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Hidden Gem Recommendations for the 2020 Steam Summer Sale
In these deeply uncertain times, one thing you can always count on is Steam’s seasonal sales. Steam’s Summer Sale is ongoing now through 10:00 am PST on July 9th. I always enjoy the Steam sale as it’s a great opportunity to take advantage of some of the exceptionally low prices to take a risk on games I’m curious about but not entirely certain I’ll enjoy. As such, each year during this time I’ve made it a tradition to recommend lesser known “hidden gems” that go on sale for under $5. If these deals aren’t enough then previous years recommendations are, of course, still valid.
Nex Machina
$4.99
Nex Machina is a top down twin stick shooter from Housemarque, a group that is known for its arcade-style action games. In this game, the player fights an unrelenting horde of rogue machinery amidst a world streaked by the neon chaos of explosions, laser blasts, and voxelated destruction. As an arcade-style game, it’s relatively short, choosing to focus on high score and replayability, and some people may be turned off by the lack of a save feature, meaning that if the player quits their session, they must start over from the very beginning. This is a great game for people looking for fast-paced action and non-stop sensory overload without the trappings of more story-oriented action games.
Little Nightmares
$4.99
I’ve written about Little Nightmares before, and it’s now available at a great price. As a “nightmare” puzzle-platformer game, it’s impossible to not compare this title to the likes of Limbo and Inside. In Little Nightmares, a mysterious child navigates a dementedly distorted world using their wits to evade the grotesque monsters that hunt her at every step. Little Nightmares is a great game for players who enjoy puzzle-platformers with a focus on aesthetics and cryptic world building.
Gato Roboto
$3.99
Gato Roboto is a fairly recent release in the “Metroidvania” genre. After surviving an emergency crash landing while on patrol in space, a simple house (space?) cat dons high-tech power armor to explore a hostile abandoned installation to find help for its human companion. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the game is its stark monochrome visual presentation which can be a “like it or hate it” kind of thing. In-game collectibles can be found to unlock new color palettes, but they are all composed of simple 2-color variations. While the game has many elements of a Metroid-style adventure, it can be very linear in progression, so those that enjoy the sequence breaking and exploration focus of those games may need to look elsewhere. Gato Roboto is a good choice for players who like sidescrollers that are equal parts action and platforming. The heartfelt and goofy journey of this cat who becomes an unlikely mech pilot to save its human will also resonate with pet owners who love their companions.
1001 Spikes
$4.94
I wrote about this game a long, long time ago when I played it on the 3DS, and while I think it is one of the best sidescrolling platformers I’ve played in the past 10 years, it’s also a game that is highly divisive. 1001 Spikes follows Aban Hawkins as he explores dangerous, trap-laden ancient ruins in search of a long lost treasure. This game is hard, with as much emphasis as I can put on the word, and borderline unfair. It’s the “borderline unfair” part that makes the game so polarizing. Traps in the game are hidden incredibly well with only subtle hints to their existence (if any), often leaving the player with a frantically tight window of time to react when triggered. As such, it can often be viewed as a trial and error ordeal. The gimmick, though, is that the player starts the game with 1001 lives to complete the challenging quest, and after they run out, there is a reasonably generous continue system that only incurs a small penalty to progress. 1001 Spikes is a game for people who like super challenging platformers like Super Meat Boy and Celeste and have the patience and tenacity to stick with it.
Vanquish
$4.99
I try to keep this list to lesser known games, but that’s based on my personal perception, which is not always the best gage. With that in mind, Vanquish may be the most well-known game on this list as a product of the acclaimed director Shinji Mikami and Platinum Studios (of Bayonetta fame). Vanquish feels like Mikami’s attempt to do a cover-based shooter in the vein of Gears of War. Gears of War, of course, was heavily influenced by Mikami’s Resident Evil 4, so this is a snake eating its own tail situation. Vanquish involves the ultra-American protagonist Sam Gideon ona mission to reclaim an American orbital city colony (an O’Neill cylinder to be exact) from Russian androids. What sets Vanquish apart from other third person shooters is that Gideon has an extraordinary amount of mobility due to his ability to rocket slide around the combat zone. While the game has plenty of chest high walls to hide behind, Vanquish’s enemy encounters are designed in such a way that Gideon can’t stay in one place for too long, meaning he has to constantly rocket boost from point-to-point to evade enemy fire. The result is a more kinetic action game than was typical for games of that era. I recommend Vanquish to all players who enjoy big, bombastic action shooters.
Night Trap
$2.99
Another game that I’ve covered for Halloween, Night Trap is the legendary interactive movie from the Sega CD that heavily contributed to the creation of the ESRB in the US. Night Trap tells the story of a group of high school girls that have been lured to the trap-infested Martin house to be captured and fed to pseudo-vampiric entities known as augurs. The player is an agent of an outside security force that has hacked into the traps of the house and intends to turn them against the augurs. The player must cycle through video feeds of the house party, keeping an eye out for signs that an augur is preparing to strike and triggering the appropriate traps when necessary. In hindsight, the moral panic that surrounded this game was laughable due to how utterly tame the “violent” content actually is. Night Trap is goofy and cheesy, and I’ve found it to be fun while it lasts (which is really not very long). The brevity of the title will turn many people off, but I think this game is an interesting artifact of gaming history, worth it for those who are fascinated with the culture of gaming that existed in the ‘90s.
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara
$4.94
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara is a compilation of two arcade beat’em up classics, Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. These games are mostly notable for their relative depth when compared to other arcade beat’em ups of the time, featuring RPG mechanics, branching paths, and equipment and spell mechanics that set them apart from their contemporaries. For fans of the arcade originals, there are a fair few extra goodies to unlock. I recommend this compilation to anyone into ‘90s beat’em ups.
Serious Sam Double D XXL
$1.99
The Serious Sam series has had a few smaller spin offs made by indie creators in partnership with CroTeam, and Double D XXL is an enhanced version of the first of these spin offs to be released. The game reframes the Serious Sam formula as a 2D sidescroller similar to Contra. Serious Sam games are all about fighting off giant swarms of alien enemies that are advancing from all directions, which doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly when a dimension is stripped out, but Double D makes up for it with some of its own ideas. The most notable is their gun stacking system, that allows Sam to combo weapons together to equip as many at one time as the player wants. Serious Sam is a series known for its strange enemy design, but Double D XXL somehow manages to out weird the mainline entries in this respect. Mutant stacks of pancakes that blast vuvuzelas are seemingly too bizarre for even CroTeam’s main team to touch. I recommend Double D to players who are into tough, dumb, action games.
Dusk!
Dusk is badass. I don’t know of any other way to start talking about this game other than to just get that out there. Dusk is a first-person action game that is more similar to Quake than to the story and spectacle heavy FPS games that come out today. This is immediately apparent when you first get a look at its grungy, low-poly visuals. But beyond the superficial, Dusk perfectly encapsulates what made those early first person action games so much fun, and, in a lot of ways, it exceeds those inspirations. That said, it might seem like a strange choice for a Halloween game, but I was personally surprised to discover that it was one of the most gruesome and disturbing experiences I’ve played in a while.
