Dark Souls III

I finally, finally, got around to playing Dark Souls III. I think this took extra long because I had had enough of the previous two games, so I wasn't even considering playing it for a while. Yet here I am.
I'd hope Dark Souls requires no introduction. It's really a genre-defining game, even if that genre is mostly just "a difficult action RPG". Sure there's also the "convoluted, interconnected level design", and "world state persistence through death" aspects, but at the end of the day it is just an action RPG.

I'm going to be brief today, and mostly refer you to find my review for Dark Souls II. I couldn't get into the third game. I couldn't get into the previous two either, but I think this one was even worse somehow. Perhaps it was the experiences of the previous game still being fresh enough in my mind (it's only been several years after all) combined with this being just... more Dark Souls. Aside from being two years newer, I didn't see much innovation, just new content with a fresh lick of paint.
I'd like to add to what I previously said. I think difficult games have the obligation to be fair. It is important that if you're going to make the player lose, that they feel mostly responsible for that loss. Dark Souls III still hasn't managed to properly port their game to PC, because the keyboard and mouse support isn't of acceptable quality. I do not have sufficient control of my character - I execute certain actions without meaning to. Be those attacks which are triggered by a button combination that has an ambiguous meaning, or the game sometimes not intercepting mouse clicks in menus (so they still perform an attack, plunging me off a cliff or attacking a friendly NPC). There's also issues of enemies hitting you through solid walls, or level geometry making you think you get somewhere, only to be interrupted by invisible walls or bumps, again, causing you to lose. These are not super common occurances, but they happen far more often than I find acceptable, given how punishing such issues are. And I won't repeat what I believe to be persistant issues in level design.

Honestly, my opinion on this isn't really important. I'm happy for what the game has done for the genre, and I know there's plenty of people who enjoy it. Good on them. I find this brand of difficulty to be more frustrating than fun, and I get bored of playing the same content over and over again until I'm perfect at it. Recommending this, or not, is simple. Did you like the previous Dark Souls games? If so, you'll probably like this one. If not, you probably won't like this one. If you haven't played any souls-likes, then maybe the best comparison would be to the more recently popular brand of "difficult" games that you see streamers playing. Getting Over It, Jump King, etc., except instead of being just difficult, with no substance, Dark Souls is the same brand of difficult, but with a lot of substance. Regardless of this, I don't enjoy this kind of difficulty, so I can't recommend it. Perhaps my opinion would be different if the game was of a higher quality, but it isn't.

Fury Unleashed

I was incredibly put off by Fury Unleashed for some reason, as soon as I saw its store page. I think it was the old Flash game art and animation style that caused me to be biased against it. Still, because it had relatively good reviews at the time, I decided to add it to my backlog. Looking at it again now, the reviews had definitely taken a turn for the worse. But what did I think about it?

Fury Unleashed is a platformer shooter. You go between small rooms, evading traps, killing enemies, maybe a boss every now and then. You have a gun, a melee weapon, a special ability, some grenades, nothing unique really. The levels are randomly generated, and there's a focus on fast-paced gameplay - building combos and getting a high score.

Well, truth be told, I didn't get very far, so I can't speak much for the actual depth or difficulty of the game, but I can say that it feels like it looks. The movement and combat is very floaty and does not at all feel expertly made. You can just spam your weapons, you're really mobile, and there doesn't appear to be any weight to neither the attacks nor the movement. The game's also quite zoomed in, as if it was made for a smaller screen, which limits the amount of stuff that can be happening at a time. I wouldn't really say the game feels casual, more like really outdated and cheap. I definitely saw no redeeming qualities in it, so combined with my intial bias, I was quick to toss it aside, and move on to the next game.

So, in short, I think my personal dislike for Fury Unleashed is greater than the game is actually bad, but regardless of that, I can't really see anything unique or particularly well-executed in the game either. It's just another action platformer with an emphasis on speed, which is another thing I personally dislike. In any case, I can't recommend it.

Sea Salt

I think I picked up Sea Salt because of its interesting visuals and the unique concept of controlling a swarm of creatures, instead of just a few of them.
However, interesting concepts do not always translate to interesting games. You see, Sea Salt is a very simple game, with effectively two actions you can do. You can tell your swarm to go to a place, and you can tell your swarm to attack. Considering this, I'm amazed there is no mouse support, as it can be quite annoying to switch directions with how slow your cursor moves with the arrow keys. I guess you can also choose which units you summon, but that's only an action you can do every once in a while. Your swarm handles the pathing, which includes evading obvious danger, except when attacking, then they just diregard their safety to strike. There's various enemies, and numerous bossfights with different mechanics, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to positioning and choosing when to attack, because that's all you can do.

I don't have a lot more to say about this game. There might have been something here if there were more options, both in terms of controlling your army and general things to do. As it stands now, I very quickly got bored of both the simple gameplay, as well as the subpar execution. The AI was dumb enough to constantly force me to question its decisions, be it splitting up the swarm, or focusing the wrong things during attacking. The graphics were perhaps a bit too pixelated and hard on the eyes, and the music, while fitting, wasn't very enjoyable either. Overall, I can not recommend playing it.

