The Solomon Code

I haven’t written in a while. Life’s just been… life.

But! I recently played a bunch of games during the Steam Next Festival, and that reminded me of how I used to review games all the time, so I decided I’d give a quick breakdown of all the games I played.

Recently, I’ve gained a new appreciation for, shall we say, smaller games. I’ve decided I spend too much time playing games, fun as they are, and if I ever want to get back to writing / drawing / learning the mandolin, I should play smaller games. 

(Notably, I decided this after finishing XCOM2 for the 3rd time and Death Stranding for the 2nd. But details).

Anyway, so on the Steam Next Demo festival, I decided to focus on “Metroidvania” demoes. (as I’ve explained before, this is a genre of platformer where progression is tied to new move sets/equipment that opens up new areas of exploration.) Which, in retrospect, probably why a lot of these ended up feeling the same, unless it has to do with exactly how long it takes to put together a game that is nearly (but not quite) an exact rip-off of the beautiful Hollow Knight game. Perhaps, given how many demanded I use a controller, it also has to do with the burgeoning poularity of the Steam Deck and similar platforms. Hard to say.

Anyway, here are the games I played, and my thoughts on them!

Narcalid

It’s a bad start when you have to search to find a controller just to play a game, and then the game turns out not to be very good. The game is listed as co-op, which would probably have made things easier, if instead of constantly having to switch between four characters I could have just relied on a teammate to do things. But even then, the characters felt very limited in their abilities, the art style not particularly unique, and the world-building just sort of generally confusing. It was weird for weirdness sake.

Alcyone: The Last City

A Chose-Your-Own-Adventure style game, this was a largely text-based affair with a (I would say) unnecessary voiced read-aloud component. The setting was in a far future where literally the entirety of the known universe had been obliterated except for the single city you were a part of–or at least that was the expository dump at the start. There were some suggestions that things weren’t quite that simple. I wish that this game could have used more visual cues and less text–descriptions of, for instance, the moon that orbits the city and looks like a skull were very interesting on their own, but could have set up some really startling set pieces. This might be fun for people interested in the concept or interested in text-based adventures, but otherwise I can’t see it being a big hit.

Phosfi

The first of the Hollow Knight ripoffs, Phosfi seemed to be going for a vaguely “sea-life” riff on Hollow Knight’s “bug” theme. Apart from that, the art style was nearly indistinguishable and the gameplay extremely similar. There’s nothing wrong with that as such–with the developers of Hollow Knight still sitting on their promised Silksong sequel, people are understandably hungry for more in the same vein–but the gameplay felt clunky and just nothing about it felt new or special.

Deviator

Deviator was equally obviously a rip-off, and less good in its gameplay. Instead of an “animal” theme, the isolated bits of exposition seemed to hint at some kind of multiversal plotline, but with a combat system that depended heavily on blocking and counter-striking, combat was more frustrating than entertaining, especially with a lack of save points. I died twenty different ways before finally giving up in frustration.

Aestik

Again, very clearly inspired by Hollow Knight, yet better than the last two, if for no other reason than that it went for a more cartoony and childlike style. It was still gloomy and some of the enemies seemed outright nonsensical, but it at least felt like its own thing and had some interesting story beats about a corruption on a mysterious island where all the animal-like islanders had gone insane. I didn’t finish it, but I liked it better than Deviator or Phosfi.

Berzerk Boy

Berzerk Boy is a good example of how to do a rip-off–not of Hollow Knight, but of Megaman. With the Megaman franchise largely down the tubes, lots of games have tried to emulate it’s particular charm, and Berzerk Boy does an excellent job. Bright colors, expressive characters, and pumping 8-bit music fill a fast-paced environment where you can rescue civilians and defeat evil animal-themed robots. The combat was a little difficult to work out, but there were good indications of various areas being opened up as you gained more abilities from defeating bosses, just like in the original Megaman. The only thing was that I didn’t see any sign of those bosses being particularly unique or challenging, which could ruin the appeal, frankly. I also wasn’t quite sure what the story was supposed to be–the demo seemed to drop you into the first level after some important stuff had happened. But it was fun.

The Weird Dream

I can’t really come to a fair description of The Weird Dream, because for whatever reason, half of it was still in Japanese and I couldn’t understand the instructions. The environments were pretty, and there seemed to be some sort of food-based mechanic at play, but the enemies were disappointingly bland, and combat was not satisfying. The first boss I met was literally a giant bouncing ball that you had to hit over fifty times. Maybe there were some extra techniques you could use that I was missing out on–I’m not sure, because I couldn’t understand the instructions. In some ways, that added to the “dreamlike” nature, but mostly, it was confusing and irritating.

Mendacium

Mendacium is almost distinct enough from Hollow Knight to escape being called a rip-off–it uses 3-D rendered models instead of hand-drawn animations, for one–but not enough. It still tries to copy the gloomy tones, the fast-paced action, and the animal-based enemies–lizards here. It’s borderline, maybe. I’d call it equally reminiscient of Ori and the Silent Forest as much as Hollow Knight. It shows more polish than Aestik, more originality than Deviator, but bottom line, the combat wasn’t very balanced, with an odd mechanic that forcibly switched you between spear and bow with no control over how or when.

