Tag: ps5

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Game Ramblings #154 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits

More Info from Ember Lab

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows

In general I don’t really like Souls-like games, but I keep dipping my toes into ones that try a little something different. Jedi: Fallen Order managed to keep the combat approachable enough through the use of hand waivey dodge mechanics made possible by Force powers existing. Games like Ghost of Tsushima were generally more fast action-oriented, leaving the Souls style one-on-one mechanics for well tuned individual fights with an engaging open world. Kena definitely ends up leaning more towards straight Souls combat, but with a few tweaks, some that work well and some that really don’t. By the end it was a bit grating to me, but it definitely was another that pushed me further into the subgenre.

This is very much a Souls game in general combat. It’s heavily tuned into proper timing of dodges or parries. However, it also has a very effective shield, and that was the thing that really felt the best to me in terms of Kena feeling tuned to be less dramatically unforgiving. It’s sitting on the same button as parry, so rather than parry being a direct action it feels more like a well-timed shield deflection in practice. Being able to avoid damage because you are too early and going right into a shield is a huge benefit to difficulty. It lets you deflect a few hits while you get your timing down, then letting you parry your way through the rest of the fight. That reduction in learning through dying is such a better experience than a lot of Souls-likes, and it’s due to a relatively small change.

The game also fed me a useful bow and arrow, which is always going to be a positive in my book. A lot of the later fights started really being mechanically dense in a way that I didn’t want to be in melee range, so I’d stick back, get damage with arrows until a parry opportunity came up. At that point I could lay in some big damage and get the hell out of the way.

However, the game’s boss fights really ran out of steam in a hugely negative way. By about the end of the second act, it was clear that the game was mechanically done growing. At that point the boss fights just started throwing arbitrary things at you to distract you. Endless adds, off-screen projectiles, radial explosions. The fights just kind of become annoying, rather than challenging. I liked the fights when they were challenging because I had to properly time things. Once I was getting hit by attacks I didn’t see because my view was constantly being pulled all over the place I no longer wanted to deal with the bosses. At that point I lowered the difficulty to easy and powered through the rest of the game.

By that point, the studio’s lack of experience started to show in some of the overall combat polish as well. A lot of the arenas were just dark. Dark bosses against dark backgrounds with very little in the way of highlighting. It made fights unnecessarily difficult just because of lack of vision. Some of the tells were also just kind of odd to me. A lot of them would start with some big tell then have a large unnecessary pause followed by a wildly fast dash. It didn’t feel smooth and it didn’t feel consistent. The difference between tells for weapon throws vs tells for dash/melee was also pretty arbitrary, which reduced the ability to effectively pick parry or dodge as your defensive attempt. On individual fights you would eventually learn the specifics, but I started just getting to the point where I would see some of the tells starting and immediately just hold shield to learn. It felt kind of sloppy.

Ultimately though, a decent difficulty slider allowed me to push through the rest of the game. I was enjoying the overall story and exploration a lot, so I wanted to keep playing, even with my frustration around the boss fights. It was always interesting to go see little hints in the environment and go off to find new things. It might be a hat for your little helper creatures, it might just be some currency, it might be a little side quest type of thing, but in all cases it was a good change of pace and something that felt worthwhile to pursue. That ability to dump the difficulty down to get through the parts I wasn’t enjoying to let me get through the parts that I was enjoying was hugely welcomed. It may just be numbers in the backend, and a lot of people may not want to see it in a Souls-like, but I will always support studios that get that type of stuff in there.

I’m probably not a good person to go in recommending Souls-like games, but in this case I’m pretty comfortable recommending this one. It’s got some rough edges, but combat is fun enough, the exploration was super enjoyable, and it’s a downright gorgeous game. It’s backed by a story that I wanted to see through to the end. Ya, I cranked it down to easy to power through for the things I wanted, but I got through it nonetheless, and for a Souls-like, that’s pretty rare.

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Game Ramblings #152 – Manifold Garden

More Info from William Chyr

  • Genre: Puzzle
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PC (EGS/Steam), Apple Arcade (iOS, macOS, tvOS), Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S

This game broke my brain in the best ways. Any time you can look at an art style for a game and immediately know what you’re getting into, that’s a good thing. When you look at this one and recognize the Escher-esque style, you know you’re in for trouble. Good trouble.

This game does so much with so little, and it’s an amazing thing to behold. You can run, you can change what direction down is, and you can manipulate a small set of blocks. That’s it. That level of simplicity means that the game spends its entire time manipulating your brain, and not your hands. Every single puzzle is a set of maybe three or four steps, but figuring out what those steps are is always the trick.

In some places, it may be that you need to manipulate blocks of different colors to hold each other up and activate buttons. In some places, it’s using the blocks to redirect streams that you can then freeze and use as walkways. In some places it’s simply trying to figure out which up is the up that you want, and trying to rotate around to get there. However, none of this would work without the game’s use of portals to support the visual and gameplay style, and it’s by far the game’s most impressive – and most hidden – feature.

Everyone knows what a portal is in the hit Valve game sense. You have a spot on the wall that you can walk through to teleport to another spot. That tweet there is a very simple version of this, but it shows off the core of the tech. They have a portal in the door to allow the player to teleport from one room to a completely different room seamlessly. They use this for simple tricks like that, but they also use it for some core functionality in very non-obvious ways.