Dusk begins in media res with the player character waking up as an unwilling cult sacrifice in the basement of a farmhouse guarded by hooded men wielding chainsaws. After managing to escape captivity, the player emerges into a quiet countryside where monsters and cultists lurk in every dark corner. Eventually, the player reaches the government-quarantined town of Dusk, deep beneath which a secretive archaeological site has unleashed cosmic horror upon the world. The player’s ultimate goal becomes traverse a strange parallel dimension that spawned the twisted alien abominations that are assaulting the very fabric of Earth’s reality.
Dusk doesn’t have much overt storytelling. The motives of the mute main character are never explained in-game. There are no cutscenes and no other friendly characters with which to interact. The cult leader will occasionally telepathically taunt the player, but there’s no one to instruct the player on specifically what they should be doing which contrasts with the majority of action games released today. Storytelling is really more environmental in nature. The player learns about the world of Dusk via the places and things they witness along their journey.
I think the low-level storytelling is a key part of Dusk’s appeal. Modern video games, especially big budget ones, tend to have a preoccupation with making sure the player always understands exactly what is happening and what they should be doing. As a result, they often tend to get bogged down with cutscenes, radio conversations, tutorials, setpieces, etc. Dusk, on the other hand, just lets the player run loose. As I have limited free time for games these days, the fact that Dusk just cuts straight to the fun stuff is incredibly refreshing.
The key to this is in how incredibly well-designed Dusk’s levels are. They tend to be highly non-linear, offering the player multiple paths and directions to explore at any given moment. Stages like these could falter by becoming too confusing or maze-like, too easy for the player to get lost, but I never really had this issue with Dusk. It is complex without being confusing. Each area feels distinctive and memorable, which makes it easy to find one’s way around. I really enjoyed exploring this game, discovering what oddities and horrific sights lay around every corner, unlocking the vast number of secrets the game hides, and getting hooked on the adrenaline rush that each enemy ambush brought.
With 33 levels divided across 3 episodes, I was a bit worried that the game would start to get repetitive. Fortunately, the game has a ton of imagination packed into its sweeping journey. What starts off as a struggle for survival in a dark countryside filled with cultists and killers eventually morphs into a trek through secretive high-tech facilities harboring strange and unrestrained experiments and eventually across the warped landscapes of cosmic abomination. With each loading screen to usher in a new chapter, I always felt on the edge of something strange and surprising.
As an action game, Dusk is a lightfooted run-and-gun. Like Serious Sam or Quake, the player has gotta always be moving, less they become an easy target. There is a good variety of weapons, and the enemies are designed in such a way that makes most of the weapons fairly useful to the player. In a lot of Dusk’s classic counterparts, I usually found myself defaulting to using only one or two weapons that were clearly the most powerful, and only grudgingly using the lesser ones when I was out of ammo for the favorites. Dusk, on the other hand, does a good job of designing different situations that uniquely suit particular weapons, thus giving the player fairly frequent reason to mix things up and not simply rely on the shotgun or rocket launcher.
Despite the fact that Dusk is a fairly kinetic and aggressive action game, I was impressed by how well the developers were able to infuse it with the atmosphere and tension of a horror game. You wouldn’t necessarily think that an action game where the player is routinely outgunning dozens of enemies at a time could be scary, but Dusk can often be truly suspenseful. There were a ton of times when I was getting goosebumps because I knew a disturbing reveal was being ominously teased. The game oozes atmosphere, and I thought it was great at psyching me out. One of my favorite levels features the player descending downward through a cave that leads deep into the Earth. As the cave got narrower and more tortuous, I found myself becoming increasingly anxious about what I would find at the end of the long, downward spiraling tunnel. Something that really helps is the grungy, low-poly graphics which go beyond being a sentimental call back to classic games and provide a level of abstraction, aliennes, and crudeness that greatly enhance the murky and unsettling nature of Dusk’s world. Simply put, the game does an amazing job at balancing the power fantasy of taking on huge hordes of enemies with a feeling of vulnerability toward the hidden threats that lie in wait for the player.
Dusk is a quintessential example of a nostalgia trip done right. It doesn’t merely exist as a desperate attempt to recapture the fond memories of the past. Rather, it understands the elements that made those classics so great, elements which are often discarded or downplayed in modern game design, and then it enhances and advances those elements with its own ideas in a way that exceeds its inspirations. I honestly have no hesitation in saying that Dusk truly outdoes many of the action games that it seeks to honor.
The Life and Death of Vita
Earlier this month, news broke that Sony was finally discontinuing production of the Vita. This got me thinking a lot about the machine. Considering my enthusiasm for handheld gaming, I’ve always viewed the Vita a bit regretfully. As a platform, it never really sparked much passion in me. It’s an amazing piece of hardware: a big colorful screen, a nice d-pad and buttons, very ergonomic compared to other handhelds, and, of course, it has two analog sticks, an addition that its predecessor sorely needed. As a machine, it’s also just very slick looking from an aesthetic standpoint. In comparison, I’ve always thought the various versions of the 3DS looked very toy-like, especially considering the classy, minimalist shapes of the DS Lite and DSi. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I always feel a bit more self-conscious when other adults see me playing a 3DS than I do when I’m playing a Vita.
The problem that I’ve always had with the Vita is the games. On the one hand, it’s unfair and inaccurate to say that the Vita doesn’t have a decently-sized library of games. The problem is it doesn’t have a lot of games unique to the system. Sony put a lot of effort into supporting the PSP with great games. They developed new series like LocoRoco and Patapon, and they had great entries of their other big series on the machine, like Killzone, Syphon Filter, Resistance, MotorStorm, and Little Big Planet. The big video game publishers in Japan were also big supporters of the PSP, but that support didn’t materialize the same way for the Vita. Square-Enix, for instance, launched huge titles for the PSP like Final Fantasy Type-0, The Third Birthday, and Crisis Core, but the only major game for the Vita from them that I can think of was the FFX/FFX-2 collection.
It seems like most of these publishers very early on decided that mobile and 3DS were simply better investments. The worst loss for the Vita was when Capcom decided to move the Monster Hunter series from PSP to 3DS, instead of Vita. Monster Hunter was a hugely successful series in Japan and was the driving force behind the PSP’s long-tail popularity over there. Worst of all, Sony, themselves, gave up on making games for the Vita pretty quickly. Going by Wikipedia, the last major release from them seems to have come out and 2013.
Regardless, the Vita still managed to cultivate a fair number of games for itself. The Vita library was heavily filled out with indie games. I like indie games, and I play a ton of them, but I was never really drawn to play these games on the Vita. This was mainly, I think, for two reasons. First, these games often released long after their original release on either Steam or PS4, and I had often already played them on these other platforms by the time they came to Vita. There were a few times when I made a conscious effort to wait for the Vita release of a specific game, but this frequently ended in the Vita version being cancelled or the wait ending up being so long that I just lost interest. The second issue I had with these games was that they were often markedly inferior versions, either running poorly on the Vita or simply not being scaled correctly to the handheld’s screen size and resolution. Stuff like uncomfortably tiny text or fuzzy image quality were recurring flaws in these ports.
