its simplicity was that they just totally did away with a virtual mouse cursor when interacting with the city. You are just locked to the center of the screen, and whatever is there is what you can select. I honestly expected this to be really restricting, but it generally just worked. There’s definitely some oddities around the edge of cells where you can get stuck quickly swapping between adjacent cells, but the game largely just worked well with screen center selection. I suspect that this is a combination of buildings generally being large in screen, but you can scroll around the world visually pretty quickly and lock in one what you need easily so it easily exceeded my expectations.

It’s not necessarily what they appear to have been going for but there’s definitely a good city builder within the mechanics of this game. It just needs to have a bit more breadth to everything. Resource gathering needs to be less easy to just max out while resource movement needs to be more important. Building new things need to be a more impactful decision making moment instead of just build in order. The location of housing relative to goods could stand to be more important. Growth through worker types could stand to be a little less rigid – instead of requiring everything, let it be some combination of a list of things with the player steering the direction of city growth. Maps could have resource restrictions, allowing for the trade system to have more importance. Mechanically the pieces are all there for a sequel to push further into the genre, rather than being what feels like a starter entry to the genre.