Playlist (October 2018) (Patreon)

Hello Patreon peoples! I’ve got a rapid fire selection of games to talk about this month, so without further ado let’s jump straight into it and get chatting.

ELOH

ELOH is the new mobile game from Broken Rules, who made Old Man’s Journey. This is a soothing, relaxing puzzle game about bouncing balls around a grid. What makes it so mindful is that everything in the game makes a sound and as you work towards finishing the level you’ll slowly build up to making a pleasant tune of drums and marimbas and other percussion instruments.

Even if you ignore all that or, heaves forfend, play with the audio off, you’ll find a perfectly good puzzle game with clever new challenges and ramping escalation. It’s not about that, though: it’s about zoning out, hearing the sounds of the rain forest, and making sweet music with monkeys. If you know what I mean.

Wandersong

Another musical game, now. Wandersong is a sort of RPG adventure where you can sing your little heart out to solve puzzles, do platforming, and fight ghosts. As far as I’ve played, which isn’t massively, the singing is kinda just used for all sorts of random ideas and mini games, rather than being a consistent mechanic. If you catch my drift. But I do like that everything, even talking in dialogue trees, is done through belting out a song.

It’s also lovely looking, kinda reminds me of Paper Mario in various ways, and has a silly storyline to follow. I definitely need to play more of this, but it’s going very slow as my girlfriend and I insist on doing all the voices for the characters. 

Mega Man 11

I like Mega Man 11. I’m not a huge Mega Man fan: I’ve always found them to land more on the side of frustrating than challenging. Lots of trial and error, and instant deaths. And 11 has that too, but to a lesser extent: the level design is fairer, and the bigger resolution gives you a bit more leeway in terms of pixel precision.

There are some weird bits, though. I find that the boss weakness thing is a strange holdover: every human on earth now knows that Mega Man bosses are vulnerable to the weapon of another Mega Man boss and so the optimum strategy is to try every weapon on every boss until you find the one that works. But this is just time consuming, so I found it was better to just look them up online. Cheating? Maybe.

Less obviously cheating is using the shop to buy items like upgrades to boost your buster, or just have energy tanks and extra lives. You can make the game extremely easy for yourself - and you really have to work hard to find an appropriate level of challenge.

Personally I found it a bit too tough to find the right level and spent a lot of the game just modulating things to make it not be too easy or too hard. But I enjoyed it when I got to the right level.

Astrobot

Astrobot is one of the best VR games around. So Sony released this free Playroom VR game that had this cutesy Mario-like platformer mini-game and, thankfully, have since turned it into a whole video game. And it’s wonderful.

So it looks a bit like Mario 3D World, but you have this huge, expansive view of the world thanks to being in VR. And sometimes that means you’ll be platforming up walls that are - in the real world - over on the other side of the room. Or on your left shoulder. Or behind you.

One of the smartest things about this game is how it casts Astrobot, and you - the player - as two distinct characters. An outcome of this might be an enemy that spits goo at your face. Like YOUR face, which obstructs your view on the VR headset. And so you can duck out of the way to avoid getting gooped. And then have Astrobot go up and beat the enemy up. Very clever.

There are also just loads of lovely moments, great surprises, and moments of wonder. This game is full of joy, and is genuinely one of my favourite games of the year.

Return of the Obra Dinn

I’ve only just started Return of the Obra Dinn but I love it already. This is a detective game where you explore a pirate ship where all 60 crew members have died. You have a pocket watch that lets you see the exact moment of their death, and a book to record how they met their fate.

You really have to use clues, relationships, deduction, process of elimination, and other clever thinking to figure out what happened to who. It’s a proper detective game, as good as Her Story, and I can’t wait to get stuck in.