I know that in addition to indie games, there was also a large contingent of Japanese visual novels released for the system. And while I recognize there is a niche for these sorts of games, the genre doesn’t really appeal to me outside of a few of the higher profile games like Danganronpa or Steins;Gate.
I know that I’m not alone in feeling, simply but sadly, that the glory days of handheld gaming are long behind us. The Vita didn’t really come close to living up to the PSP, and while the 3DS faired better, it’s library wasn’t quite as expansive and vibrant as the DS before it. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of great games for the 3DS, but they were mostly from Nintendo, while other game makers provided much less support. Almost certainly, a combination of mobile phone gaming and the extensive piracy on both the PSP and DS has lured support away from dedicated handhelds. From that perspective, I think the Switch is probably a very smartly formulated device, as it keeps Nintendo’s handheld legacy alive, while also being a platform that attracts console game makers.
All of this said, I’m not really in a rush to bury my Vita in a drawer and forget about it. The recent production news has really been a reminder to me that there’s still a handful of games that I want to go back and play. Particularly, the higher profile visual novels, namely Danganronpa, Steins;Gate, and Virtue’s Last Reward. I also recently became interested in playing Death Mark, a more obscure title from last fall. Perhaps it will be a Halloween game this year. Beyond that, I think the machine is still the best way of playing PS1 and PSP games. It’s too bad that most of my PSP collection is on UMD and not PSN, or else I could probably permanently retire my PSP.
QUBE 2!
I love puzzle games, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I was much younger, the term “puzzle game” was more synonymous with falling block games, that is to say games that relied on the old Tetris formula in which the player’s goal is to arrange pieces of junk falling from the sky according to some idiosyncratic rule that causes the mess to disappear. I really liked Tetris, but I also got it for free with my Game Boy. It simply never crossed my mind to use the limited opportunities that a youngster has to get new video games on the numerous clones of Tetris that proliferated after its breakout success. Those types of games simply didn’t offer enough content in comparison to the action-adventure games that I usually picked up.
Somewhere along the line all that changed. The “puzzle game” term was commandeered by a different game and its numerous clones. That game, of course, was Portal, and it completely reinvigorated what had become an utterly sleepy genre. The term suddenly was used less to describe games about the strategy and reflexes of arranging falling blocks, and more to describe games in which the player sets about solving puzzles built into the environment of the levels they are meant to explore. And after Portal, there was a boom in indie groups taking advantage of new digital storefronts to release new games in the genre. One game that often stands out in my mind as emblematic of this boom time was QUBE, a game that could easily be described as a Portal clone, although a good game nonetheless, worth the time of anyone interested in such games. QUBE sort of came and went, and it seemed like it didn’t quite make the same lasting impression as some of the other big name puzzle games of the time, which is why I was happy when a sequel, QUBE 2, was released earlier this year.
QUBE 2, like the game before it, is set inside a massive structure made of white cubes, ominously implied to be of alien origin. During the beginnings steps of the story, the player discovers and equips a strange, technologically-advanced glove that allows them to manipulate the properties of the cubic building blocks of the surroundings. This is the primary means through which the player interacts with the environment. The glove can confer functionality to specific cubes with each functionality having a specific color coding. Red cubes expand outward, laterally from the surface in which they are embedded, to create steps or possibly obstructions. Blue cubes act like “ejectors”, forcefully expelling the player or any other objects that touch their surfaces in the opposite direction. Finally, green cubes become detached from the structure, creating a moveable object that can be used, for instance, to weigh down switches or act as stepping stones.
These are the only glove functions that are introduced to the player. With such a limited number of ways to manipulate individual blocks, I was initially worried that QUBE 2 might be too simplistic mechanically for a large variety of complex puzzles. Ultimately, however, I found that the game had a good ramp in terms of difficulty and complexity. While the player may only have three “powers”, the game continually introduces new elements and features to the environment that keep the basic formula of the puzzles from stagnating. And while I felt the game started off maybe too easy, the puzzles progress through a fair difficulty curve, and I think the puzzle design offered a very satisfying challenge without ever becoming unreasonably obtuse.
The first QUBE was completely devoid of story, and that’s not an exaggeration. As far as I can recall, the main character never spoke, was spoken too, or encountered other characters. He/she/it simply moved through the cube structures solving puzzles to progress. I think the game may have been criticized a bit unfairly for this, as the closest point of comparison most people have for this game is Portal, and many people play Portal for the story first, puzzles second. Eventually, a “director’s cut” version of the game was released that included new story elements, but I’ve never gone back to play this version, so I can provide no comment on it.
I can say, however, that QUBE 2 puts a fair bit of effort into its story from the get go. The player takes control of Amelia Cross, a woman who awakens on a desolated planet that has been overtaken by the eponymous alien cubes which have self-assembled into enormous structures that dot the world’s surface. Taking refuge in one of these structures, Amelia begins to explore its inner workings and sets about uncovering the true nature of the cubes and their potential as friend or foe to humankind. The story is metered out in the “radio play” style with all interactions between Amelia and the other characters being carried out over radio transmissions as the player goes about their business. I thought the actual plot that unfolds was merely decent. It’s not bad by any means, but for people who have read or watched a lot of science fiction, it will probably be easy to figure out where the story is heading. But as predictable as it may be, the story doesn’t really get in the way of the overall adventure, and I felt it gave some coloring to the experience that increased immersion, meaning I don’t feel that it was a purely perfunctory element of the game. But it’s important to understand that for the kind of person who plays Portal for the story and jokes and doesn’t really care about the challenge of puzzle solving, this game probably won’t be particularly engaging.
Speaking of immersion, I thought QUBE 2 was visually stunning in its own humble way. I feel like that’s kind of a weird thing to say about a game where the player spends their time exploring environments entirely made out of white cubes. But the image quality is really sharp, and lighting is used well to create texture and dynamism in the world. Later on in the game, bits of nature and greenery begin to encroach on the otherwise sterile environments, adding a small bit of satisfying diversity. There’s not a huge amount of variety to the setting, but I never felt bored or tired of the aesthetic, which is not something I can say of the first QUBE.
QUBE 2 is interesting because its predecessor is so quaint in comparison. QUBE was a simple $15 puzzle game released in the wake of Portal’s popularity. It was a cool game, but I never really thought the core concept could carry more than one title in a series. The team behind this game apparently had a completely different idea, however, and really doubled down on what they had. With QUBE 2, they took their humble indie game and blew it up into a significantly more expansive and polished product. QUBE 2 has more extensive content, slicker visuals, and a significantly more substantial story. I find it to be the often too rare kind of sequel that stands completely on its own, and in no way requires experience with the prior game in the series to fully enjoy. Personally, I often tend to be compulsively driven to play games sequentially in a series (i.e., I can’t play sequels until I play their predecessors). But with QUBE 2, I have no hesitance about recommending newcomers start here, and only tackle the original game if they are left wanting more.
Stories Untold!
