Tag: platformer

Posted on

Game Ramblings #104 – Octahedron

More Info from Demimonde Studios

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox One, PS4

Octahedron is a wild ride. At its core, it’s a really mechanically tight puzzle platformer. However, that’s way oversimplifying it. As you dig in, it becomes a wildly fun experience dripping in an ’80s color palette that moves wildly between tight platforming sections, quick movement sections, and even a little bit of offensive weapon flair to your move set.

I figured I’d start with this short video, because it kind of shows a bit of everything. You see the core mechanic of the game – the ability to create a platform that moves underneath you. There’s a bit of the puzzle and offense, where my platform drops an explosive to open up my path, then I use my platforms to get around the enemy spawner. You’ve got the over the top visual style and audio, which the game is largely synced to.

The most important thing about all of this is that it’s mechanically really tight. That’s always the big differentiator between good and bad platformers. Jump heights and jump distances feel really consistent. The height gaps between platforms as you move up and down are obvious, so there’s no second guessing whether you are going to make a jump or need to lay down a platform of your own first. The obstacles moving in time with the background music sets a great internal rhythm to threading the needle through the level which added a nice secondary layer of confirmation to the way I was playing the game.

That’s not to say that things are necessarily easy. What it comes down to is the precision places everything on player skill to complete the game. Generally speaking there’s levels of difficulty to this. Simply completing the level generally provides a nice challenge that ramped up slowly throughout the game. Doing a full completion pass on the level started to add things to grab that were in out of the way or more challenging spots. Then completing a level quickly and with minimal use of player-created platforms is another level of difficulty altogether.

This ends up providing a bit of a choose your own adventure style to the game, and is where it really leans into the puzzle side of things. You’re no longer simply getting from point A to B in safety. You’re now having to be more precise with your jumps to minimize platforms. You’re taking some risks to move through the level as quick as possible. You’re keeping an eye out for secret areas that hold the last few bits of collectables that you need to grab. It all just works very well as a whole. If you’re having trouble with a level, you can kind of pick and choose what your goal is and come back later to wrap things up, so even the hardest content has ways to alleviate frustration and keep you moving forward.

Also a bit of a shoutout to Demimonde themselves. I hit a bug where a section of a later level wasn’t aligned properly until I restarted a couple times. We had a bit of a back and forth trying to narrow down what was going on. While we ultimately don’t have an answer, it was good to see them digging for info to potentially fix the issue, especially in light of the great speedrunning potential for a game of this style.

This is going to sound kind of weird, but if I were to give this one a comparable, it would probably be Super Mario Bros 2. Something about the way that the platforms you create move and glide with you gives it the same sort of floaty kind of platforming feel with similar amounts of precision really feels like that one. However, Octahedron is so much more when you really start digging into it. It takes those tight mechanics and adds a bunch of completionist tasks to really hone in on a super tight puzzle platformer. Combined with great audio and visual style, this one’s a pretty easy game to recommend.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #56.1 – A Hat in Time – Switch + DLC

Original Ramblings

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, MacOS, PS4, Xbox One

I picked up A Hat in Time on Switch, largely so I could have a physical copy of it for my collection. However, a secondary reason was to go back and play through the DLC that’s come out in the last two years since the original release. Going back and playing through the game in full was just as fun the second time around. New content, plus a whole lot of additional polish made this a really easy game to fall right back into.

The new content in place is definitely a bit of a mixed bag, but what’s there is still a lot of fun. I basically got two new worlds to play through, plus a bunch more side content. Arctic Cruise was a short chapter, falling in at only three acts. However, it’s got some of my favorite pure platforming in the game. It’s also a largely fetch quest-based level, where you’re running around doing chores and collecting people. Nyakuza Metro was a much larger free roam world. The free roam part was a lot of fun, but I was probably most impressed by the fact that it had an escape sequence instead of a boss at the end. It wasn’t quite a Metroid timed escape, but the change of pace right at the end of my play through was definitely welcome.

On the other side though, I really got nothing out of the new Death Wish mode. It’s basically a set of tasks where you replay previous time pieces with some tweaks and secondary goals. Had I been going back to the PC version, this would have been a good way for me to fall back into the game before the DLC. However, after playing through the game fresh I really didn’t want to replay the content AGAIN. Definitely an interesting idea given the release schedule, but really didn’t work out for my timing in how I was playing.

As far as the Switch goes, it also did a pretty solid job of keeping the game running. Visually it’s definitely not up to the PC version, but it fell into what I’d generally call good enough. Everything looks pretty good in motion, and it’s not jarring in a way that I wouldn’t come back to the game on the platform. The framerate is also generally pretty solid throughout. Ya there’s a few places where the framerate obviously dips, and there’s definitely a handful of spots where as an Unreal developer I’m left groaning at garbage collection hitches, but by and large it was never a particular issue.

Controls wise, it also nailed it. While that shouldn’t be unexpected given it was a standard platformer scheme, I was super comfortable playing on TV with the pro controller, as well as handheld on the Joycons in bed. There’s definitely been a layer of polish added to overall movement and camera work in the two years since as well. While that was never a particular issue when I last played it, it was nice to see that things had seen that push to improve anyway.

