Tag: platformer

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Game Ramblings #116 – Ovivo

More Info from IzHard

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: iOS, Android, Steam, Xbox One, Switch

Ovivo is the perfect kind of indie experience for me. It takes a single mechanic, polishes it to a brilliant shine, and lasts as long as it needs to. It doesn’t start adding a bunch of cruft. It doesn’t add 20 hours of extra shit purely meant to extend gameplay. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. In focusing on what makes it special, it ends up being better than games that push higher and fall hard.

This is an early level that I was playing, but I figure it’s a good place to start. The only mechanic available to you is the ability to switch between the white and black gameplay spaces. As you go further in the game, there’s some amount of nuance there, but it really is that simple. You can move left and right, and you can press the one button to switch between color planes. However, it’s the nuance that ends up giving the game a lot of depth.

Early on they give you those curved platforms and elevation changes. In swapping planes, you start to see a bit of momentum from the swap. It intuitively pushes you to preload your swap, which then teaches you about really using that momentum change to get to new spots. Meanwhile, this is all being taught in complete safety. Later levels start adding little pits that you have to use momentum to get around, giving you a spot to experiment with. It then proceeds to moving platforms and moving traps, giving another layer of depth to the interaction.

It’s that little step at a time push forward in complexity that works really well. You hit a new wall, have to experiment a bit, learn a little bit more, and move on. You see it in games like Super Mario Bros – can’t run left, always move right; jump before the first Goomba and hit your head on a question mark block – where new mechanics are introduced in a spot where you intuitively learn something, rather than being hand fed something. In the case of Ovivo, they do it extremely well. The complexity they get out of the one simple mechanic is astounding.

This is all helped by the fact that the game is visually stunning AND the visuals are core to that single gameplay mechanic. The entire game is presented in black and white, and everything you see is part of the gameplay space. The transition in colors literally acts as the collision boundary. Things that rare visually spiky and dangerous looking are literally dangerous and will kill you. Nothing is wasted in the layout of the levels, and it’s all important to the experience.

The fact that it is visually interesting leads to the one other sort of mechanic, which ends up being the light collection aspect. There’s two types of collectible items to find in the levels, and they’re a mix of on the core path and off of it in unique side areas. They end up playing a nice role in forcing you to pay attention to what’s going on around you to find those little side spots. In general, the ones off the path are also the ones that have the most interesting puzzle and momentum tricks, so it ends up being fun to find them anyway.

Each level is followed by a zoom out, showing both the entirety of the level you went into, and the art theme around it. It’s always impressive.

These kinds of short indie experiences are the type of game that I really like playing, and also the type of game that I’m glad to see coming to physical releases. In this case, I got this one from Red Art Games. These types of indie releases usually have a pretty small audience, so seeing them on disc is always a nice treat. Despite the small release number, it’s still getting it out to an expanded audience, and in a way that it will continue to be preserved. This definitely fell on the positive side for me. They really took their core mechanic to a polished state that isn’t common in many games, and it results in a game that feels truly unique in execution.

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Game Ramblings #107 – GRIS

More Info from Nomada Studio

  • Genre: Adventure/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Windows, macOS, iOS

I’m honestly not going to spend much time talking about the game itself here. Mechanically speaking, it’s a super tight and really well constructed game. It hits a nice mix of platforming precision and intelligent level design to make a really relaxing experience. It’s also phenomenally gorgeous, especially with some of the improvements done for 4k support on the PS4. As a core adventure experience, it’s worth playing for that alone.

What I am going to hit on is where my brain was going as I was playing this. There’s not that many games that I recommend based on me thinking about things outside of the game – really the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are titles like Journey, Hellblade, or Firewatch. However, this one really hit on two main things that were really personal to me, and honestly really unexpected.

One of the things that I’m always trying to find as a developer is a way to ship a game that has an impact on my players. I’ve spent a lot of time festering on my jobs thinking on how to achieve that, but never really knowing where that thought leads. I’ve been lucky enough to work on games like Rocket League or Smite or Killing Floor, which have clearly had large enough audiences to be considered impactful in some way, but to me I’ve had various levels of enjoyment out of actually having been involved in those.

I’ve always looked at some of the indie darlings and thought “hey, I can pull that off easily enough, maybe I should just do that.” However, playing GRIS has kind of solidified what I actually want out of development. GRIS is ultimately a game that I really loved playing, and has had a heavy impact on players, but in hindsight, making a game like it was never going to be interesting for me. Mechanically speaking, it’s super simple and isn’t something that really needs much in the way of programmer help to achieve the gameplay mechanics that it has. What it does in really special ways are the visuals and story telling, both things that I’m not at all interested in from a development perspective.

The things that I’ve always gotten the most enjoyment out of from a development perspective have been the crazy mechanics that I get to work on as a gameplay programmer. It’s things like working on an open world spawn system in Maneater, even if I don’t think the game is that good. It’s working on things like predator stealth for Medusa in Smite, even if that didn’t end up shipping. It’s things like working on Star Fox-style ship movement in Arc Squadron or FF Tactics-style combat in Smite Tactics because I love both of those inspirations, even if both of those games were complete bombs. Working on stuff like that is why I stay up at 3am in Visual Studio; not the end result of shipping something off to players.