Stories Untold is a series of four vignettes tinged with horror and modelled after classic sci-fi anthology series such as The Outer Limits and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. Each vignette is superficially a standalone experience with the commonality that they each feature stories in which the player interacts with an array of (by today’s standards) vintage electronics such as classic microcomputers, microfiche archives, radios, televisions, etc. The exception is the final episode which manages to tie together the seemingly unrelated events of the preceding chapters into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
Of the four episodes, I felt the first was easily the strongest. It’s also the only episode that I felt leant deeply into the horror genre. In this chapter, the player is rooted at a home desk with a “Futuro” microcomputer, which is essentially a fictionalized analogue of machines like the Amiga and Commodore 64. Loaded up onto the system is The House Abandon, a text adventure that is essentially a game within a game. The entire episode is spent at this desk playing this one text adventure game. The House Abandon begins as a seemingly warm and fuzzy story about returning to a childhood home, but eventually reveals itself to have a more sinister side. All of a sudden, the game turns a dark corner and begins distorting the in-game reality surrounding the microcomputer. While this might sound gimmicky and a little cheesy, I found it to be executed surprisingly well. The metafictional interplay between the reality of the humble desk and Futuro computer setup and the dark residential setting of The House Abandon is one of the most creative mechanisms of producing tension and foreboding that I’ve seen in a game, and the creepiness of the experience left a distinct impression on me.
The subsequent episodes, however, were not quite as effective in creating the atmosphere and mood befitting a horror game. The second and third episodes are more sci-fi oriented. Instead of a cursed computer game, the second episode involves the player operating lab equipment in a government research facility, and the third episode takes place in a radio outpost for an expedition above the Arctic Circle. Horror is subjective, of course, and while I could see how someone might consider these chapters to be eerie, I simply did not come away with that impression.
The fourth episode diverges significantly from the rest and serves as a capstone for the disparate stories that came before it. A more grounded tale, eschewing supernatural and sci-fi elements, the final chapter is, in a certain way, the most chilling episode and deals with tragedy and deeply personal torment. Not scary in the traditional sense of the oft-surreal horror genre, Stories Untold concludes with an upsetting story of loss and regret, real world horror if you will. Beyond that, the fourth episode manages to color the entire experience with an interesting perspective that attempts to elevate the game above the sum of its parts. The blurring of boundaries between layers of metafictional reality is a theme that permeates throughout, and this peculiar aspect of the individual vignettes serves as an important hook for the conclusion.
Surprisingly, the text adventure aspect manages to find its way into the story beyond the initial episodes. Of the actual interactive parts of the game, I found these segments to be the most enjoyable and interesting. Text adventures have a bad reputation of obtuseness due to how frustrating it can sometimes be to figure out the right wording of commands to enter into the text parser, but I didn’t find Stories Untold to be too much of a hassle in this regard. The other various tasks the player is given, on the other hand, can sometimes feel like busy work to fill in time between story beats. One part of the game has the player manipulating the various buttons, knobs, and levers of a microfiche display, and this activity was especially tedious.
Ultimately, I have no strong feelings toward Stories Untold. I can easily see that it’s competently designed with a well crafted story, but I simply did not resonate sharply with this game. I chose this as a Halloween game after seeing it on a number of horror game recommendation lists, but, honestly, I personally have a hard time characterizing it as such. The first episode featuring the cursed computer game was a great experience, but the remainder of the game felt like a different direction tonally. To me, the hook of the game is more for those interested in ‘80s nostalgia than it is for enthusiasts of the horror genre. (Which is ironic, because I felt that one of the main themes of the game was that nostalgia is a coping mechanism that deters us from facing reality.) As a ‘90s kid, I have little attachment to this subject matter, which is probably why the game didn’t leave as strong of an impression on me.
Little Nightmares!
Each year for the Halloween season, I try to dedicate my playtime and writing to a selection of spooky games that I’ve always wanted to try. This time I’ve been really excited for these Halloween posts all year, and I feel like I’ve actually gotten a bit ahead on my plans for once, so I’m optimistic that this might be the best Halloween on the blog yet. Previous Halloween posts are all collected on this tab. This year, I’m starting off with Little Nightmares, a creepy adventure game that released fairly recently on basically every modern gaming platform.
A small child shrouded in a yellow raincoat awakens at sea on a mysterious ship filled with danger and foreboding. As she begins to explore her surroundings, she finds other children in cages and begins getting glimpses of the grotesque giants that crew the dreary vessel. The quest that follows pits the defenseless protagonist against the strange appetites of the pitiless but hapless denizens of this otherworldly domain.
Little Nightmares immediately draws comparison to Limbo and its pseudo-sequel Inside. It’s easy to feel like the former was inspired by the latter. All three are puzzle platformer games about a defenseless youth trying to survive in a strange and creepy world. Little Nightmares does, however, manage to differentiate itself from the other two with a few key new ideas. Most importantly, while Limbo and Inside are essentially sidescrollers that confine movement to a 2D plane, Little Nightmares offers movement in fully 3D environments.
Furthermore, while the game starts off mostly about solving environmental puzzles to progress in a similar fashion to Inside and Limbo, later portions of the game become heavily focused on stealth and evasion. The protagonist of Little Nightmares is a small creature in a world of giants. Everything in the world she is travelling through is oversized, both objects and people, very much like Jack and the Beanstalk. Thus as the game progresses, gameplay becomes less about Limbo-style puzzles and more about sneaking through this jumbo-sized world while evading, hiding, and sometimes needing to outrun the ponderous creatures that view the child as nothing more than a pest to be squashed.
Little Nightmares is scary like a fairy tale, not necessarily suspenseful in a traditional sense, but creepy and unsettling in how it contrasts innocence with monstrosity. The monsters the player faces are grotesque and unpleasant to look at, and their designs emphasize themes of decadence and depraved overindulgence. These giant beings don’t feel like highly threatening apex predators, as they’re rather hapless and clumsy at times. But the moments where the girl is discovered and pursued by these beings are tense thrills as she scrambles to find a safe hiding spot. I don’t really feel any reservations in calling this a horror game, even if it is an offbeat amongst the genre.
And while the game is not particularly scary in the same sense as most horror games, the final monster encounter was a surprising exception. While I tend to find that most horror games become less scary as the story progresses and I become more comfortable in the setting, Little Nightmares managed to end on a high note. The final section has an amazing sense of atmosphere and dread, but it was also regrettably the shortest part of the game. After seeing how capable the designers of this game were at creating such an unnerving experience, I kind of wish they had imbued earlier parts of the game with this kind of atmosphere.
However, my principle issue with Little Nightmares is the brevity of content. The game is roughly three hours long. I don’t necessarily think a game is bad if it’s short, but I do consider it a negative when a game feels short, and Little Nightmares definitely felt short to me. I thought the game really only scratched the surface of the concept and world it introduced. The ending felt like it came on way too abruptly. The final area of the game should have been a bit longer, and the game could have really used one more major monster to encounter. Frustrating the issue is that there is a $10 DLC pack that offers three additional chapters to the game’s original five and features a different character from the original story. (I do not own the DLC, so I can’t comment on its quality.)