In general, it’s pretty rare that I go back to games and actually finish them again, let alone play through more new content that I’d never played before. There’s usually something stupid in my replay that makes me go “forget this, moving on.” I’m glad that this was one of the cases where the game was worth playing again front to back. It was a more polished experience, with more content, on a completely different platform, and it was just as fun the second time around.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #103 – Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

More Info from Playtonic Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, Xbox One

Where the original Yooka-Laylee was a clear love letter to 3D collectathons like Banjo Kazooie, this game is a love letter to 2D platformers like Donkey Kong Country. With the loss of a dimension of movement, we’ve ended up with a much more solid game. The levels are filled with great platforming and secrets to find. The overworld is more than just a set, and has a ton of puzzles to solve. However, the Impossible Lair of the name ended up being a bit of a head scratcher, and marred the ending of what was ultimately a really fun game.

This is through and through a Donkey Kong Country game in everything but IP. There’s a bunch of 2D levels with feathers instead of bananas, gold coins instead of KONG letters, feather-covered barrels, obnoxiously slow swimming levels, etc. Hell, there’s even a roll with an intentional jump that can be triggered in mid-air if you’re quick enough. However, despite being a mechanical copy, it definitely does a great job of getting those mechanics extremely right.

If there’s one thing I’d consistently point at as the difference between good and bad platformers, it would be the feel of momentum in the game, and this one gets it really right. It’s not just that running feels right. It’s little things like extra speed from rolling giving you extra jump height. It’s jumping off a platform to the right, switching direction in mid air, and smoothly moving back left to get to the platform above you without bonking your head. It’s smooth sequences like a roll off a ledge into a mid-air jump into a spin to give you just that little bit of extra distance to get to that platform with some hidden secret. It’s timing your jump off a moving platform to get a little extra momentum to get a hard to reach feather. All of these little interactions mean so much to a 2D platformer, and they’re done extraordinarily well here.

The thing that Yooka-Laylee doesn’t copy from DKC is their overworld. The one in place here is platformer overworld on steroids. It’s not just that the overworld here is non-linear, although that’s pretty neat itself. It’s that the overworld is literally filled with puzzles and interactable elements, a lot of which have an impact on the levels. See a level sitting in a pool of water? Throw an ice bomb at it, and now you have a level variant covered in ice. Have a level that takes place on a bridge? Lift the bridge and now you’re climbing the bridge instead of crossing a bridge. It becomes a clever way to get reuse out of levels without feeling repetitive while also providing a nice change of pace in puzzle solving between levels.

You mean I wasn’t supposed to be playing a Game Boy game?

There’s also a ton of collectable tonics in the overworld to puzzle out. Some of these may help or hurt you, with things like checkpoint count reductions or increased movement speed. Some of them are just silly, like the Game Boy color and resolution filters above. These are just another fun little thing to go looking for as a break between levels.

The overworld basically ends up being a nice way to break up the gameplay. You aren’t always in full speed platforming, and you aren’t always in full on puzzle solving mode. The cadence of doing a level, then doing a puzzle ended up being a great way to pace out periods of high stress and keep me playing at a pretty level clip.

These claws are as crushing as having to repeat completed sections of the Impossible Lair.

All that said, the “Impossible Lair” of the title had me scratching my head a bit. This level is effectively the end boss fight of the game, and consists of a no-checkpoint level with multiple boss fights sandwiched around longer stretches of high difficulty platforming. If you die, you go right back to the beginning with no skip forward in progress.

One of the core ideas behind it is that completing levels and searching the overworld gives you bees that act as a shield for this level. One damage hit = one bee. Running out of bees then dipped into the Yooka+Laylee pair mechanic, and you could indefinitely run until you lost both of them. What I suspect this was supposed to do was make the level easier to complete. What it instead did was simply just make my practice runs longer. Ultimately it didn’t really matter if I had 1 or 100 hits of damage to take going through a level if it was new to me. I was probably going to take some hits, I was probably going to learn the things to avoid pretty quickly, and on my next run through, I was going to avoid taking (most) damage. This generally stood as accurate, as each run into new areas generally was getting me 10-15% farther into the level.

The issue with all of this is that it was extremely boring. By my 3rd run I was already past 50% of level completion, which meant that each run through the level was already putting me at 5+ minutes of action that I’d already completed. Dying that deep into the level was a huge waste of time, and instead of feeling challenged, I simply felt bored. It’s not difficulty for the sake of pulling off skill-based mechanics. It’s difficulty for the sake of memorizing a long sequence of things to avoid. That kind of gameplay is just uninteresting to me.

What it really felt like was needed was a skill-based checkpoint system for the level. Complete an area with no damage taken? Great, here’s a checkpoint. You’ve proven you’ve mastered this area, so stop wasting your time. That little change both solves the boredom problem AND would have allowed them to make the lair experience longer and more compelling, rather than have it sit in the experience it is now.

Weird ending aside though, this was a fantastically fun game. Despite the fact that we recently got the Switch port of DKC: Tropical Freeze, I really am happy to see more quality straight 2D platformers. We see a lot of Metroidvania-esque titles at this point, but we really don’t see many games like this. Despite my misgivings about the end, this one still very strongly falls into the recommended category. There’s a ton of game to enjoy up to the end, and for that it’s worth the play.