Combining those mechanics I love working on with a title that has an impact on players is kind of the ultimate goal, and while I’ve been pushing in this direction with my thoughts, GRIS definitely helped solidify that I want to focus on the smaller picture over the bigger picture for the sake of my own happiness, and if something more comes out of that? Fantastic.

This bird….

From a high level, GRIS is a travel through the five stages of grief. The bird section of the game ends up falling between Anger and Bargaining as far as the game’s travels go. It also hit really close to home.

Everyone’s got their issues with depression or anxiety, and I’m no different in that regard. Everyone’s also got their own ways to manage and deal with it. In the past I generally dealt with it by bottling it up until I got stressed out and lash out.

Which is exactly what that bird does.

That whole pattern comes in waves. I’ve gotten a lot better as I’ve gotten older at recognizing when it’s starting with me, and I’ve gotten a lot better at finding ways to mitigate whatever stress is causing me issues. However, I’m not entirely there yet, and I don’t really think I’ll ever truly solve it. Coworkers will probably recognize this as “Dan being grumpy”, and while there’s some truth to that being the public-facing outcome, it’s deeper than that for me. At this point it’s something that I usually work myself out of pretty quick through some quiet time or taking a bit of time off. However, seeing it in game form was entirely jarring.

I shut the game off after the level and didn’t come back to it for a couple days. It’s not that I’m particularly going through a period of stress right now, but seeing something like that level wasn’t something I was really ready for. In this case, fixing a lego kit was a good distraction until I could get back to it, and really the rest of the game matched coming out of any one of those periods. However, it was an unexpected reminder that I’m not there yet.

So ya, go play GRIS. Maybe you’ll simply play it for the experience and be better off for the enjoyment. Maybe it’ll hit some note for you like it did for me, and you’ll get further meaning out of the experience. In either case, it’s something positive on the other end.

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Game Ramblings #105 – New Super Lucky’s Tale

More Info from Playful Studios

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

This was another one that snuck into my start of the year kick into platformers. This game isn’t necessarily doing anything new and interesting, and it’s certainly not an overly challenging game. However, what it does end up being is fun; fun in the most pure way that mechanically solid platformers can be. The world and characters are colorful and charming. The levels you hop around in are extremely varied in their platforming styles. The little side challenges provide enough of a reason to explore every location. It just ends up with you having spent way more time playing the game than you expected because you never stop having fun.

Variety is really the name of the game here. At the start of the game, it looked like this one was going to be a standard 3D platformer experience. But then they throw you into a side scroller level, then an isometric level, then an auto runner level, then a Super Monkey Ball style rolling maze. The game really takes great advantage of using the core mechanics that are in place and putting them in all sorts of new environment types. When this is combined with a distinct overworld, it meant that I was never growing tired of the kind of gameplay being presented to me. You’re not going to play the same kind of level back-to-back, so it feels like there’s always something new happening, even if the mechanics are largely the same.

This is combined with a level structure that really encourages a bunch of exploration. Each level has the general end-level reward. It also has rewards for finding LUCKY letters, a hidden secret area, and a reward for collecting a bunch of coins. These all provide built-in excuses to go running around checking every corner It’s these kinds of little things that bring the levels from being just a straightforward point A to B to something that lets you get lost in them.

This is all helped by the fact that the game is mechanically very sound. This does all the little platforming things really right. Jump heights and distances are very obvious, and that surprisingly carries through despite the large differences between the various gameplay types. Where you’re landing is really obvious thanks to having drop shadows directly under the player at a long visible distance. These all seem like obvious things, but they’re all things that a lot of platformers get extremely wrong. When done well like here, they’re simply things that work as expected instead of being deterrents.

However, the mechanic details extend to things like boss fights as well. Take the screenshot above. Early in the fight, the purple patches are small and easy to avoid while showing very obviously that they’re damage zones. It immediately enforces that you want to move towards blue as the boss fight progresses and the safe zones get smaller and smaller. Other bosses have similar paths, such as single laser sights becoming multiple sights. These all play well into the fairly standard multi-phase platformer boss fight gameplay, but again to where them working well means they are simply working as expected, rather than being a deterrent.

The game’s biggest issue overall is that it’s ultimately a fairly easy game to play. Ya, you’ll lose lives occasionally, but the game is both generous with health pickups and generous with additional lives, so you’re not going to be pressed to stay alive. Realistically this might as well have gone with the more modern approach of just not having lives, and having a death be a level reset or checkpoint reset. However, that lack of difficulty was never a particular deterrent. Figuring out where the secrets were became the real fun of the game. Puzzling out what the boss’ mechanics were, then defeating them with those mechanics became the real fun of the game. I wasn’t having to slam my head against long fights and long precise levels, but instead simply enjoying the game for what it was.

To be perfectly honest, that lack of difficulty in place of just having fun is something that I find myself enjoying more and more these days. I just don’t have the time anymore to repeat difficult experiences getting incrementally better for the sake of difficulty, and have found myself enjoying experiences that are fun for the sake of being fun. Super Lucky’s Tale really hit that mark for me. It puts together an experience that is mechanically sound to the point where you don’t think about the game mechanics, combines it with a bright and enjoyable world, and gives you enough of a reason to explore that each level is its own little self contained playground. It unfortunately sounds like the studio has been having some financial trouble, so I don’t know how much more we’re going to see specifically of Lucky, but it’s clear that the devs behind this are going to end up making fun experiences wherever they end up.