Playlist (January 2020) (Patreon)

What do you get if you combine a king, a robot, and a baby? It's this month's playlist! That's three mini reviews of the games I've played, for your viewing pleasure. And if you don't feel like watching, you can read the whole thing below...

Death Stranding

Oh boy, where to begin with Death Stranding? As the latest game from Hideo Kojima - the ambitious auteur behind the Metal Gear Solid saga - you know that, if nothing else, this game will be extremely interesting.  

The game follows Sam Porter Bridges, who is a sort of post apocalyptic postman, with a side hustle as a network engineer - as he travels across a wrecked America with the aim of both delivering parcels and connecting various outposts to a steadily growing internet-like infrastructure that should ideally criss-cross the USA.

The standard gameplay loop is this: you go to an outpost and take on a delivery order. Maybe, schlep four boxes of food to a bloke on the other side of a mountain. You then assess the upcoming area and decide what other cargo you should carry with you. Ladders and ropes for mountain climbing, vehicles for flat terrain, maybe weapons and health kits if there are bad guys ahead. You can even take out a 3D printer to build things like postboxes and battery charging points out in the world.

You then set off and it’s here - I think - that we get to the bit where people start to debate whether or not this game is actually “fun”. Basically, you spend a lot of time just sort of walking forward. Maybe tapping X to climb over a rock. If you’ve got particularly heavy cargo, you might need to squeeze the triggers here and there to sway left and right and re-balance your load. And you’re always keeping an eye on the stamina bar, or the battery that powers your exoskeleton robo-legs.

But, to be honest, I actually found this quite a lot of fun. It was genuinely enjoyable to plot my route on the map, decide where to use my limited supply of tools, and figure out how to sneak past enemy camps. It’s like a serene, glacial-paced Crazy Taxi - mixed with a bit of Breath of the Wild style climbing, and survival sim item management. I found this loop entrancing enough to go ahead and finish the game, and even take on some optional orders here and there.

What I especially liked is how the game’s online system works. A bit like in Dark Souls, other players can leave notes and messages for you to find in your game world. But beyond that, they can also drop parcels for you to deliver, leave vehicles for you to borrow, and even build all sorts of useful structures. So while the game starts in a completely desolate empty world, after a few hours it will be brimming with roads, bridges, and zip lines - all created by the game’s community. That then makes it even more satisfying to go out and drop down your own safe house or watchtower, and getting notifications that your stuff is proving useful to others.

So throught its gameplay alone, Death Stranding speaks about reconnecting, working together, rebuilding, and finding hope for the future - which is all very much needed right now. Whether the narrative is saying the same stuff, I have no idea. Worse than any Metal Gear game, this is a nonsense spaghetti mess of plot threads, exposition, and scenery chewing monologues where your hero - the gruff bearded dude this time is played by Norman Reedus - just sorta goes “huh”, every now and again. I lost interest in much of the story stuff pretty early on - though, I did enjoy the relationship between Sam and his baby buddy, BB. Oh yeah, Sam can detect invisible enemies thanks to a premature baby that swims around in a tank on his chest. Did I mention that? 

I think most of all, I’m pleased to see a big budget, tentpole release where the verbs are more interesting than just “shoot”. And even then, you’re discouraged from shooting in much of the game - dead bodies are bad news, so if you end up killing someone you’ll have to take their body to an incinerater halfway across the map. Instead, this is a game where the key verbs are to walk, climb, balance, build, drive, deliver, sneak, scramble, and, uh, sooth a baby.

I still don’t fully know what I think of Death Stranding. If you asked me to give it a score out of ten I think I’d tell you to look behind you and then run away really fast. But I’m totally here for ambitious, weird, slightly boring, but always interesting games. So, a tentative thumbs up from me. I’m gonna need to sit on this one for a while.

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

The SteamWorld series of games is really interesting because despite featuring a unifying art style and presentation, the games themselves are all very different. SteamWorld Dig 2 is a miniature Metroidvania, SteamWorld Heist is a side-on XCOM, and the latest one - SteamWorld Quest - is a super streamlined JRPG with a pinch of deck-building.