Awita: Journey of Hope

I wanted to like this game, I swear. It was setup like a classic retro hack-and-slash, with your protagonist out to foil red-robed cultists that have something to do with a vague threat facing her home village. The pixelatted characters and backgrounds were beautiful, like something out of Owlboy. The enemies were varied and interesting.

But the writing was so bad. Flat, boring, without even an attempt at disguising the conventions of the genre. A bartender literally says “I might know something that would interest you–but first, you must do something for me.” The combat, too, was unbalanced, with a “blocking” mechanic that took longer than your attack. And while most enemies were easy to fight, the end boss was completely unmanageable. Disappointing.

Pampas and Selene: The Maze of Demons

Sometimes I wonder who makes these things. This is like the sort of game I might have played 20 years ago as one of 250 shareware games on the Game Empire disc that my parents bought my brothers and I. Back then it would have been some college student in his garage tweaking about with what you could do with QBASIC. Now? I have a hard time seeing the market for a game where two people crawl around a poorly-rendered dungeon fighting stiff enemies that barely move and die in two or three hits. Movement was clunky, combat was unchallenging, levels were uninteresting.

Ultros

Now this is the sort of game that I play through demos to find! A standard Metroidvania in some senses, this takes the right message from Hollow Knight by developing a totally unique and beautiful art style in its trippy, psychedelic world. Combat is balanced and interesting, with an added mechanic that gives you different “remains” based on how you killed the animals, and correspondingly different boosts to your character attributes. Combat is, though, slower than Hollow Knight, with your character having distinctly less agility and a lot more simply normal hack-and-slash movesets. The world is fascinating and bizarre, with hints at a larger lore. My only worry is if they could keep the motif going for an entire game.

Princess Pomu and the 5 Moons

This game was just terrible. Unclear instructions, boring environments, complicated combat, and TERRIBLE writing. Not just in the sense of “heavy-handed racism metaphors” but in the sense of “actually riddled with grammar and spelling errors. I toughed it out as long as I could playing this abomination, but I finally ran up against a literal wall in the game and couldn’t keep going anymore.

Tales of Zenzera: Zau

This is a beautiful and fluid game, though I have to laugh a little at how it pretends to be oh-so-original with its devices. ”Oh they’re not skill points, they’re SHAMAN points.” ”Oh, it’s not XP, it’s UGLABO.” At it’s core, this is a very straightforward platformer like Trine, only your main character switches between two sets of powers that let him fight at close range or long range. It plays very well and the character and dialogue is good, though the stakes (rescuing your father from the Underworld) seem a bit low. Still, it’s a fun game and that counts for a lot. I don’t think I’ll buy it–it doesn’t seem to have anything new beyond its aesthetic, which I didn’t find compellin enough–but it’s a good game.

Pepper Grinder

You’re a little girl with an oversized drill who can drill through sandy portions to recover gems and leap high in the air. For unclear reasons, you’re stranded on a whimsical island with a pirate queen and need to track down the missing treasure she stole from you. The gameplay might appeal to some; I found it too fast-paced and hard to control. After I died for the tenth time, I gave it up. 

LumineNight

There’s constantly some imitator out there trying to emulate the Phoenix Wright style of deduction and argumentation. Despite the series clear appeal, no one has ever really managed to do so–though LumineNight is not a bad attempt.

You’re a single father detective in 1950’s America (maybe? the setting is unclear), and instead of poking holes in obviously lying flamboyant witnesses, you’re pointing out contradictions in the well-meaning theories of your understated partner. That, by itself, robs it of a lot of the Phoenix Wright charm, where the characters and music do a lot of the heavy lifting. But this adds in you needing to do the actual legwork for investigation and match up clues to relevant points. I can’t see the game being a smash hit, but I hope it achieves some modest success.

Pricolage -IDOLIZED-

This was intriguing. An “Instagram Detective” style game, where you try to solve the mystery of a missing K-Pop star by surfing through her instagram photos and conducting searches on items that pop up in the backgrounds, while also checking out related followers and hashtags that allow you to see other sides to the idol’s supposedly perfect lifestyle. A simple but effective game, I could see myself purchasing this if the price is right. I probably wouldn’t pay over ten bucks for it, but I enjoyed the one ending you could get to in the game.

Dyschronia: Chronos Alternate

This was clearly a very… ambitious game, as signaled by the fact that it offered VR support (which I opted out of). It’s very heavy on cutscenes and dialogue, which means that what was there was very slow-paced and hard to get through. There’s a lot of heavy sci-fi stuff here involved with time-travel, diving into past memories, enhanced collective dreaming, and the end of civilization. It’s honestly all a bit much for a game that’s essentially just another investigation and deducation game. This one feels like it’s likely to collapse under the weight of its own concept.