Atomicrops

Atomicrops combines twin-stick shooter roguelike gameplay with a farming simulator. It's a game that's visually very exciting. I suppose that's half the reason I picked it up. Looking at the screenshots on the store page, the graphics are quite stylized, and there seems to be a lot going on at the same time. None of that's wrong, but perhaps the busyness of it all is actually a downside.
See, the game gives you a brief tutorial on how to shoot, how to till your fields, plant crops, water them, and then harvest them. That's all fine, but that's a small portion of things that you can do. The game starts off slow with a small patch of land and enemies only appearing at nighttime. It feels manageable, but you quickly realize you can decide to just ditch your land and go to another area to fight enemies instead. You also run out of seeds, because harvested crops don't drop new ones. You don't really know what the right course of action is, and the game doesn't lean you into it either - everything's available straight away, and time is ticking away. Each next day is harder, and each next season is harder, and each next year is harder. Sure, you get some upgrades between all that, but still. So at least I was quicky overwhelmed, trying to juggle somehow getting new seeds, not leaving my farm unattended, planting, watering, harvesting, and defending my crops at the same time, all the while trying to figure out if I might be playing the game entirely wrong.

In the end, after a few failed runs, not that the game expects you to get far at first, I gave up. Part of me feels like I should've stayed for longer to see more of what the game had to offer, but my experience thus far was stressing and confusing, and that's not something I want from a game. I was constantly out of seeds, but I also couldn't go get any because I was always being attacked, and I felt like there was some way to get better crops, but the game didn't teach me any of that, and then every plot of my land was instantly overcome with weeds, or short on water, or in need of tilling, or... You get the point - I always had to do something, and I didn't get much more action speed as the game went on, but I was expected to attend a larger field and defend it from more enemies.

Atomicrops is definitely more of a twin-stick shooter than a farming simulator. I'm not convinced it's a bad game, just a bit unapproachable. So if you're looking for a twin-stick shooter with a twist, then it's possible you'll enjoy Atomicrops. I didn't experience it enough to really tell, so from a personal standpoint I can't recommend it. I couldn't get over trying to do too many things at once, and for a combat-focused game, I can't say I found anything special or particularly enjoyable about the combat either.

Children of Morta

I picked up Children of Morta, which I had sitting in my library for quite a while. I don't remember where I got it from, and I didn't think I'd enjoy a random game, but it turned out to be quite fun, and I'm not even entirely sure why.

Children of Morta is kind of like a mix between an action roguelike and an RPG. The bulk of the game is the campaign, where you run through a series of around nine stages, each comprised of a few randomly generated maps. During a stage, your character gains gold, experience, and items. Items expire at the end of a stage, but can grant powerful active or passive buffs. Experience can be used to upgrade your character on their talent tree, while gold can be used to purchase upgrades for all your characters. You have a total of 7 characters who lore-wise form a family, each playing like a different class. Slow, fast, ranged, melee - something for everyone. There is a minor incentive to actually try different characters, as leveling each gives passive bonuses to all the other ones, and playing one for too long inflicts a debuff on them that decreases as you don't use them.

There is also a more roguelike mode, which does not let you get any upgrades between runs, but makes the runs 13+ maps long, and gives you a a random choice of powerups upon level-up, as well as a lot of currency to purchase and upgrade items at shops that occur every now and then. I found this mode both more fun and more challenging than the main story mode, although there are basically no gameplay differences. It just adds more randomness, and lets you more heavily customize your character with items before the run is up, potentially unlocking very strong combinations.

There's no mechanic that stands out, and I can't say the game's super well made either. I definitely found some smaller bugs, balance issues with certain characters or upgrades being too strong or weak, visual clarity problems, and other imperfections. I think the strong side is the storytelling. The main story actually has a voiced narrator, and the characters have a lot of animations and well-defined personalities that make them feel more alive. Of course, I've never been one to prioritize that too much, so why do I, despite the unimpressive gameplay, like this game? I thought about that for a while, and I actually don't know. Perhaps it helped that I played it in co-op, sticking mostly to ranged characters. Most characters felt too slow for me, some being so immobile and slow to attack while having very few upsides, I wonder why anyone would want to play them at all. I did find one character I really liked who could attack and move at the same time, which caused me to play a lot of the game like a twin-stick shooter instead, but then again, what's stopping anyone else from doing that too, if that is the most fun way to play.

While Children of Morta is far from my favorite action roguelike, it's definitely up there. From a more objective standpoint, I don't think the game's all that good and there are probably similar games out there that are better, but at the end of the day, I liked it. So personally, I would recommend it. It's not super long, not super replayable, not super difficult, but I got a good amount of fun out of it and perhaps you will too.

The Finals

Another recent game for a change, because a friend invited me to play it - it's The Finals, a 3-player-team-based first-person shooter with destructible terrain.
I suppose the reason I agreed to play was because it is free to play, and the low barrier to entry is always nice, but I quickly got bored of it because it really doesn't stand out that much.

