52 Games Challenge 2024!!!!!

[dhaabi]

23. Kids || PC || 05.10.24



Nearly six years ago, I remember first watching the teaser trailer for Kids and having my attention immediately grabbed. Despite it being a short experience and one which I've had available to me for about four years, I'm only just now properly playing it.

Self-described in succinct ways such as it's "a game about crowds" and "the psychology of the group," Kids presents its audience a strange series of screens with nondescript cartoon persons—I suppose the titular kids—interacting with another as a crowd. In some ways, Kids blends the puzzle game genre with interaction animation, as its development grapples with the connection between game and short film. Like those short descriptions imply, the project demonstrates what a crowd is and the various events which often surround them, whether they be positive or negative. As the player, it is not necessarily about our controlling or even guiding them but instead witnessing what happens through our brief engagement which serves as a catalyst for some sort of event, whether it affect two or two hundred.

At times, these faceless figures you dictate are few in number, but other times you will see their presence grow into the hundreds. Then, the screen becomes a sea of figures who, on their own, represent nothing, but, as a collective, are perplexing to understand what they are exactly based on their actions and reactions. In some situations, crowds demonstrate groupthink as they stand motionlessly, awaiting for any one of their neighbors to act of their own free will first, so that they themselves know what to do. However, other situations are the inverse. During these moments, we instead see crowds disrupt to devolve into minor conflict, as they react in clear opposition to someone's initial action, perhaps thinking they know best. No matter the scene, all kids must agree to progress.

Through its simple yet effective visual design, the project's presentation is often hypnotic as patterns seemingly unfold, greatly evident once a proper crowd is a part of the scenario at-hand. This is especially the case because, until the player understand what sort of action is necessary to progress, the game runs on loops. Additionally, great use of contrast is employed through its binary color system, as new screens may appear suddenly and shift from black to white. I'll also mention that I surprised to hear voice acting, however minimal it may be. In each of these scenes, the simple dialogue complements the on-screen action, perfectly demonstrating what it's like to be in a group. At the same time, the project's use of music sung by a boy's choir is haunting as it amplifies the empty void these characters reside in.

Ultimately, Kids is a project up for audience interpretation, which was an intentional design choice. I don't necessarily think there is one explicit takeaway to be gained from the experience, but clearly there is some sort of commentary on groupthink and the dissonance or harmony it may bring. Nevertheless, Kids offers an alluring experience to the introspective, which I'm glad to have played. Like I mentioned above, Kids is short, about 15–30 minutes. I know several here have access to it through a massive itch.io games bundle from years ago, so I'd suggest for any one with immediate access to it who are curious to try it for themselves.

[realpoketendonl]

7. Miraculous: Rise of the Sphinx [Switch]

Hold your horses, got a lot of thoughts on this one.

I got this game because it was on a huge sale (with my gold coins I got it for 3 bucks), and I really like the animated series it's based on. This game does not do it justice though. I knew it looked bad, and yeah, it was kinda bad.

The game’s biggest problem is just how monotenous it can be. The level design and platforming are basic and dull. Combat is basic and repetitive, with only like 1 or 2 enemy types with different skins (excluding bosses). Combat doesn’t feel good either. There’s barely any sense of impact, some sound effects are outright missing, your movement and actions all feel a little slow, but worst of all: it downright feels unresponsive sometimes. You will get through the earlier levels effortlessly with button mashing. Their idea of making levels more difficult though, is to just throw more enemies at you. And at that point I sometimes found it hard to get through, in no small part because I was fighting the controls when I wanted to dodge. You also can’t control the camera, and in some points the angles it chooses cause real problems. I know this is a kids game and I don’t expect Bayonetta here, but I doubt this could even hold the interest of kids for long, or it would frustrate them to the point of quitting.

The combat is broken up by sections where you go around and talk to your friends as a civilian. This feels almost unfinished. The controls can be straight-up broken sometimes here: whenever you leave a menu you can get stuck spinning on your axis, and it frequently takes me two or three tries to simply talk to someone. I’ve also seen layering issues, with text boxes being covered up by other elements. On top of that, I’ve even managed to trigger dialogue out of order, simply by walking into a location as the wrong character. This could’ve been interesting, and it is admittedly neat to see the characters from the show in any form, but at any point it’s either dull, broken or feels pointless.

Visually the game looks pretty bad too. On top of the basic level design, the models and character renders look rushed, with very awkward facial expressions and basic problems like odd hair colours in dark lighting. A shame, especially because I feel like Miraculous’s visual style should not be that hard to adapt faithfully into a game.

