Clark | Definitely Opinions

What the Golf? Review

What the Golf? is a really funny game… for the first five minutes. It does a great job of initially subverting your expectations when different objects fly towards the hole instead of the golf ball you thought you were aiming at. But that’s the game’s only good joke… and they use that “joke” a lot. Well, that and video game references. Referencing another game is like the laziest form of humor, especially when it’s things like Portal references. We haven’t grown sick of those yet, have we? The sound design also tries to be very Katamari Damacy but ends up more annoying and repetitive than anything. You will get so sick of hearing “Waaaaah” every time you fail a challenge.

I don’t mean to be so down on this game, though. While it’s certainly not as funny as it thinks it is, the actual gameplay isn’t bad. It’s a series of fast-paced, golf-like challenges that span a multitude of styles and gimmicks. Some are in 3D, others 2D. Some are puzzles, others straight-up races. The variety is definitely fun, but it barely qualifies as golf. And yeah, I get that was the point. However, the game often feels like a platformer with wonky controls instead of any sort of golf game. What’s even weirder is that you can play most of the game with a controller, but a handful of challenges at the end can only be completed by switching to a mouse.

I did like that every level was broken up into three increasingly difficult challenges, and you only need to complete the first one to proceed through the campaign. Naturally, I wanted to 100% the game, though, and that’s where a lot of the frustration lies. The second challenge is almost always to get par, even if you already got par the first time around. And why does completing the first challenge kick you back to the overworld but the second challenge leaves you in the selection menu? The overworld is a pain in the butt to navigate, because you still move around as a golf ball. Like everything else in What the Golf?, it’s a cutsey idea that wears out its welcome super fast.

Mythic Quest – Season 2 Review

Similar to Season 1, this season has another spin-off episode that takes place in a different time and with mostly different characters. This time around, it’s about a young CW becoming an author, so it’s not as out of place as A Dark Quiet Death, though A Dark Quiet Death is the better short. But I still enjoyed CW’s backstory episode. It reinvigorated what was turning out to be a dud of a season overall. I feel like Mythic Quest would have worked better as an anthology show that followed different people’s journeys through the video game industry. I honestly don’t care about Mythic Quest or its employees anymore. Like, the video game influences are bordering on the cringey side, and the office antics feel like a discount sitcom.

It doesn’t help that I hate pretty much all of the characters now. Poppy went from my favorite character in Season 1 to my least favorite. She’s started yelling every line and became a pretty mean boss to her subordinates. I don’t know why they went to the “wring comedy out of people being rude or pathetic” well, but it’s not a good look. I do commend the showrunners on playing it safe with F. Murray Abraham and COVID, even though it relegates his character to a bunch of “old people can’t use Zoom” jokes for the first half of the season. At least Backstory and Peter give him something more meaningful to do and are naturally the standout episodes. Those two episodes don’t feel like Mythic Quest at all, and that’s the problem. The core Mythic Quest story is just not that good.

Elli Review

Obviously I wouldn’t have bought this game if I didn’t think I was gonna like it, but it turned out to be a surprisingly good puzzle platformer. Granted, I was hoping for more of an adventure game. Elli has strong Legend of Zelda vibes, not only in its screenshots but in the actual gameplay. You’ll frequently enter a room where the door slams shut behind you, and the only way to proceed is to figure out how to find something that you can put on a switch to open the next door. While that probably sounds pretty rote, there are some clever puzzle moments throughout, and the platforming is more involved than what you would get in a typical Zelda outing. I also love how the whole game has zero combat, though there are enough other hazards that I wouldn’t necessarily call this a casual or relaxing experience.

That said, the game is still fairly easy overall. I only died a handful of times, and you’re never put very far back when you do die. The only section of the game I struggled with was the dark dungeon that takes places at the halfway mark. It’s a little too purposefully dark, making it hard to see the next ledge. I was also disappointed with how linear the game ultimately is. You’re given no allowance to backtrack, so if you didn’t collect enough money to buy every wardrobe upgrade along the way, then… sucks to be you. But there’s no achievement for doing so, anyway, which is another thing this game is sorely missing. These are nit-picky complaints, though. Elli is a great “budget” platformer that’ll actually last longer than most $15 games of the same nature.

