I love a side-scrolling platformer video game. I love the first Yooka-Laylee game. I love Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair...or, at least all but the last 10 minutes I played of it.
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Yakuza Kiwami isn't exactly a fun game. It's a game that leverages many different things, in small amounts, to pull the player through. It's a bit funny, its combat is a bit good, its narrative is a bit engaging, and its cutscenes are a bit long (this last "bit" is sarcastic; the cut-scenes are very long). Yes, I finished the game, so it has to have some merits. But I won't be playing any of the other Yakuza games.
Untitled Goose Game is my favorite type of game. It's a video game that takes a small number of mechanics and stretches them in increasingly chaotic ways. Here, you play as a goose with the ability to waddle, honk, and pick things up. Your mission: sew the seeds of confusion among the citizens of a small town. You know, goose stuff. Here's the essay I mentioned: https://calebjross.com/being-a-ninja-is-easy-in-a-world-full-of-idiots/
The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is here and it is amazing. But, having not played the orignal since I was a child, I was surprised by the story. It's,well, it's pretty sad.
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The credits have rolled on Trover Saves the Universe. Well, actually they haven’t. Not yet. But they will. I’m still playing it. And I do intend to finish it. I just feel confident that the endgame won’t surprise or delight me enough to make this early review an invalid review. Incomplete, perhaps. But not unfair. See, Trover saves the Universe is primarily a showcase for Justin Roiland’s brand of noncommittal riffing. Imagine you were to accuse a drunk neighbor of pooping on your carpet, and that drunk neighbor insists he did no such thing, delivering his appeal with all the incoherence and verbal hurdling over swallowed-down almost-vomit that a drunk neighbor would of course exhibit, and proudly so. That’s essentially every one of Roiland’s characters. Basically, you get the sense that Roiland’s voice recording sessions are just him, probably high, vocalizing every single thing that comes to his mind. Sure, he’ll pause to gather his thoughts or jump into an alternate take, but where less confident writers may insist the pauses and jumps be edited out, Roiland seems to insist the opposite. It comes across as brash laziness. And I freaking love it.The puzzles are the best kind of puzzles. Just a few mechanics to keep track of and each series of puzzles builds upon the rules of previous puzzles. It’s near puzzle perfection.
How should we, as gamers, handle the knowledge that some of our favorite videogames were likely created under potentially abusive working conditions?