Playlist (March 2021) (Patreon)

Hey all! It's your Playlist , which is three quick-fire reviews of games I've been playing in the last month. Let's jump right in. Watch it as a video or read it as an article, up to you.

Little Nightmares II

Little Nightmares II is best described as a Limbo-like. It's one of those side-scrolling cinematic platformers with puzzles and insta-kill traps.

Now, there's loads about Little Nightmares II that I really liked. It's got some genuinely creepy monsters. The story is evocative and interesting. And the game has some super clever game mechanics that it explores in great ways.

For example, there are living mannequins that chase after you: but stop dead in their tracks if you shine your torch in their face.

This is introduced in an elegant and immersive way. The stakes ramp up as more challenging versions of the idea appear. And it fits into some clever puzzles where you need to truly understand how this system works. It's great - just the sort of design I praise on GMTK.

However, it's those insta-kill death traps that spoil the fun. Much of your time in Little Nightmares II is about moving forward, dying, and then using that knowledge to avoid the trap on your next go-around.

That's bad enough, but the game is so particular and finicky with its traps that you can find yourself dying over and over, even if you know what you're doing, simply because you're not stood in the exact right pixel or whatever. The AI on the monsters is also pretty hard to read, which is more frustrating than anything.

Because, here's a thing: dying in a horror game is definitely scary. But dying in a horror game like 8 times is no longer scary because you've seen the same triggers and AI routines and whatnot so many times that it's no longer a terrifying monster, it's just a predictable video game mechanic that are you trying to reverse engineer and overcome. It's a surefire way to completely suck all the threat out of a game.

Anyway, I still had a lot of fun with the game so would recommend it!

Maquette

Maquette is an ambitious, ingenious, and kinda dissapointing puzzle 'em up.

The idea of the game is that it's recursive. You're in a room that contains a smaller version of the same room. And also, your room is within a bigger version of the same room.

And so you can make changes in one to affect all the others. You can easily pick up a tiny model bridge and place it in the doll house version of the room - which will spawn a massive life-size bridge in your normal size room.

Hopefully that made some amount of sense. Though, then again, part of the challenge of the game is just getting your head around the thing and tricking your brain into understanding this weirdo recursive world. And that's fun! The game has a number of clever puzzles that play with this conceit.

But… they run out pretty fast. You'll start doing the same tasks in very slightly different variations. And then just normal puzzles that don't really play with the recursive nature all that much. And then just bad puzzles with poor design like contradictory and confusing rules.

All of this is wrapped up in a story: a sappy, melodramatic relationship drama that - to be honest - feels like a mocking parody of indie games that loosely connect their mechanics to a love story. But, I don't think the developers are joking.

I think Maquette is worth playing - especially if you can get it for free with PlayStation Plus. But only if you're really into these first-person puzzlers: like Superliminal, Manifold Garden, and Portal, and are gagging for a new fix. Otherwise, there are better games in this genre that you probably haven't tried - like Obduction and The Talos Principle.

Loop Hero

Loop Hero is definitely the flavour of the month right now: the game everyone is talking about.

Here's how it works. It's a dungeon crawler where your hero automatically wanders around the dungeon - which is actually an endlessly looping circuit. Along the way they'll fight monsters, pick up loot, and gather resources.

That's all automated, so your job is to essentially decorate the dungeon with tiles. Some gather resources, others provide help to your hero, but most create monsters to fight. A mansion that spawns vampires on nearby tiles or a grove that adds werewolves in the near vicinity. You want to do this, as killing foes makes your hero stronger and adds extra resources.

This leads to one of the things that makes Loop Hero very compulsive: there are often ways to lay down tiles in a very optimised or synergistic way to boost your output. And so it's easy to get sucked in to the game in an effort to make the most efficient loop possible. It reminds me of games like Factorio in that way.

But beyond these loops, Loop Hero is all about using those resources to buy permanent upgrades for your character. There's a huge skill tree to explore, new hero types to unlock, new buildings to make, and so on.

And… this is where I kinda dropped off. I could see the game stretching out for hours ahead of me: endlessly repeating the same basic loop in order to get resources. Which I can use to buff my character, in order to get further in that same basic loop. And ultimately, I just don't find the actual game interesting enough to deal with that. It's slow, it's pretty random, and your influence is limited.

I can totally see why people love Loop Hero - it is stuffed to bursting with gameplay tropes that are satisfying and addictive. Synergies. Optimisation. Meta-level progression. Random drops. Deckbuilding. But for me, I need more than a simple compulsion loop - which is why I dropped the game after a few hours of play.

Room to Grow

Okay, I feel bad that I've been pretty down about these three games so here's a quick bonus game that I can totally recommend. Room to Grow is the latest Sokoban-inspired game, similar to stuff like Stephen's Sausage Roll and Baba is You.

In this one, you play as a cactus that grows longer every time you hit an arrow key. You can use this power to push plants into the goal. And… well, obviously there's more to it than that.

You'll soon realise that you can push the cactus into walls to shunt your entire body over. That opens up a whole load of clever new puzzles. Then the game adds more mechanics and more ideas and doesn't stop until the game is over.

This is just a really well made puzzle game, and I found the difficulty level pretty perfect - most of these games get too tough for me, but this one felt just right. Then again, there are bonus levels that are a challenge to unlock, let alone play, so you'll hopefully enjoy it even if you're a Sokoban expert.

That's your lot. See you soon.