Mythic Quest – Season 1 Review

Movies and TV shows about video games have historically come across as pandering, cringey, and/or totally out of touch. Mythic Quest might be the best game-themed media I’ve seen, but it’s still not quite there. While it’s obvious that the creators grew up playing video games, they seem to only have cursory knowledge of how games are actually made. This reminds me a lot of Silicon Valley, where the technobabble sounds ridiculous to anyone who works in the industry. I know TV shows have to speed up real-world events for the sake of story, but it’s hard to suspend disbelief when one of the game programmers can add a new feature to a million-dollar game without getting permission first, and then can re-tweak it overnight before the launch. That’s not how this works; that’s now how any of this works!

It’s also weird that they used real video game footage for scene transitions. I think the first episode used footage from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which really took me out of the story since I had just finished playing that one. On the other hand, it is kind of cool that they’re able to use real licenses. I do get the sense that the showrunners are people who understand and appreciate playing games. There is a great episode early on that follows a dev team couple and how they struggle to keep creative control over their horror franchise as it grows in popularity. That episode is a wonderfully random side story. It has nothing to do with the rest of the Mythic Quest plot and features characters we never see again. One of those characters was played by Jake Johnson, and his presence in that episode sheds so much light on what the rest of the show is missing.

To put it bluntly, Mythic Quest needs someone like Jake Johnson to be permanently in the cast. Sure, Always Sunny fans will enjoy seeing Rob McElhenney and David Hornsby, but neither of them can really carry a show on their own. They’ve always worked better in supporting roles. I also like Danny Pudi a lot, but he isn’t given much to do here and is painted as more of a villain, which is an odd choice given what made him popular on Community. The best character is probably Poppy as played by Charlotte Nicdao. She has great energy and often acts as the frustrated intermediary between department heads. But that circles back to my original complaint: the company structure makes no sense. Like, why are two testers hanging out with the creative directors when there is supposedly a whole floor for testers? Maybe I’m just too close to the source material to fully appreciate this as a silly office sitcom.

The Free Ones Review

I’ve been eager to find the perfect “first person grappler” to add to my list of no-combat adventure games. I’d played two similar games not that long before this one—Valley and A Story About My Uncle—and was really hoping The Free Ones would finally fit the bill. It certainly has the best grapple mechanics of the three. It’s much more about leveraging your momentum, because you often have to propel yourself towards a target and then let go early so you can sail above/past it. There’s a great sense of height and speed as you whip yourself through the game’s environments. When the levels are open and forgiving, it’s a lot of fun. Alas, that’s not always the case.

The thing is, the level design is really repetitive and obnoxious. Large stretches of the game have you making your way across bodies of water or traveling downstream, where your only aids are tiny floating wooden boxes. These stupid boxes are difficult to aim at, easy to fall off of, and constantly crash into other obstacles. It’s infuriating how many rivers there are in the game. And then they basically do the same thing with little bridges and mine carts suspended above deadly chasms. You have so little room for error that it really sucks the fun out of it. I know grapple mechanics naturally escalate to difficult challenges, but trust me, you will be so sick of looking at tiny wooden boxes by the end.

Ted Lasso – Season 1 Review

With Jason Sudeikis as the lead, I really expected this to be nothing more than a raunchy goofball comedy. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sudeikis, but most of the stuff I’ve seen him in fell into that typecast. So it was really refreshing to find out that his character here is more like Earl from My Name is Earl. That is, Ted Lasso is an overbearingly friendly and optimistic “hillbilly” out to make the community a better place despite no one liking him. Ted Lasso the show wants to be feel-good entertainment so badly, though, that the stakes actually feel quite low. Sure, everyone expects/wants Ted to fail when he’s first hired as the new football coach, but most of these naysayers are won over before the season has even ended. And the biggest possible confrontation—Ted finding out his boss purposefully sabotaged his efforts—is quickly forgiven, as only Ted would do.

At least the season didn’t conclude with the obvious underdog win, showing that they have some restraint with the feel-goodery and are setting up decent goals for Season 2. It is weird, though, how so much of the sport at hand happens offscreen. I’m not a big sports fan myself, and I understand that filming a football match would seriously complicate the production. Still, it always felt like a cheap cop-out whenever the show would jump from a pre-game locker room scene straight to a post-game locker room scene. But I get that the locker room scenes are the whole point. While we don’t get to know very many of the team players, the few we do spend time with are fun and help round out the cast. I also liked how a lot of seemingly pointless side stories still tie into the bigger picture in the end. It’s a tightly written show. I just hope Season 2 adds a little more antagonism to the mix so things don’t become too cozy and sugary.