I like Little Nightmares. I thought it was a cool game. But for the reasons above, I think it’s a little hard to give the game an unqualified recommendation. I find it hard to provide justification for purchasing the game at full price, and I would also recommend playing Inside, a similar game, first, as I thought it was a considerably better game, although it doesn’t lean as much into the horror genre. Little Nightmares is a good Steam (or PSN, eshop, etc.) sale game, interesting and fun and worth playing, but not necessarily worth paying full price, especially when the DLC is factored in.
Into the Breach!
From the makers of FTL: Faster than Light comes Into the Breach, a peculiar kind of strategy game that is completely unlike anything I’ve ever played before. In the far flung future, global flooding has left only four small islands as the last habitable land mass on Earth. Civilization continues on until a race of giant subterranean insects known as the Vek begin attacking the citizens of these new nations. After a long war, the remnants of humanity are driven to extinction with the exception of the last squadron of mech pilots who open a breach in the timeline to travel to the beginning of the Vek incursion and relive the war as many times as it takes to secure the safety of mankind.
Each mission takes place on small, randomly generated maps that fill up an 8×8 grid of tiles. The player is in command of a squad of three mechs that drop down onto each map and must defend cities from the onslaught of Vek emerging from underground. Each mission requires the player to hold out and survive for roughly 4 or 5 rounds before the Vek retreat. As such, Into the Breach is really a strategy game that is more about defense than offense. Whereas strategy games such as Fire Emblem and Advance Wars are mostly about eliminating all enemies in a given mission or capturing an objective defended by said enemies, there is no requirement to annihilate the Vek in Into the Breach. Missions are failed only when a certain number of cities are destroyed.
The acute scope and defensive nature of the game result in something that is a hybrid of puzzle and turn-based strategy elements. The puzzle-like nature of the game is strongly reinforced by the idiosyncratic way in which turns play out. In most strategy games, the player and opponent alternate moving and committing actions with their units. Not so in Into the Breach. Each round begins with the Vek moving into position and then indicating which tiles they plan to attack. After this phase, the player is allowed to move and take actions with their mechs. Following the player’s go, the round concludes with the enemies attacking the tiles they are targeting.
Since the player can see where the Vek are going to attack, they can effectively prioritize which enemy to focus damage on. Essentially, the player has the opportunity to sabotage the Vek before they can do anything. The Vek that are targeting cities are generally top priority in most sound strategies. The best thing about Into the Breach, however, is that the player is allowed to operate creatively in how they handle the situation. As an example, perhaps there is a Vek that is preparing to attack a city, and the player isn’t able to deliver enough damage to it to take it out this turn. However, most mechs have weapons that have some sort of knockback effect, so you can use that to knock the Vek away from the target. That seems simple enough, but it gets even more elaborate. Perhaps there is already an enemy on the tile you’ve knocked the first Vek into. The collision will do damage to both Vek, possibly destroying both. Or perhaps something even more interesting can happen, if there isn’t a second Vek already there. The first Vek is already committed to attacking the same tile relative to its new position. What this means is that if you knock the enemy 1 tile to the east, then the tile it’s targeting will shift 1 tile to the east. If there is an enemy on that tile, the Vek you moved will deal damage to this bystander.
The complex ways in which you can manipulate enemies makes Into the Breach feel like a puzzle game at times. Beyond the knockback effect I mentioned above, there are a large number of unlockable mechs that have special abilities that lead to even more strategically interesting effects. One of my personal favorites is a mech that can kick up dust storms on the tiles it attacks. These dust storms blind any enemy standing in them and render them unable to attack. This can be paired with another mech that confers electrical charge to all of the dust storms on the map, so anything standing in those storms takes damage each turn.
This is what really hooked me on Into the Breach. Experimenting with the various mechs and their abilities and discovering the ways in which their abilities can augment each other keeps the game from ever feeling stale. It is absolutely like a puzzle game. There are times when I would be in a difficult situation, on the verge of hitting game over, and I would spend several minutes going through the various possible moves in my head until finally I would have an epiphany and realize a way I could save myself from the situation. Of course, it’s immensely satisfying when this happens.
Like its predecessor, FTL, Into the Breach can be considered a roguelike game. That’s a bit of a nebulous term these days, but in this case it means that if the player gets a game over screen then all their progress is lost, and they must begin the game from the beginning. In the game’s story, this plays out as the mechs opening another temporal breach and time travelling back to the start of the war. I had mixed feelings about this when I started Into the Breach. In the past, I’ve really enjoyed games like this, including Spelunky and Rogue Legacy, but lately I’ve started to feel that this formula just isn’t for me anymore. The issue is really that I don’t have as much free time as I once did, and as roguelikes make you replay a lot of the early content in the game many times over, I worry that these games really aren’t the best use of my limited free time.
Fortunately, I feel like Into the Breach managed to narrowly sidestep this concern. There are a few reasons to which I attribute this. First, you reach a point where you can start on any of the game’s four islands. Initially, only the first island is available to play, but once you beat that island, the second island will be unlocked in all future instances that you start the game over. The same goes for the third and fourth island. Ultimately, you can play the islands in any order you please, and the final mission becomes available once you clear two islands in a given run (although there is a reason not to go the the final mission until three or four islands are cleared). Each island has sufficiently unique mechanics that choosing a different island to start on each time keeps the game from feeling stale.
It also helps that there is a wide variety of unlockable mechs that promote experimentation each time the game is started from the beginning. New squads of mechs are unlocked by completing special achievements in the game (similar to how starships were unlocked in FTL). Each squad comes with its own unique gimmick. The squad that is initially available at the start of the game are the Rift Walkers and are fairly straightforward, focused almost purely on direct damage dealing and some knockback effects. But then, for instance, there is another squad, the Flame Behemoths, that focuses on turning tiles into hazards by setting them on fire. My two favorite squads are the aforementioned Rusting Hulks, which are built around taking advantage of dust storms and electrical electrical damage, and the Zenith Guard, which make use of energy weapons that do chain damage to groups of adjacent enemies. There is a good variety of strategy represented by the different squads, and I feel like everyone tends to find their own favorite. It’s also just fun to experiment.
Into the Breach has a unique approach toward difficulty and victory. At the beginning of a run, a player chooses to start on any island they’ve completed so far. Each time an island is cleared out, the difficulty is increased for the next island the player chooses. After completing only two islands, the final mission appears on the map. The player can then proceed to this last mission or complete one or both of the remaining islands. Thus the game can be won in a two, three, or four island victory. Since difficulty increases based on the number of islands cleared, the two island victory is the easiest to achieve, while the four island victory is hardest.
I’ve honestly never managed to beat this game’s predecessor, FTL. I’ve made it to the final mission twice in FTL, and after the second time I realized that I would probably never be able to beat the game, simply because the final battle was so incredibly difficult. Into the Breach has a far more attainable ending, and the final mission is not nearly as insurmountable. In a way, this was a relief, because it meant I could obtain some closure on the game, but I can’t deny that it also felt a bit anticlimactic compared to the awe-inspiring final boss of FTL.