There are a couple different game modes, but they're all about collecting, then depositing money, basically like a capture the flag game mode with a slightly modified ruleset. You have a choice of three classes from light to heavy, with heavier classes generally having more health, slower movement speed, and weapons / abilities that are, well, heavier. A light class can, for example, go invisible, use a grappling hook, and use a sniper rifle or submachine gun. A medium class can heal or deploy a jump pad, and has an assault rifle. A heavy class can ram through walls or deploy a barricade, and use a rocket launcher. This is not the full list, as each class has 3 abilities, a couple unique deployables or grenades, as well as the default pool of grenades, and several unique weapons.
Still, having some variety is the baseline minimum I feel a game could do, and with just three classes with abilities that don't majorly define their playstyle and differentiate the gameplay experience, it really just felt like a bland and small round-based shooter. The destructible environment is a cool gimmick, but I don't feel it created many unique or memorable scenarios.

Overall, while The Finals doesn't have any outstanding flaws, it also doesn't have any outstanding qualities. I'm neither for or against FPS-style gameplay, but I don't enjoy most round-based games. So that's the main reason I couldn't recommend The Finals, but even if you were to compare it to any other round-based FPS like Counter-Strike, Overwatch, or Valorant, I don't feel it is in any way better than them, nor different enough to provide a feeling of freshness.

Songbird Symphony

Songbird Symphony is a platformer and a rhythm game. You explore different levels, doing platforming puzzles and collecting some items, and end each level with a rhythm-based boss fight.
I was quickly put off by this game, as it felt a bit too childish for me, with a big focus on the cute and happy art as well as silly lyrics and animations. I've never been too good at rhythm games, and I don't like them a whole lot either, but I still think that the timings of the rhythm bits were quite bad, and the visuals weren't clear if you opted to ignore your ears and follow your eyes instead. Similarly, the platforming seemed quite simplistic, with more time spent trying to figure out where to go than how to complete some part of the platforming.

A short review for a game I didn't spend long playing, but I don't feel like I missed much. The game advertises itself as a metroidvania, and I'm not sure I'd quite agree on that. It's really more of an exploration game, with subpar platforming and rhythm aspects, and probably only enjoyable if you value the style and theme over the gameplay. As for me, it's a most definite no.

Opus Magnum

I'm only 6 years late, but Zachtronics just doesn't miss with their games, and even in all these years, no one has managed to compete with the absoute brilliance that are their puzzle games. I completed Opus Magnum, and while it wasn't my favorite Zachtronics game, I sure as hell enjoyed it.

Opus Magnum is a game about assembling (or sometimes disassembling) compounds from atoms or other compounds. You have an infinite hexagonal grid, arms that can rotate, extend, and move along tracks to move these atoms and compounds around, as well as mechanisms for bonding, unbonding, and altering them.
As usual, there aren't a lot of different mechanics, but they work together very well to create interesting puzzles that have a lot of different solutions. In fact, as far as I know, it is not too difficult to create puzzles with just a single solution, but Zachtronics' games are good, largely because he consistently manages to leave the solutions up to the player's personal creativity.

The reason Opus Magnum is not my favorite from the series, is because the infinite boards give us too much freedom, and make the problems a bit too easy. Of course, having a low skill floor is not too big of an issue, because a big part of Zachtronics games has always been getting high scores on the leaderboards for making good solutions. Still, even in terms of going for high scores, some categories seemed more tedious to set up than difficult to come up with, such as minimal cost solutions, which usually just had one or two arms along some track, and very, very long lines of instructions stashing and retrieving pieces in elaborate ways to prevent collisions.
The appendix was actually space-constrained, and the journal offered more difficult puzzles, but they were not part of the main story, and thus not the bulk of the game.

Regardless of all that, I still heavily enjoyed Opus Magnum. Perhaps due to its lower difficulty, it is the highest rated Zachtronics game, so even if you don't think highly of your puzzle solving capabilities, it would probably be the best Zachtronics game to try, if you were going to try any. I would absolutely recommend it, and I hope to get around to playing the next game in not too long of a time.

Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa

I'm on a roll with these sub-hour games. Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is a horror game in the same vein as all those really short and badly made ones you saw YouTubers playing for a single video. Perfect for that, since after 30 minutes you'll be done with the game either through completing it, or by having enough of trying to do so. And it relies on cheap jumpscares to get funny reactions. This one's Touhou-themed, so you get anime girls too, oh joy.

Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this, but I thought it would have at least a little more substance, humor, dialogue, or anything, really. You run around a maze with some rooms, trying to collect 6 books while two 2D sprites chase you in the dark. It takes 5 minutes if you know what you're doing, though as it gets harder with every book, the last ones are quite difficult.
Honestly, it's just bad. I don't like horror games, but that has nothing to do with how low-effort this is. Only the power of memes, anime girls, and cheap horror keeping this afloat, and that ain't enough for me. I'd recommend staying away.