Category: games

It’s been a while since I’ve played a puzzle game where I felt like the difficulty balance was… well… balanced. But Lumote was nearly perfect in that regard. There were several puzzles that had me stumped for a while, but I only ever got frustrated a few times, and in those moments, it was less about the puzzle being too obtuse and more about the platforming mechanics getting in my way. This is a 3D platformer at its core, so that means some jumps are easy to miss, or some of the creatures can’t climb over a step that didn’t look like a step at first. The rules of the world are also hard to wrap your head around sometimes, because the color of the creatures affects how nearby plants behave, whether they extend outward to create a bridge or grow upward to act as an elevator. It doesn’t help that, after you beat the main set of levels, the “New Game+” levels reverse the colors on you!

But I feel like I’m reaching for things to complain about, because I really did enjoy this one. I liked that the game world felt big and seamless even though it was broken up into obvious “rooms” with clear checkpoints. It made it easy to play as many or as few rooms as you wanted for any given session. Some rooms/puzzles can be beaten in a few minutes while others might take up to 30 minutes to figure out. It was interesting to see what new mechanics they would introduce, mostly in the form of new creatures that you have to move around, either directly or indirectly. This is a thematically and visually bizarre game that maybe lays on the bloom effects a bit too thick, but it’s still fun to take in the world they’ve created. I appreciate any game that’s not afraid to be a little weird, and a game where you’re guiding alien creatures around—creatures that change colors in ways that also affect their surroundings—is different in all the right ways.

Hell Pie reminds me a lot of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but that’s not necessarily a compliment. Like Conker, Hell Pie is a cutesy 3D platformer on the surface that revels in poop jokes, gore, foul language, and tasteless movie parodies. I don’t remember Conker’s Bad Fur Day being particularly funny as a teenager, though, so 20 years later, that kind of juvenile humor is even more wasted on me. However, I do like the premise. You’re a demon tasked with finding ingredients to make a birthday pie for Satan, and of course the ingredient list is ridiculous. A little too ridiculous, though, as it includes things like used tampons and stillborn chickens. See, it’s “funny,” because it’s gross…

If you can look past all that, the actual gameplay is really solid. This is a 3D platformer collectathon similar to all of the N64 Rare classics. Notably, you have a swing mechanic that allows you to swing mid-air at any time. You can also upgrade this skill to be able to swing multiple times before needing to touch ground. Soon, you’re zipping around the levels in absurd ways that feel like you might be breaking the game if you didn’t know better. It’s a lot of fun and really rewarding to swing over to some obscure platform that was hiding a collectible. It’s too bad the gross-out humor creates such a disconnect overall, because the core of this game perfectly scratches that 3D platformer itch otherwise.

I normally don’t enjoy roguelike games, because you quickly reach a point where progress feels extremely slow. That hasn’t been the case with Patch Quest. I’m about 15 hours into the game and still feel like each run has accomplished something. It helps that the map layout isn’t randomized, only what happens in each tile. The map is also quite large and takes a long time to fully uncover, but you can unlock many permanent shortcuts along the way. You also have a few sub-goals to work towards in the form of clearing mini dungeons, collecting plants, and finding new animal friends to send home as pets.

The animals represent Patch Quest’s main gimmick. Your character is pretty helpless on their own, but you can lasso a wild, Pokemon-like animal to control. Once in your control, you inherit that animal’s abilities/attacks. You can’t just ride your favorite animal all the way through, though, because they’ll tire out, forcing you to lasso a new one. It’s a fun mechanic that requires you to be familiar with a good variety of animals and gets you looking forward to your favorite types popping up again. Heck, 15 hours in, I’m still discovering new species!

The only criticism I have against Patch Quest is that, yes, it’s still a roguelike, and it still feels like it’ll take forever to actually beat the game. This largely depends on how generous any given run is, too. Like, if you don’t start with the power-up that immediately increases your maximum health (and increases how much health pick-ups give you), then you are far less likely to succeed that round. But even a round that gets off to a bad start can still miraculously turn around, and suddenly you’ve been playing a single run for over an hour. But you can also save and quit mid-run, so yeah, they thought of everything.