In this screenshot, they’re also using portals. The tower out there in the distance is actually the same tower. The little thing coming out of the ceiling above them is actually the bottom of the tower poking through the floor. In this case, there’s portals allowing the one tower to exist as an infinitely expanding world in multiple directions, but to the user it’s just a crazy never ending landscape to move toward. This version of their portals is used all over to support falling as a gameplay mechanic. Need to bring a colored block from the bottom of a tower to the top? It can only be moved while you’re on its plane of existence, so simply fall down to the top of the tower.

That is really where the game broke my brain. Contextualizing a 3D space not as something finite or fixed, but as something where it can stretch infinitely in arbitrary directions is weird. Down is down, but there’s also 6 planes of “down” that are all valid. Up is also down if you can fall. It gets even crazier when you start doing things like redirecting water flow to create a waterfall so you can get water to some wheel above the source of the water. It’s crazier when you get environmental pieces to fall left so they can get stuck on something to your right. It’s even crazier when they only way to hit a button is to get a block to fall up.

However, for as weird as it is it’s also incredibly natural. You get a piece of the game at a time, so you mold your thinking to a new mechanic in isolation. It’s a very oddly Nintendo approach. At the start, you only have the gravity shift in fixed hallways, so you get used to changing the meaning of “down”. They then introduce a spot where you can fall infinitely, so you get used to the wrapping environment. They then start introducing colored boxes, so you get used to bringing them around to triggers that open doors. Etc, etc, etc. It’s that little bit at a time that turns something that should be a complete mindfuck into something that is both completely manageable and completely natural. It’s incredibly well executed.

From front to back this was just an incredible experience. It’s extremely tight mechanically and extremely impressive visually. The puzzles are well crafted to take advantage of a limited set of mechanics. It’s long enough to feel good, but short enough to not wear out its welcome. It’s just really fucking good.

Go play it.

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Game Ramblings #148 – Hot Wheels Unleashed

More Info from Milestone

  • Genre: Arcade Racing
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

This is just a stupid fun game. It’s not deep. It’s not going to hold your attention for long. What it is is stupid fun. You’re going to hop into an event, drift around like an idiot, probably fall off the track a few times, probably want to kick the rubberband AI in the dick, and keep going back for more. It’s just that kind of game.

This is as good a gif to describe the game as any. I spent a lot of time drifting and boosting in this game, and it’s kind of core to the experience. You boost to keep your speed up and you drift to get your boost up, so there’s a lot of time spent trying to alternate between the two and not really spend time simply driving. In a lot of ways it’s reminiscent of Ridge Racer, albeit with a weird visual scale. Like Ridge Racer, it’s helped by the fact that the drifting is distinctly fun. It’s got the right amount of looseness that makes it feel slightly out of control. However, it also gives you the ability to modify your drift mid-turn giving you some precision capability. That bit of flexibility really allows for long duration drifts through varied courses in a way that feels far more natural than I expected.

If it was just fun though, I don’t think I would have ever really picked up the game. There’s enough arcade racers that I really don’t need to jump into them that much. Through all of this I was generally just constantly baffled by the fact that the game exists in such a high quality form. There’s just so many things that mask the fact that this is ultimately hot a huge AAA production that are all extremely smart but also impressive to see in use.

Let’s start with the tracks themselves. There’s 5 main themes which may not sound like a lot but is more than enough. The themes themselves have a ton of useable space within them. As an example, there’s a construction theme with a ton of vertical space. Some of the tracks in theme have you at ground level, zipping around equipment and debris. Others have you up in the rafters going along beams and supports or using magnet tracks to zip around on the ceiling. In that regard, they get a ton of mileage out of a small amount of themes. The tracks have some background level of familiarity, but have a much different feel just based on how the track is sent through the environment. This is combined with a high potential to really find shortcuts via boosts and launches to make the racing feel extremely dynamic and different with each race.

The vehicles themselves also just have a ton of detail in them, both in gameplay and non-gameplay bits. The level of detail in the vehicles is astounding. The way they modeled the various surface materials is fantastic. Visually speaking, there’s a ton of difference between the plastics, metals, different paint types and more to where these just look incredibly realistically like their in-hand counterparts. However, at the eye level of a race, these look like they are driveable cars.

The detail extends to the gameplay level though, and the balance act here is impressive. The cars all run from the same general stat pool, so you would think that a high speed, high acceleration car is generally going to be the way to go. However, the slower cars are also generally the ones that have more boost availability, so they have a lot of potential to really keep up with the pack in the hands of a player comfortable with drifting. To some extent, the shape of the car is also a factor. I really fell in love with a wedge-shaped little roadster, and if I hit my boost right, I could go underneath cars in front of me and launch them off the track. It was a nice bonus to my selection that was inherent to the car, and not necessarily something obvious that came out of stats.

This is a game that punches far above its weight. It’s an inherently AA-priced licensed racing game, but it’s so much better than that. It has such an ability to just be picked up and played, then played for far longer than was intended without growing old. It’s got a great drift model combined with fun vehicles and even more fun track design. It’s got a light heartedness in its theming that really just comes out of it being based on a kid-focused license, but has such a quality that any fans of arcade racing – particularly drift focused racing – will be able to have a lot of fun. It’s just the surprise of the year for me.

Also…..that map design 😍