The performance is really bad too. I played the Switch version, but this is nowhere near pushing the limits of the platform. But still, the load screens take long enough for me to almost write this paragraph. The framerate frequently dipped into what felt like less than 10 fps. It would stutter noticeably whenever you trigger a change, like a cutscene or written dialogue, with the transition always looking sloppy.

And then there’s the glitches. I encountered a few, including one which could’ve locked me out of finishing the quest if I hadn’t figured out how to undo it. Good luck if you’re little kid with that problem.

I also need to mention the voice acting. There is voice acting during the action parts by the original voice actors, which is good, but they’re only oneliners and parts of the dialogue. No grunts during attacks or when you get hit or anything like that. How do you forget to add attack grunts? On top of that, most of the dialogue between characters is text only. That is hard to excuse in a game based on an animated series. It really should be fully voiced. Also, there’s a distracting amount of typos in the dialogue.

It’s a real shame. A Miraculous action game could be amazing. The series has a lot of creative fight scenes, moves, choreography, enemies, and abilities. There’s so much potential. But this game does not live up to that. I enjoyed it slightly, but that's solely because it looks like a show I like. I picked it up for 3 bucks. If you have a kid that really loves Miraculous and really wants this, I say it’s worth that much. But otherwise, just skip it. You can do a lot better elsewhere.


So that's 7 games beaten thus far, six of which for the first time. Also finished 8 books thus far this year. Decent progress! In terms of games, I did also abandon BROK the InvestiGator. A shame, I was really charmed by its world and characters, but the combat just wasn't clicking for me, and I found out the game has a lot of different endings, which is something I just hate in games. No idea what I'll play next, but thinking Star Fox Zero or The Big Wave or something. We'll see!

[realpoketendonl]

8. Star Fox Zero

Unf, god this game.

I know it has a bad reputation, but I wanted to play it for myself. And for a decent part of the game, I'll say I didn't think it was bad. The controls didn't have to be the way they are, but they worked fine for me. Occasionally I would forget I had two screens and mess up because of it, but other times I did find myself looking between both screens decently naturally. And in all-range mode (full free flight mode), I even found it useful in a few cases, to be able to look around my surroundings on one screen while keeping aim on the other. But a lot of the game is pretty basic in its level design, and towards the end you start to figure out why. I don't know whether it's the controls or whether it's poor boss design, but towards the end the game genuinely got on my nerves. That final boss especially frustrated me so much it almost made me want to quit the game entirely. I did defeat it in a not-crazy amount of attempts, but in that fight I felt I just wanted to be done with the game, which is not a good feeling. And that's not even getting into stuff like how bland the game looks, how little content there is, how insanely clunky the walker is, etc. I'll give the game some leadway, maybe I just don't click with the genre either (I prefer faster paced action games) and maybe with more playtime the controls will click better, but I don't feel a desire to replay the game and find out. Try it if you're already curious, but otherwise I think it's perfectly OK to skip it.

(And the worst part is: I thought I lost my disc, so I bought it again, but then I found the original disc. So now this game is on my shelf twice.)

So that's 8 games beat (and 9 books read) thus far this year. Got another short indie game on my radar, but also planning to play Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door when that comes out on Switch.

[ignition365]

Spent the last 3 hours writing up blurbs about the games I had played this year.  Managed to get up to like a week ago, hoping I can bother to churn out a few more blurbs tomorrow and catch up.

[dhaabi]

24. Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly || GameCube || 05.20.24



Despite having already played Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly long ago around the time of its release but for PlayStation 2, I couldn't remember much about the game, so I had been contemplating revisiting it for some time. Of course, this is in spite of the reception the game's garnered for being one of the worst installments in the franchise. However, since I didn't remember much about the game before playing now, I couldn't remember on my own if that reputation is valid or not, but I didn't necessarily remember having a bad time with it before.

As the fourth main entry to the series but the first to not be developed by creators Insomniac Games, Enter the Dragonfly will be familiar—in fact, far more than familiar—to those who've played previous games. Like games before it, Enter the Dragonfly is a 3D platformer with an emphasis on collecting items. Acting as the titular character Spyro, players are introduced to a scenario that's a near copy of the preceding game's story: in short, to round up a large group of dragonflies which the villain-character Ripto threatens to use as a powerful resource for their own purposes. Unfortunately, this is the only narrative device present this time, which results in story that's largely undeveloped and, ultimately, unoriginal. Nevertheless, along Spyro's journey which mimics his previous ones, the dragon ventures across a variety of worlds to gain back what's been lost, which inevitably also leads to saving the people within these worlds from Ripto's forces.