I actually managed to beat the final mission on my first try at it while going for a two island victory, but it was still a fair challenge. At one point, I was only a few turns away from victory, when I suddenly hit a wall. As I sat there strategizing, it suddenly dawned on me that every move I could think of would result in my team of mechs getting wiped out. Since I couldn’t see a way out, I was almost ready to resign myself to defeat, when I had a better idea. It was really late that night, and I settled on simply saving the game so I could come back with a fresh mind in the morning. (You can save at any point in the game and pick back up where you left off.) I came back the next morning, stared at the game for about 10 minutes, and then like a bolt of lightning, I was suddenly struck by a set of moves that would let me survive. With my persistence rewarded, I only had to survive a few more relatively easy turns before I attained victory.
Since then, I’ve also managed to achieve a three island victory. Someday maybe I’ll come back to try at a four island victory, but for now, I’ve set Into the Breach aside to move on to other games on my stack. In my post about Hollow Knight, I discussed how exciting and rare it is to find a game that isn’t merely just good, but is something that I truly love and hold in high regard as one of the reasons I enjoy gaming so much. Amazingly, I’ve played two games back-to-back this year, Hollow Knight and Into the Breach, that met this lofty standard. Years from now when I reflect on why I love gaming, Into the Breach will be one of the reasons. I think it’s that good.
Eight Underrated Deals from the Steam Summer Sale: 2018 Edition
Each year when the Steam Summer Sale rolls around, I like to put together a quick list of recommendations for lesser known games that are going for really cheap prices. One of the reasons for doing this is that I think sales like these are good opportunities for trying out underrated or rough around the edges games that you wouldn’t always take a chance on at higher prices. A way to explore your tastes in games, if you will. I have two criteria to maintain the spirit of the list: 1) These are games that I (arbitrarily) feel are underrated or have been forgotten about, and 2) They have a price point no greater than $5 (USD).
This year, the list is coming in hot, since the summer sale started just as I was packing up to take off for a week long vacation (probably the longest vacation I’ve taken in forever). The sale ends Thursday (7/5) at 1:00 PM EST, so I realize there’s not a lot of time left to consider these recommendations. I thought about not doing it this year, but I decided I wanted to keep up the tradition, since I’ve been doing these lists since 2014.
I had a little more trouble writing the list this year because of the time constraint I found myself in, but also because the deals just don’t seem as good as they’ve been in past. When searching for games to put on the list, several titles I thought would be going for under five bucks by now weren’t. In fact, I’m not entirely sure previous years’ lists are still valid, since I noticed that Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed from the 2015 list wasn’t even on sale at all this year! Nonetheless, I still think you can grab most of the titles form the old lists fairly cheap, so I recommend looking over those too if you are interested.
Jazzpunk
$2.99
Jazzpunk was actually one of the first games I wrote about when I started this blog way back in 2014, and I think this is the first year that it’s finally hit a price point to qualify for this list. Jazzpunk is more of an interactive comedy than a game. The game chronicles the missions of a secret agent codenamed Polyblank, who lives in a bizarre alternate Earth version of the Cold War. There’s not much challenge to it, rather you spend your time exploring the environment and discovering bizarre situations and odd mini-games to play. The comedy relies heavily on non-sequitur and absurdism, so it can be hit or miss, and of course it will depend on your own sense of humor if you find it funny or not. I found it to be an amusing experience, at least.
Pirate Pop Plus
$2.49
Pirate Pop Plus is a simple arcade-style game that is based on an old Japanese game called Pang. I don’t imagine many people are familiar with Pang. I certainly wasn’t until I played Pirate Pop. In Pirate Pop, you play as a little pirate guy who needs to clear the screen of these bubbles that bounce along the ground and deal damage to the player upon contact. You do this by shooting upwards (and only upwards) at the bubbles. Each time you hit a bubble, it breaks up into smaller bubbles which are harder to hit, but also bounce lower to the ground which means they are also harder to dodge. As the game progresses, the formula gets varied up with gimmicks like alternating directions of gravity. Pirate Pop is basically an arcade game, meaning you start at the first level each time you play and your goal is to beat your previous high score. It definitely can be fun to play for short bursts when you don’t have a lot of time to play something more serious.
Haunted: Halloween ’85
$1.19
Haunted was originally released as a homebrew NES cartridge and eventually a PC port was made available on Steam. You play as a kid who wakes up from a nap to realize that he’s late for the Halloween dance at school. As he rushes to school, he discovers that his town has been taken over by monsters. Part beat’em up, part platformer, Haunted plays like a real NES, while most games that claim to be modern NES games play more like idealized versions of games from that era. While it can definitely be fun, it is also crude and frustrating at times. There are 6 levels, and no way to save. This means that each time you start the game, you start at level 1, just like most NES games. If you enjoy playing actual NES games, I definitely recommend it, but to others I would be a little more cautious. Two important tips: The first is that there is a secret uppercut move that is activated by pressing Down+B and does much more damage than the standard attack. The other is to play the game in windowed mode, because I believe there is no way to exit out of the game in fullscreen other than Alt+F4.
Quantum Conundrum
$0.98
Quantum Conundrum is a first-person puzzle game that has a lot of similarities to Portal, but with the veneer of a Saturday morning cartoon. You play as a kid exploring the mansion of his mad scientist uncle. The puzzles are based around the gimmick that you have a device that allows you to shift “dimensions”, which really means that you can alter the laws of physics in the surrounding environment. Namely, you can make objects lighter or heavier, slow down time, or reverse gravity. You are guided through the game by the disembodied voice of your uncle in the same way the GladOS guides you through the test chambers of Portal. In general, neither the puzzles or comedy of the game are quite as good as Portal, but I think it’s still a fun game to play, nonetheless.
Strider
$4.49
Strider is a modern take on the classic Capcom action series. This new version of the franchise is a bit more like the old NES game than its arcade counterparts. Rather than a linear action game, this is a fast-paced hack-and-slash set in a massive Metroid-style open world. Those that like Metroid-style games will probably find a lot to like about Strider.
Serious Sam HD
The First Encounter: $2.24
The Second Encounter: $2.99
Serious Sam is sort of a B-tier first-person shooter from around the turn of the millenium. In a time when many action game were going for cinematic-like adventures, Serious Sam had significantly less fluff and focused instead on a more pure action experience that was closer to games like Doom and Rise of the Triad than contemporaries likes Half-Life 2 or Halo. Serious Sam is about the war waged by time traveller and one-man army Sam Stone against an alien horde that is invading ancient Earth. Serious Sam’s signature style of gameplay is to basically inundate the player with a massive number of enemies at once. This might sound like it could get stressful, but I find that the games are balanced enough that they are challenging without being frustrating more often than not. Serious Sam was released as two chapters, the First and Second Encounters, and both are well worth playing, although I would try the first one first to see if you like this formula of gameplay before picking up the second.
Orcs Must Die
$2.49
A handful or so years ago, there was a huge craze over tower defense games, and while I’m not much of a fan of tower defense, I really dug Orcs Must Die. In Orcs Must Die, you play as a wizard tasked with defending a castle that holds the portal to the human realm from an onslaught of invading orcs. Your magic allows you to manifest a variety of traps in each level that are strategically placed to thin out the encroaching horde. Unlike a lot of tower defense games, the wizard is an actual character that moves around the level, instead of being a disembodied entity that views the action from above. The wizard possesses his own weapons and spells that he can use to attack the orcs directly, which ultimately makes the game a fusion of tower defense and third-person shooter.
