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.

The Tomorrow War Review

The concept of this movie is pretty interesting. I like the idea of needing to go back in time to recruit soldiers since the current/future population has been mostly wiped out. Of course, this brings with it your usual time travel issues that don’t hold up to scrutiny. At least they had the foresight to only recruit people who would be dead in thirty years, anyway, to avoid creating a time paradox. Again, the “future war” aspect of it has a lot of potential, so it’s really weird that they destroy the time travel device halfway through the movie. It basically feels like a second movie at that point (doubly so given the overlong runtime). Needless to say, the latter half of the movie is not as good, doing little to differentiate itself from other alien invasion blockbusters.

The first half of the movie isn’t perfect, either, but more on that in a moment. First, I want to at least say that you do get thrust into the action pretty soon. There’s a lot of initial intensity to draw you in. The aliens are also pretty scary, though the CG effects sometimes don’t look great. The movie has a strange, oversaturated color palette, which might have been their way of easing the alien effects into the real world. It’s also a bit disappointing that the movie sets up a ragtag team of heroes played by actors like Sam Richardson and Mary Lynn Rajskub only to abandon/kill off a lot of them in favor of a “father and daughter do science” storyline. Once that starts to play out, The Tomorrow War loses momentum that it never manages to recover.

It Takes Two Review

Developer Hazelight has a knack for mixed gameplay co-op games. I’d played their previous game, A Way Out, not that long before It Takes Two and was really impressed by the variety of gameplay mechanics. The game overall, though, was kinda lackluster in its story and co-op elements. It Takes Two feels like the game they wanted to make but they had to appease EA’s mature marketing first. That’s not to say It Takes Two is childish, because it does tackle adult themes like divorce and has a few grim scenarios like when you have to throw a stuffed animal to its death. But the game is very whimsical, which justifies the huge shifts that take place in the gameplay.

If you thought A Way Out had variety, It Takes Two triples it. The game is still a 3D platformer 95% of the time, but it frequently drops gimmicks altogether and introduces new ones that could have been their own complete indie game. And it’s all done with co-op in mind, so the two characters rarely have the same capabilities and need to work together. My only complaint is that there are just a few too many boss battles that almost always overstay their welcome. The best chapter in the game was the snow level, because, thematically, it was about the two characters having fun again, and the total lack of boss fights helped solidify that for the players as well.