Category: games

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.

I’m having a hard time nailing down my final thoughts on this game. On one hand, I love mice and rats and enjoy any game where they are the protagonist. Exploring the different neighborhoods from the perspective of a mouse is certainly fun. The lack of a jump button feels a bit restrictive, but it works when you accept that a real mouse is going to do a lot more climbing than jumping, anyway. And I do like the overall theme of the game, where you are helping these electrical spirits bring happiness to the townsfolk. However, I think the electricity theme hinders the game too much. Being able to take shortcuts through electrical wiring is neat, but the fact that every quest boils down to “turn the power back on” is kinda lame. The game starts with a mouse who wants to help people, and it would have been far more interesting to explore that idea as a regular mouse and not a mouse with electrical super powers.

The sub-quests that you must complete to fix each electrical box are equally silly. Some quests are basically just mini-games, after all. I liked the quests that involved searching the city for clues, though. That is still the best thing about this game: going around the city, looking for stuff. There are over a hundred little, blue light bulbs hidden throughout the game, and even when their locations are obvious, how you reach them isn’t. Those moments definitely elevated the experience for me. I found myself having a lot of fun when I put the main story on hold and just hunted down light bulbs for a while. But as soon as I focused on an actual quest again, I couldn’t help but think, “This is so dumb…” Ultimately, if you like wholesome video games, then The Spirit and the Mouse has enough going for it to come recommended. Just make sure you set aside time to look for hidden light bulbs.

I’m not normally one to buy a game the day it comes out, but it was hard to resist the allure of My Little Universe. And so I basically played through several patches that altered the difficulty of the game on a day-to-day basis. The biggest improvement that took place was that dying no longer reset your character’s level back to zero. As of today, you only lose one level and, subsequently, one level perk. The update was ultimately for the better, but it significantly changed how I approached the game. I mean, yeah, you still don’t want to die, because the random perk you lose might be the best one. But you don’t have to be nearly as careful anymore. This is supposed to be a casual game, after all, so it makes sense that it shouldn’t be too punishing. And most perks are simply nice-to-haves, anyway. The only perk I was ever devastated to lose was the pacifist perk that prevents monsters from outright attacking you. Because, if I have one complaint about this game, it’s that there are too many friggin’ monsters.

I adore everything else about My Little Universe, though. This is a “numbers go up” resource gathering game at its core, but damn if it isn’t satisfying to continually spend those resources to physically expand the game world. Each planet starts out as a tiny, little island, but as you mine and chop and collect resources, the island quickly grows to the point where you can easily get lost looking for your way around. As a single-player experience, I could see this getting old after a while. The required resource count can be a bit ridiculous at times, forcing you to backtrack to get more wood or coal or what have you. As a co-op experience, though, it’s fantastic. Particularly in dungeons, one player can forge ahead (perhaps the player who has the pacifist perk) while the other player hangs back and keeps the resources stocked. There’s a great balance in the co-op gameplay, and it’s become one of the best games my wife and I have played together in recent memory.