It looks a little bit like Slay the Spire, actually - enemies up top, a hand of cards down below. But it’s actually more like Final Fantasy, just with a unique combat system. So, imagine all the moves your team can use in a JRPG - like attack, magic spells, block, and heal - are represented as cards in a shuffled deck. You then draw a hand of cards and, hey, that’s what you can use this turn. 

This immediately brings lots of interesting consequences. For starters, you get away from the repetitiveness of most JRPG battles. And you have decisions like, maybe I should keep this heal card in my hand so I can use it later. And if a party member falls in battle, you’ll still get their cards but they’ll be useless. And then there’s the fact that you can play three cards per turn, and there are bonuses for certain combos - play three moves by the same party member and they’ll get a bonus. Other cards get improved if used after a certain character has played a move. 

I’m not going to say it’s the most complicated set-up ever, and you’re certainly not going to be discovering the same game-breaking synergies as Slay the Spire. But I did find it rather engaging. The game keeps up the content with new characters and cards, and upgrades and card crafting. Unlike most JRPGs, I found the actual turn-based battles to be good fun.

The rest of the game is, like I said, a streamlined JRPG. You move around a very small and constrained world of tiny hub rooms, and the game’s splint into short levels - so this isn’t some epic world to explore at your leisure. It’s very linear and simplistic and while the story is cute and charming, it didn’t do much for me. So I guess you could say, the game ran out of steam after a few hours.

Still, props to developer Image & Form for constantly trying new things. If I had to guess, their next game will be, maybe, a kart racer. Or a block-pushing puzzle game. Or a game about delivering packages while a robot baby is attached to your torso.

Shovel Knight: King of Cards

When Shovel Knight hit Kickstarter, developer Yacht Club Games promised that you would be able to play through the game as three of the boss characters. It was supposed to be a cheeky alternative mode with ever-so-slightly different mechanics - but, they ended up being a lot more than that.

Plague of Shadows has a bonkers explosive character who’s alarmingly fun to control. Specter Knight completely revamps the existing levels with new challenges for his ninja-like moveset. And now there’s King of Cards, which is definitely the most ambitious of the lot.

Let’s start with the King Knight’s move set. He’s got a lot in common with Wario, actually: thanks to an aggressive should barge move. But doing this sends King into a spiralling pirouette. Now the game works like the original Shovel Knight, as you try to plunge down onto enemies. But doing that recharges King’s shoulder bash, so you can do another in mid-air! This can be used to create lengthy combinations of moves to get through difficult challenges. Basically, he’s really fun to control.

This takes place in, basically, a whole new set of levels. Sure, they’re the same theme as before - a castle, an underwater stage, a clockwork tower, and so on - but the layouts are all new, with new mechanics and hazards that are used to get the most out of King Knight’s mobility. There are also secret exits that lead to new bonus levels, and also the stages are split into three mini-levels, allowing you to better decide how you want to travel across the Mario 3 style map screen.

The other big addition to King of Cards is right there in the title: a card game. It’s called Joustus, it’s apparently based on some Final Fantasy card game, and I just completely suck at it. There’s a lot of lookahead calculation, actually, as you weigh up what will be the possible outcomes of every move you can make. And I’m just way too lazy to do that so I play fast and loose and end up losing over and over. Fortunately, the game is designed so you can complete the whole campaign without every playing the card game at all. Thank heavens for that.

I also enjoyed the story stuff. These bonus campaigns are interesting in how they fill in story beats that happen before Shovel Knight, or run alongside his story. This one is a prequel and is genuinely funny in a lot of places. 

Ultimately, I’m happy for Yacht Club that they’ve finally delivered on all of their stretch goals, and so I’m excited to see what they do next. But considering the quality of all four of these campaigns, I’d be more than happy to play Shovel Knight for a fifth, or even sixth time if they had any more ideas left in the tank.