I must have liked the first Moving Out game, because I added it to my list of recommended busywork games. But after playing Moving Out 2, I’m not so sure anymore. To be fair, the more normal levels in this sequel aren’t bad. As a sequel, though, it tries to be so much bigger and leans into very gimmicky territory. Within the first few levels, you’re introduced to “Moving In” levels, which sound novel on paper but don’t work nearly as well as the game’s core “moving out / destroy everything on the way out” mechanic. The worst offenders with these new ideas are the Score Attack levels and the farming levels where you have to “move out” animals. Not surprisingly, the animals run away from you and jump out of their pens. It is very frustrating and annoying.

After the farming levels, the game explodes into other dimensions, where each dimension brings its own gimmicks. The candy world has a wrecking ball you have to roll around, the city world has drones and pollution, and the magic world has trains and portals. Honestly, though, I really liked the magic world levels. The trains are fun to operate, and the portals can turn a regular Moving Out level into a puzzle of sorts. Alas, the magic world has the least amount of levels in it, and you constantly have to play the other two (lesser fun) worlds to increase your rank before more levels in the magic world open up. They should have just gone all in on the magic angle and called this Moving Out 2: Moving with Magic. But it seems like they ran out of magic ideas pretty quickly, so I dunno if an all-magic game would have made a difference…

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why developers continue to insist on implementing stamina bars to prevent you from running too much. This stamina restriction absolutely kills the pacing in Everdream Valley for me, because, if you aren’t running, your character is soooooooo slow. Seriously, they should have made the run speed the walk speed and then increased the run speed even more. Or just gotten rid of the stamina bar. It sucks trying to trek across the map but having to continually stop and wait for your stamina to refill. The map isn’t even that large, but it feels large due to how long it takes to get anywhere. I would have enjoyed this game so much more if I didn’t have to monitor my stamina to the degree that is required. Oh, and if you get hurt, your stamina permanently decreases! Yay!

At its core, though, Everdream Valley is still a decent farming game. You have a lot of freedom in how you want to set up your farm, and I do like that you can just go out and find stray animals to bring back and claim as your own. The game’s main gimmick revolves around having dreams about these animals, where you play as the animals, and on paper that sounds pretty cool. In actuality, the dreams are nothing more than clunky minigames that each have their own wonky controls and rules. However, you have to be able to beat some of these minigames to unlock certain features, like a saddle for your horse. Riding a horse would probably fix a lot of my grievances with the game’s speed, but alas, the horse minigame was too difficult to beat on my first try. You can’t control which dreams you have until the end of the game, either, so I was stuck playing most of the game on foot and not liking it very much.

Togges is not your typical 3D platformer, and I love it for that. I can’t even remember the last time I played a platformer that had such a unique set of rules. Maybe calling this a platformer isn’t even correct, though it still feels like one. While you directly control a little vacuum-like robot that can freely move and jump around the entire level, you can only interact with things if you build a chain of blocks to the item or switch at hand. These blocks have a lot of restrictions on how they can be placed, though, and each color of block behaves slightly differently. Yellow, for instance, conducts electricity and stacks higher than other colors but also uses up twice as many “build points.” Thus, a big part of the game is seeing a collectible in plain sight and then figuring out how you can lead the blocks to it to pick it up.

In that sense, you could characterize Togges as more of an environmental puzzle game. And these environments are jam-packed with stuff to do. There are only seven levels/worlds in the game, but I’ve already put 15 hours in just getting to World 6, and I wasn’t even trying to do everything. Each level is its own, mini open world with three bonus sub-levels and a whole bunch of fruit and seeds to collect. And the fruit locations aren’t always obvious, either, as you sometimes need to complete a challenge to reveal them. If I have anything bad to say about Togges, it’s that some of these challenges are a little too vague. 15 hours in, and I still have no idea what to do with the “ghost fruits.” But if you like games that don’t hold your hand and games that let you explore at your own pace and games that aren’t afraid to be different, then you need to check this one out. It deserves so much more attention than it’s getting.