Be that as it may, I doubt the majority of those playing any games in the Spyro franchise do so for the narrative foremost. So, this leads us next to gameplay which is no different than the story regarding its lackluster quality. With each sequel entry building off the first game's core mechanics of charging at enemies, blowing flame breath, and gliding, the fourth entry offers little that's new. In fact, the only new mechanic is that Spyro can now evoke several different breath types to attack enemies. While this may have been an interesting mechanic, it is mostly unimportant, as there are only about three enemy types among the thirty or so which require a specific breath attack to defeat them. As for Spyro's other abilities which have been gained over the course of the series, they appear only once in brief moments, if at all.

While the initial trilogy of games were never groundbreaking in terms of gameplay, they did offer some variety through their use of mini-games and simple puzzles. Regarding the former, they're also present in Enter the Dragonfly and are mediocre at best. But, the latter are entirely absent for this entry. So, these two aspects lead to a game with middling level design, as other gameplay elements are instead used to fill in the void. As a series focused on collecting and exploration, these two elements always felt balanced in that the game instilled the desire for players to explore to seek out hidden treasures and secrets. But, now collectibles feel littered about stages with very little to discover as the natural progression to most stages is straightforward and linear.

To make design decisions worse is the game's performance which is, by all accounts, bad. In fact, there is an entire inventory of quality issues and bugs which make an average experience sometimes aggravating. These range problems range from camera control, draw distance loading, frame rate, and control inputs not registering. Generally, I am not someone who obsesses over high quality for some of these matters, but, when the quality reaches so low a point that basic gameplay is negatively impacted, it does become a major detractor.  Of the multitude of issues, the one I took fault with the most was the game's low frame rate, simply because it affects other aspects. For instance, items are mostly gathered from Spyro's companion Sparx, but this basic mechanic seldom operates correctly. As a result, Spyro is forced to walk around so as not to overload the game, which is the exact opposite to Spyro's horns-first while charging attitude. And, even when walking, the game regularly struggles as quick or sharp movements are made.

Lastly, I will mention two other design decisions which felt like little forethought for how they operate was given, only because they made my playthrough much more irritating. The first of these issues related to world portals, which naturally transport Spyro from one area to another, including areas where mini-games take place. Throughout any given stage, there are at least three portals, and little differentiation between them. This may not be such an issue on its own, but the stage layout often has the proposed end of a stage actually not be at the end. Instead, other collectibles and even additional areas almost always exist past the exit portal. So, I found myself charging through the stage exit portal thinking it was a mini-game portal a total of four times, which lead me to backtrack through the entire stage upon re-entering. The second issue is similar to the first, as it also relates to stage movement. On the pause menu, players can access a journal of sorts which details each stage's progress. In backing out of this menu altogether, the game recognizes two buttons as the cancel action. However, only on the page which serves as a table of contents does one of these two cancel action button option serve another purpose: warping to another stage. So, also for a total of four separate instances, I found myself only trying to exit this menu to instead be taken away elsewhere.

From what I've read, the consensus is that either both the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions of Enter the Dragonfly are on par with another on the low end of the spectrum or that the latter port is notably worse. Whichever the case, my experience playing the game this time was unpleasant. The departure of Insomniac Games developing the franchise clearly shows with the final product, as there's a considerable amount of polish needed to bring the game's quality up to a higher standard which players may find fun. As a result, there really is nothing redeemable about Enter the Dragonfly within the context of other entries within the series, meaning there is little reason for anyone interested in the franchise to seek it out.

[kashell]

41. Skautfold: Shrouded in Sanity - B Ending

This is the first game that's part of the Skautfold: Bloody Pack. This was an impulse buy in the most major way. No research, no word of mouth, no nothing. I just saw the cover art and thought it looked cool. The price was nice, too: two games in one pack. I'm glad collections of games are becoming more and more popular. Anyways, Shrouded of Sanity can best be described as Souls-like (sigh) mixed with Castlevania mixed with Mega Man. You play as a corpse brought back to life that needs to put a stop to a deadly fog that's covered old-timey London. Said fog has turned the workers of the palace into bloodthirsty beasts. Stopping the fog requires you to kill four boss enemies in any order and then the big-bad king. It's gothic horror setting and zippy combat give nods to Bloodborne. I finished the game in about two hours. The game is tough, but as always, it's doable with enough patience. I'm glad I picked up this pack on a whim.

[kashell]

42. Skautfold: Shrouded in Sanity - A Ending

I ran through this game again, knowing what and what not to do in order to get the best/true ending. Usurper takes place after this ending so I'm geared up to begin that whenever the time comes. What a surprise this game was. I was initially turned off by it being ANOTHER Souls-like but there was a lot more to it. I'm a sucker for the creepy and atmospheric settings so that was able to outweigh my misgivings. If anyone is looking for something quick, challenging, and imaginative then I recommend this.