Playlist (July 2021) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! It’s time for your playlist video for the month of July. Here’s what I’ve been playing recently. You can watch it as a video above, or read it as an article below.

Wildermyth

As someone who is fascinated by the potential for procedurally-generated storytelling in games - Wildermyth has been on my radar for quite a while.

So this is a fantasy RPG with addictive tactics-style battles and a clever board game-esque overworld. But the real draw is the game's storytelling system where your unique cast of characters will change, adapt, fall in love, and so on, throughout the course of a campaign. Or multiple campaigns.

And it's pretty cool! Characters who fight together might become lovers, and their child gets added as a party member. A character who falls in battle might live on, but now with an eyepatch and peg leg. You might recruit some random farmer, and watch them become a werewolf, get transformed by cosmic horrors, and die - only to be lionised as a legend.

But, 10-or-so hours in, and I was starting to see how the whole thing is put together. And it's a lot more simple than I was expecting.

Essentially, when you reach new areas it pulls a story out of its big bucket of precomposed mini narratives - like the gang finds a secret basement or the gang gets kidnapped. Your party members get cast into the key roles, and the dialogue changes a little to account for different relationships.

But that's about as far as it seems to go - leaving some big gaps in the narrative.

For example, in one campaign I had a married couple in my party - and they went to different towns to fight enemies. The man stumbled into some mystic clearing and got transformed into a werewolf. When the couple met back up, this fact went completely unmentioned by his wife. She never even mentioned his new teeth, fur, and claws. NBD, apparently!

There are loads of vthings like that which makes it feel like the storytelling system is not as robust as the game seems to think. It feels like an extension beyond the systems seen in games like Fire Emblem and XCOM, which do a similarly effective job of making you care for your cast of heroes.

And so while this is a lovely game - it's a fun RPG, even if you remove the storytelling entirely. And a nice take on proc-gen storytelling - it doesn't really go far enough for me. Personally I would have preferred for the devs to really double down on this story stuff - and pay less attention to the loot and enemy list and so on.

Just make a truly awesome storytelling system that does what so many games have tried to do: capture the on-the-fly, adaptive narrative of a tabletop roleplaying game. We're still not quite there yet, clearly. But still, well worth checking out. Like I say, it’s also a super playable tactics game.

Metroid Fusion

Like everyone else on the internet, I caught the Metroid bug this month - symptoms include a strong desire to play an old Metroid game, and the cause is the recent announcement of Metroid Dread. So I thought I'd go back to the one mainline Metroid game I've never actually finished: Metroid Fusion on the Game Boy Advance.

So first up, no - Metroid Fusion is not your typical Metroid game. Because while it's still got the interconnected world, the power ups, the secrets, and the backtracking - your exploration is almost entirely guided by an AI commander who tells you where to go and what to do, and draws handy markers on your map.

And no, that's not ideal - freeform exploration of a strange, alien world is a key part of the franchise. And that's why I didn't include the game in my Boss Keys series. But it's also not a death knell for the game - because take it on its own terms, and Fusion is a pretty good time.

It's got super snappy controls, fun combat against a varied bunch of enemies and bosses, good level design in distinctly different areas, and - more so than other Metroid games - a nasty streak of survival horror design. The game's constantly pulling traps and surprises on you, leading to an overall feeling of unease.

That's most obviously seen in the SA-X: a virus that has mutated into a full charged up clone of Samus. Sometimes you'll drop into the rafters of a room, only to see SA-X stomping around below - and your options are to wait it out or run away - you certainly can't kill it. It's pretty intense!

Unfortunately, the idea kinda stops there. I assumed that the SA-X would be an unstoppable monster that stalks you about the map, like the Nemesis from Resident Evil or the Xenomorph from Alien Isolation. But that's not the case - as far as I can tell, it just shows up in a few, specific, scripted moments. And, sure, that might be asking a lot of the GBA hardware. But it still felt like the game's most unique idea went underused.

Another disappointment is the game's over use of secret blocks. There's always a moment in a Metroid game where you're stumped and then, after scouring every room, you find that the way forward is through an invisible door or a single block that can be blown up. Metroid Fusion has that all the time and its super annoying. I don't mind it for secrets and collectibles, but it's all over the main path as well. There were at least two times I had to consult a guide and both times I felt like the game was being unfair because the solution was just some random block I missed.

But yeah, otherwise a good time and I'm glad I played it. Metroid is the only Nintendo series with a proper continuous storyline (and the callbacks to Super Metroid in Fusion were a lot of fun), and so I'm keen to see where the tale goes in Metroid Dread.

Death's Door

Death's Door is the next game from Acid Nerve - the devs behind Titan Souls. That game certainly wore its Shadow of the Colossus influence on its sleeve - but Death's Door is even more obvious about its inspirations.

This isometric hack-and-slash adventure game is a potent mix of Dark Souls, Zelda, and Hyper Light Drifter. It's got souls, it's got heart pieces and a hookshot, it's even got a combat mechanic where you get ammo by hitting enemies with your sword.

Now, it's not necessarily a bad thing to borrow ideas from other games - that happens all the time. And put those influences aside, and this is still a well put-together adventure game with great combat encounters, some nice puzzles here and there, inventive world design, and more. Titan Souls obviously showed the studio’s penchant for boss design and it’s only improved in Death’s Door: I liked every single encounter, and the final boss was a joy to defeat.

But I could never shake the feeling that this game was modelled on other, existing, and better games. I kept thinking "oh, that feels like Hyper Light" or "oh, that's very Dark Souls". And often realised that those borrowed ideas weren’t implemented terrifically well. For example, it has bonfires, shortcuts and souls from Dark Souls, but because you don't lose souls upon death, it loses that palpable sense of danger and menace.

It also fails to go above and beyond the games it takes influence from - the best games use their inspirations as a spring board to something new. Death’s Door fees feels like a Tribute Act, rather than its own thing. So this is a fun game and I do recommend it, but I have to admit that it never managed to fully step out from the shadow of its influences.