Tower of Guns
$4.49
Tower of Guns is a roguelike first-person shooter from a few years back. The player is tasked with ascending a procedurally generated tower that is filled with relentlessly attacking robotic enemies. The coolest wrinkle to the gameplay is that the projectiles the enemies fire move in relatively slow patterns, which makes weaving in and out of these oncoming attacks as important as dealing damage to the enemies. This always on your toes gameplay is probably my favorite aspect of the game, and it’s one of the better games I’ve played that tries to marry first-person shooters with the roguelike formula.
Hollow Knight!
There were a ton of cool games that came out in 2017. I wasn’t anywhere close to playing everything that I wanted to play. Around November of last year, I sat down and wrote a list of games from the year that I wanted to complete or at least try, and Hollow Knight ended up getting the priority because I thought I could knock it out quickly. My expectation turned out to be totally wrong. Hollow Knight ended up being an epic experience that drove me deep into unraveling its secrets. It’s one of the best games that I’ve played in a long time, so much so that it actually took me a few months before I decided I was satisfied enough to move on.
Hollow Knight is the story of the fallen, subterranean kingdom of Hallownest, whose citizenry was composed of a wide range of sentient arthropods, principally a beetle-like race that are simply called bugs, but also spiders, mantises, moths, and maggots. In the distant past, Hallownest was a utopic nation that was beset by a strange infection that drove many of its inhabitants into violent insanity. Life has seemingly continued on at the fringe of the once great civilization, but the infection continues to slowly spread into this periphery. Upon this desolation enters the quiet, wandering Knight, who is drawn to the surface city of Dirtmouth, which serves as the entrance to Hallownest. From there, the player journeys as the Knight down into the kingdom’s ruins to discover and thwart the source of the infection.
Hollow Knight joins the huge pile of games that take their inspiration from Metroid’s large contiguous side-scrolling worlds. In the past few years, there’s been so many games coming out that use the Metroid formula that you would think Hollow Knight would have a hard time standing out, but I think its been fairly popular. Part of the reason for that is that its other big inspiration is Dark Souls. Mostly this is seen in how it takes place in a world built on the ruins of a once great civilization that fell to decay and madness and relates the ancient history of this culture through purposefully cryptic means. Fortunately, while the games that influenced Hollow Knight are clear, I found that this game managed to create its own identity and introduced enough of its own ideas that it didn’t feel like a cheap attempt to recapture the nostalgia of its inspirations.
For the most part, Hollow Knight is a fairly straightforward hack and slash game. Most of the game’s challenge comes from studying the enemies and bosses and then building a strategy around their strengths and weaknesses, very similar to how you would approach a Dark Souls game. It has an ethos that I describe as the best offense is a good defense. You must learn and understand enemy attack patterns so that you can identify when you have an open window to attack safely. If you attack carelessly, you will get utterly steamrolled.
While the Knight’s moves are fairly standard (slash left, slash right, dodge, charge attack, etc.), there were two aspects of his abilities that I particularly liked. The first was the way healing works. The Knight heals by casting a spell that must be charged first. He is immobile while charging the spell, and if he takes damage, the spell gets interrupted. This adds an additional layer of strategic depth to the game, since its important to understand when and where its ok to heal. The player needs to understand the enemy attack patterns well enough to know when they have an opportunity to safely heal and where to position themselves so they’re unlikely to get hit. The other thing that I really enjoyed is that the Knight can slash downwards while in the middle of a jump. This can be used to attack enemies beneath the jump, and the Knight gets a little bounce when he does this. Bouncing from enemy to enemy like this is a lot of fun, and the air time can be used to evade certain complicated attacks. Sometimes, it also allows the Knight to reach some hard to get to places that hold secrets. I love games like Duck Tales and Shovel Knight that have bouncy pogo moves like this.
The world of Hallownest was fun and interesting to explore and is dense with secrets to uncover. The exploration aspect of the game is probably what resonated with me most about Hollow Knight. Each area of the map feels visually distinctive and presents challenges and enemies that mostly feel very unique. Around the same time I was playing Hollow Knight, I was also playing Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS. While I kinda like that game, I have to say that everything in it just sort of blurs together. The levels and bosses I’ve played feel rather same-y and don’t leave much of a distinctive impression.
Meanwhile, I can easily recall most of Hallownest, because Hollow Knight does such a good job of creating a varied world with unique places to explore. My favorite area is Deepnest, the dark and deeply terrifying caves on the border of the kingdom that are overrun with a race of hostile spiders. Second would probably be the mysterious Ancient Basin, where the secrets of Hallownest’s godlike ruler can be discovered. I also have to mention that the White Palace has my favorite music track in the game, a somber melody that conveys the weight of the tragedy that struck the kingdom, and the area is also intensely and satisfyingly challenging.
Hollow Knight has a few different endings, but essentially there are just two. It has a few “normal” endings that are quite similar, and then a secret “true” ending that requires a great deal more effort and secret hunting to unlock. I went into Hollow Knight knowing this, but I expected that I would only bother to get the normal ending. As it turned out, I was so enamored by the game that I committed myself to unlocking the secret true ending. This was a bit fortunate as there is a significant amount of content in the game that you would only see if you went out of your way to get this ending. I’m talking about huge areas that you would never find if you only followed the path that the main story directs you through. But I have to be honest, I had to consult a guide to figure out the requirements to reveal the secret ending. There really is not a whole lot of explicit hints in the game that would give you strong suggestions as to how to unlock it. It took me roughly 30 hours to complete the game, but if I hadn’t used a guide, I could easily see it taking double that time to find the items needed to see the complete finale.
That said, it was totally worth it. Not only are the secret areas really great parts of the game, but I found the “normal” ending to be a bit anticlimactic. I felt it didn’t really do justice to the epic quest that preceded it. The secret ending, on the other hand, has a new final boss fight that takes place after the original final boss. I felt that the secret final boss was way more exciting and formidable and easily a major highlight of the game for me. In addition to revealing the true final boss, I just felt that the secret ending gave a bit better closure to the story. The normal ending would have felt rather abrupt and confusing without the extra context of the lore found in the secret areas. I really wish that they would have made the normal ending a little more worthwhile, seeing as that’s the only ending most players are likely to see.
Hollow Knight was a game that I was excited to play due to the strong word of mouth I had heard. There’s lots of popular games that I’m pumped to try, but sometimes I end up being let down by my high expectations for them. Often when this happens, I question whether gaming is still something I’m passionate about. But sometimes a game totally surpasses any expectations I had and reinforces the affection I have for gaming as a hobby. Hollow Knight is definitely that type of game. I had started out hoping to complete it quickly, but realized that I couldn’t do anything less than master it.
Best Underrated Deals (<$5) from the Steam Summer Sale: 2017 Edition!
