Category: games

This was a pretty fun game that my wife enjoyed just as much as I did, though for different reasons. While I was off doing quests and exploring new islands, she hung back on the first island to build a house to dump all of our trophies in. I didn’t really care for the Minecrafty stuff at first, but then I realized those additions weren’t necessarily for me. If you like crafting, you can spend hundreds of hours in this game. Otherwise, it’s a cutesy gimmick that sometimes helps (like building a dirt tower to reach a high platform) and sometimes gets in the way. For instance, your inventory constantly fills up with different block types you don’t need.

That’s one of my biggest gripes with Portal Knights. Inventory management is a pain in the butt. I was constantly having to trash items, because my backpack was too full of blocks, scrolls, weapons, furniture, ingredients, and other trinkets. There are already too many types of items to pick up, made worse by the fact that they can’t be stacked very high. Why do ingredients max out at 50 and dirt blocks max out at 400? Feels like an annoying way to force you to return home and build more chests to hold all this crap. The fact that you can teleport home at any time does lessen this pain point, though.

Portal Knights is a very forgiving game in that regard. Not only can you teleport home but you can teleport to the beginning of any other island/world at will. This is a great incentive to explore the map and open up more locations. It’s a pretty big map, after all, with a lot of environmental diversity, from snow to lava to moon rock. I really enjoyed finding a portal to a new island, meeting its NPCs, and literally digging into its random dungeons in search of better loot. Unfortunately, the camera makes for some claustrophobic fights, especially in those underground dungeons. But that’s my only other complaint in an otherwise excellent and whimsical RPG.

It’s been a while since I’ve lost myself to a farming game (ahem, Stardew Valley), but here we go again. My Time at Portia isn’t your typical farming game, though. While it has the same inheritance storyline, friendship system, and mining/fishing mechanics of any Harvest Moon title, Portia is much more about crafting and building than farming. That means you’ll spend a good chunk of each day hunting down the materials you need to shove into your various crafting machines, then waiting for said machines to spit out boards or bars that can eventually become a crane or bridge or water tank. Is it tedious? Well… yeah, sometimes. But completing these tasks to open up more of the world can be very rewarding.

The 3D perspective definitely makes for a more engrossing environment that begs to be explored. If you’ve had your fill of Stardew Valley and other 2D farming sims, still give Portia a try. Running around a 3D town has a much different feel to it. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been experiencing Portia on the Switch, where glitches and graphical hiccups abound. That hasn’t stopped me from sinking over 50 hours into the game, though. I gave up on Stardew Valley at the 50-hour mark, simply because I’d seen everything I wanted to see in that game. But in Portia, there are still areas yet uncovered and dungeons yet explored. It’s a huge game that paces its story missions just right to keep you busy without feeling overwhelmed.

“If I die again, I’m uninstalling this game,” is something I found myself saying a lot. Flynn and Freckles was a borderline frustrating experience, burdened by many classic 3D platformer problems. Surprisingly, the camera wasn’t one of them, but the jumping mechanics more than made up for it. This is the kind of game where ledges are spaced just far enough apart to require annoying precision. When the game introduced a double jump, I thought that would solve these pain points, but that just meant levels started placing platforms farther apart. Missing a ledge here and there wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for three other glaring issues: 1) Flynn dies if he touches water. 2) Flynn can’t fall very far without getting hurt. 3) There’s a half-second pause before Flynn can jump again.

Seriously, this game would be 50% more enjoyable if there was no jump cooldown. Alas, the game constantly sets you up to fail by having platforms that sink as soon as you touch them, and yet you have to wait for Flynn to recover before jumping to the next one. It’s ridiculous. Oh, and sometimes Flynn will randomly glitch through the ground and die, so there’s that. It’s kind of a shame, because Flynn and Freckles can actually be fun when things are going smoothly. The setting and level design and secret-finding are all passable. While the in-game treasure doesn’t have much of a pay-off, it’s still rewarding to grab those hard-to-reach chests. The quality gap between this and other indie platformers like Poi is probably too wide to ever bridge, but with a few patches, Flynn and Freckles could be a fun second place.

World to the West is a pretty fun adventure overall and could have been a nearly perfect one had it exercised a little more restraint with certain design choices. Most of the game’s flaws can be categorized as “too much” or “too many.” For instance, there are too many monsters wandering around in this world, and they all have too much health. Combat isn’t World to the West’s strong suit, though, so any situation that requires brute force not only feels clunky but really outstays its welcome. They should have just doubled down on the exploration and puzzle-solving aspects of the game, since that’s where the majority of the fun is to be had.

Of course, even that’s hindered by too much backtracking. Many of the puzzles require all four characters to pitch in somehow, but characters can only teleport to areas they’ve visited, so you’ll frequently have to run through the same obstacle courses again just to get everyone to the same place. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, though, because the characters are pretty unique, and the same area can feel almost brand new when approached with a character who can climb walls versus a character who can dig tunnels. World to the West is able to convey a bigger sense of scale than the map lets on simply because of the mileage it gets out of this idea. Does it feel cheap at times? Sure. But when you stumble across a new secret, you’ll be quick to forgive.

I’ll never say no to more Xenoblade, but this Torna expansion is definitely the weakest game in the series. And I know, I know, it’s not fair to call it a standalone game (even though it can be played as one), because it’s meant more to supplement XC2 instead of being an all-out sequel or prequel. The amount of content surpasses what any DLC pack would have provided, though. I’ve done almost everything there is to do in the game and am just over 20 hours. However, I’ve been intentionally trying to drag things out to make it last longer and am hunting down treasure chests I wouldn’t have cared as much about had this still been part of XC2 proper.

The thing is, while there appears to be a lot to do on the surface, you only have access to two areas: a watered-down version of Gormott from XC2 and a new Titan called Torna. To be fair, though, Torna is huge and has some fun secrets and gorgeous scenery. It really feels like this was scooped right out of the main game. Alas, that also makes it somewhat frustrating, because I kept expecting the world to open up even more and continue to surprise me, but you just don’t get that here. Torna’s where you’ll spend the majority of your time, and you’re not gonna meet many new comrades along the way. This isn’t a game about finding the perfect team but rather getting to know the one you’re given.

There are some familiar faces, of course, but I think this prequel does them a disservice, making once stoic characters like Jin and Brighid seem kind of silly. Plus, their whole goal is to stop Malos, but we already know Malos is the main villain of XC2, so what’s the point of any of this? Granted, the story in a Xenoblade game always plays second fiddle to its adventure mechanics. In Torna, however, the battle system’s been streamlined a bit, and side quests aren’t really optional anymore. You have to raise your “community level” a certain amount before you can face Malos, which means helping out the citizens of Torna. It’s weird to be forced to do side quests, but how else are you gonna get your money’s worth?

The Leisure Suit Larry games were always in the background of my PC gaming childhood, notorious point-and-click adventures that I was (understandably) forbidden to play. Well, take that, Mom, I can buy ’em on Steam now! But after playing 6 and 7 back-to-back (which is probably way more Larry Laffer than anyone humanly needs in a weekend), I’m not sure if I was merely filling in a gap in my childhood or purposefully regressing as an adult. These games are certainly a product of their time, brimming with homophobic jokes, racist stereotypes, and misogynist goals that wouldn’t fly today. It’s never totally insulting, but it does feel very dated.

That’s to be expected, though. I mean, the game originally came out in 1996, back when point-and-click adventures ruled the gaming landscape. But I was in the mood for some nostalgia, and these are pretty much the only ones I hadn’t played yet, so… here we are. But you know what? Aside from some antiquated humor, the games hold up surprisingly well. I’m choosing to spotlight 6 over 7, though, because the VGA graphics are pretty endearing, the setting/story is a little less hokey, Larry is more of a lovable loser, and the point-and-click gameplay consists of true pointing and clicking without the gimmicky text inputs that 7 weirdly reintroduced.

Of course, this is a 90s adventure game, which means there are plenty of moments where you’re aimlessly clicking on things, hoping something new happens. A lot of the times I got stuck boiled down to me not realizing a certain pathway existed or that the commands “use” and “take” are sometimes interchangeable and sometimes not. It definitely felt like Sierra hadn’t quite figured out how to best do icon-driven adventure games yet. Fortunately, the majority of the puzzles make sense and are fun to figure out. I liked it overall and am thankful services like Steam have preserved these games so I could, 20 years later, finally see what the fuss was about.