Like the changing of the seasons, the Earth rolls once again around its orbit so that the sun and stars may align for the Steam Summer Sale. I always find the Steam sale is a good time to take advantage of the low prices to try out games I wouldn’t normally. For the past few years, I’ve written up posts highlighting games that I think are underrated gems and are also going for dirt cheap prices. I try to keep the recommendations to lesser known games that are going for under $5, so that people may be encouraged to try some new things without spending a lot. Of course, previous years’ recommendations also still stand, as well. The Steam Summer Sale is set to end next Wednesday, July 5th.
(All prices listed in USD.)
Sonic Generations
Sale Price: $4.99
The struggles of Sonic the Hedgehog in the post-Genesis world are no secret. There have been a lot of terrible Sonic games since the days of 16-bit glory, but there have been a precious handful of good ones. I don’t think any of them have been great, certainly nothing that has competed with the lofty trajectory Mario has continued to take, but there have definitely been a few good ones. Of these, I think Sonic Generations is easily the best. As its name sort of implies, Sonic Generations features a combination of 2D and 3D gameplay set across a collection of remixed zones taken from previous games in the series’ history. I personally had a ton of fun with both aspects of the game, 2D and 3D. Whereas a lot of Sonic games struggle to get even the fundamentals right, Sonic Generations managed to create a game that cut out a lot of the noise that has held the series back all these years.
Q.U.B.E.: Director’s Cut
Sale Price: $1.74
Q.U.B.E. is a first-person puzzle game heavily inspired by Portal. In Q.U.B.E., the player has the ability to telekinetically manipulate colored blocks to overcome obstacles in the environment. The trick is that each type of colored block has different properties. Unlike its obvious inspiration, Portal, the original release of Q.U.B.E. was pretty absent of any storytelling. It was more focused on puzzle design. The Director’s Cut release that is now up on Steam seems to have a bit more explicit story added to the game, however, I’ve only played the original release, so I can’t say for sure.
Virginia
Sale Price: $2.49
Virginia is a first-person narrative game that left a huge impression on me last year. Virginia tells the story of FBI Agent Anne Tarver who finds herself caught in a mystery that possesses shades of both The X-Files and Twin Peaks. Two of the most interesting aspects of Virginia is that the story is told with entirely silent characters, and individual scenes mostly only last a few minutes at the most. The pacing, absence of dialogue, and dreamlike story beats result in a game that packs a strong surrealist punch.
Volgarr the Viking
Sale Price: $1.99
Volgarr the Viking is a hack-and-slash sidescroller for people into hardcore challenges. I find it akin to retro games like the NES Castlevania or the Shinobi series. This game is really really hard, but completely possible to master if you put in the time to hone your skills and learn the game’s levels. You’ll have to die a lot if you want to finish Volgarr, but the point is to learn from each death and to adapt. Hard as it may be, nothing in the game is unfair. I only really recommend this game to people who are into games with brutal learning curves.
Odallus: The Dark Call
Sale Price: $2.99
Like Volgarr, Odallus is another retro-inspired sidescroller. The difficulty, though, is quite a bit more generous than Volgarr, although I wouldn’t call it an easy game. In addition to sidescrolling action and platforming, Odallus has a bit more of an open-ended nature to it which encourages the player to explore. It’s not a “Metroidvania” per se, but there are many secret areas with hidden upgrades in the game that allow the player to access new areas. Furthermore, many of the levels have multiple exits, which lead to alternative paths on the world map. As a consequence, you do a lot of backtracking and exploring like in a Metroid game.
Lara Croft Go
Sale Price: $3.39
Lara Croft Go is a turn and grid-based reimagining of the Tomb Raider series that was first released on mobile phones a few years ago, but the game has also made its way to Steam and Vita. Replacing the platforming and action that the series is known for with turn-based puzzles might not seem terribly exciting, but the creativity that the designers put into Lara Croft Go resulted in a really inventive experience. Many of the series’ trademarks find new interpretations, such as dangerous creatures to outwit, traps to outmaneuver, and precarious pitfalls to escape. I will say, I have seen this game go for lower than the $3.39 Steam sale price on the Android app store, so if you like playing games on your phone, it may be best to look out for it there.
Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition
Sale Price: $5.99
I try to keep this list to games below $5, but I made an exception for Sleeping Dogs. One of the most underrated games to come out at the tail-end of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s life cycle, Sleeping Dogs is a GTA-style open world game that is set in the Hong Kong criminal underworld. The game tells the story of Wei Shen, an undercover police officer, as he works his way up the ranks of the city’s organized crime. The game differentiates itself from GTA by placing a greater emphasis on hand-to-hand combat, ostensibly because firearms are harder to come by in Hong Kong than the USA. In addition, Wei Shen’s tale was surprisingly well-developed, and the game had probably one of the best stories I’ve seen in a game like this.
BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien
Sale Price: $4.94
Runner2 describes itself as a “rhythm-music platforming game”. It’s actually one of those games where the character is constantly running, but unlike most games in the genre, the levels aren’t randomized and they have a finite end. In the game, you control Commander Video (with additional unlockable playable characters) as he runs, jumps, slides, and kicks his way through… wherever he is. I’m not actually sure what this game’s odd setting is supposed to be. It’s called a rhythm game because if you’re making the correct moves at the correct times, the actions correlate to the rhythm of the soundtrack. The game is a sequel to BIT.TRIP Runner, which is also a pretty good game on sale.
Hard Reset
Sale Price: $1.49
Hard Reset is a first-person shooter with a heavy focus on fast-paced action and large swarms of enemies. It’s sort of like Serious Sam, in a way, where the game just likes to spam hordes of enemies at the player, although I don’t quite think it gets to the same scale as Serious Sam. It’s definitely a game where the player has to stay on their toes. The game takes place in a visually incredible cyberpunk setting where robots have overtaken all but one last human city. I recommend the game mainly to people looking for an unfettered action experience.
Toki Tori
Sale Price: $0.49
Toki Tori 2+
Sale Price: $3.74
Toki Tori is a sidescrolling puzzle game based on a cult-classic Gameboy Color title of the same name. In the game, players guide a big yellow, egg-shaped bird as he/she attempts to collect all the eggs in each level. The catch is that the bird (whose name I assume is Toki Tori) can’t jump, meaning players must carefully figure out how to maneuver through each stage without getting stuck. (Don’t worry, if you do get stuck, there’s a time rewind mechanic that allows mistakes to be undone without having to reset completely.) Furthermore, the bird is given a specific set of limited use items in each level to help him/her get around. These items include things like teleporters that allows it to go through walls and a freeze gun that neutralizes enemies.
The sequel Toki Tori 2+ is also worth playing, perhaps more so since it ditches discrete levels for an elaborate open-world. It’s a huge change from the first game. This time, the bird sets off on an adventure to find five mystical frogs hidden in the massive overworld. Instead of items, the bird must learn how to manipulate creatures and objects in the environment using two moves, whistling (attractive) and stomping (repulsive). This game has generated a cult-following of its own due to the unique approach it takes to the puzzle-platforming genre.
That’s all the recommendations I have for this year. If you have recommendations of your own, please feel free to leave them in the comments section!
The Maximum Utmost 