That being said there’s a whole lot more to Jump Space than just the co-op space sim aspect. The core game loop is a mixture of space exploration, FPS shootouts, ship management and a bunch of other things that make sure there’s always something for you to do, if you want it. This being an Early Access title, even one that’s been out for a year at this stage, means that it’s still not exactly a seamless experience with many of the mechanics lacking proper introductions and explanations but, given there’s quite a vibrant community around it, most of that is a Google search or two away. That being said though the core game loop, with all it’s various different pieces, is surprisingly seamless and is one of the reasons that my crew and I spent over 2 hours with it on the first night.

Visually Jump Space feels very similar feel to the original Subnautica, with some great visuals that also seem to have that distinct Unity feel to them. That’s also possibly the aesthetic they’ve chosen too as I’ve found that “Unity-vibe” seems to feel more present in games that choose a clean, sci-fi art style. Saying that though it’s clear that going in that direction has also enabled them to optimise the experience as even in our more…creative interactions with the game none of the crew experienced any lag, stutter or slowdowns. For a game that’ll be leaving Early Access sometime next year it’s a good sign that they’re on the right track.

The opening moments of Jump Space are spent in a mandatory tutorial to get your familiar with the base mechanics of both the ship and your character. It’s thankfully pretty short, meaning that you won’t be waiting long to get everyone ready to join up, but that does also mean that the complexities that come later can’t be included. For a game that’s absolutely designed as a co-op adventure (single is available, although the one person on our squad who did it said that it was nowhere near as enjoyable) it’s an easy thing to forgive. That is until half your ship is on fire and you don’t have enough material to make an extinguisher.

The core game loop is pretty straightforward: travel to a sector, explore the various areas with your ship until you find somewhere to dock/land, explore/shoot/loot on foot, jump back on the ship, do maintenance/upgrades, possibly engage in space combat then rinse and repeat. If that sounds like a long loop it is, but none of it really feels out of place. That’s also where having a crew to play this with makes the game shine as you can have 1 or 2 people off looting and shotting whilst others engage in space combat or explore, giving everyone something to do rather than having to sit around and wait.

Unlike similar games where our crew usually ends up falling into specific roles for the entire duration of the game we often found ourselves jumping in and out jobs more often than not. This is especially true when shit goes completely south on you and a single pair of hands can’t handle all the repairs on the ship or someone accidentally untethers themselves and ends up too far away to grapple back onto the ship. I think this is because most of the different “jobs” in the game are easy enough to understand so picking them up in a hurry isn’t hard and most of them are, most importantly, somewhat fun.

What finally killed the session for us was when we found ourselves in a mission that, unbeknownst to us, had infinitely spawning robots. Now in most games this is fine as there’s usually other mechanics there to make up for that fact, but Jump Space is a resource limited game and so after 15 or so minutes of figting wave after wave of robots, finding our reserves running on empty, we decided to call it. Now part of this is most definitely on us, we weren’t exactly reading the missions in-depth before kicking them off, but it never feels good to go up against an unlimited number of enemies when your own resources are finite. I’m sure this, and many of the other small issues will be fixed over the coming year.

Whilst Jump Space doesn’t sit with the other friendslop games the crew and I have been playing of late it’s certainly right up there as another one that’s much better with friends. The core game loop, with it’s multiple different mechanics to engage with, ensures that you never find yourself staring off into space wondering when it’ll be your turn to have some fun. Like most Early Access titles there’s still work to be done in things like introducing mechanics, balancing missions and the like but even in it’s current state it’s very much worth the cost of admission. It’s one I hope to go back to, hopefully before 1.0 given the steady pace the devs seem to be keeping with it.

Rating: 8/10

Jump Space is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with 2.4 hours playtime and 6% of the achievements unlocked.

For those unaware Spiders and it’s publisher Nacon are unfortunately no more. Long time readers might be wondering why I’d be shedding a tear at that news, given that most of the games I’ve reviewed of theirs have well, never been particularly glowing. The reason is simple: even though I’d ironically play everything they put out, reveling in their objective awfulness, under that was a hope that one day they’d succeed. I saw a glimmer of hope there in the original Greedfall, the first of their games to inch above bad and firmly into OK. Steelrising was an unfortunate and ill-advised attempt to capitalise on the soulslike frenzy that was gripping everyone back then made only worse to be released in the same year as the great Elden Ring itself so even those who’d usually hunt those kinds of experiences down were much better served elsewhere.

So it was with an extremely heavy heart that I began my journey with Greedfall 2, knowing that it was to be their swan song. My hopes before all of that happening were somewhat high as the game had been in Early Access for some time and if there was anything that Spiders’ games needed it was polish. Unfortunately though it seems that history was doomed to repeat itself once again as Spiders’ last ever game makes the same mistakes as many of their previous titles have.

Flipping the script on the previous game Greedfall 2 has you playing one of the native inhabitants of Teer Fradee who’s beginning their quest to become a seer for their tribe. Your elders have set you to task to help the people of your tribe whilst also getting more in tune with the land that sustains you. These quests inevitably have you run into the foreigners who have come to your land and have started pillaging it for all it’s worth and you’re forced to make choices about how to deal with them. It is right at the end of your journey, just after you’ve ascended to the rank of seer, that you’re kidnapped and brought to the old world. It would seem that all you have left in front of you is life as a slave but the kindness of strangers has other plans for those like yourself.

Greedfall 2’s graphics are decidedly dated. To be sure they’re very much a step up from both the previous Greedfall and Steelrising, but it would seem that Spiders’ dedication to using their own in-house game engine Silk has come back to haunt them yet again. To be sure, I get it, there’s a lot of costs sunk into developing the tooling around an engine as much as the engine itself but given how quickly other proprietary engines have outstripped the capabilities of Silk it still boggles my mind that they didn’t make the switch 2 games ago. Couple that with the decidedly wooden animations, varying levels of jank (both mechanical and visual) and the distinct lack of optimisation in many places and it’s hard to have nice things to say about the visual aspects of the game.

Optimisation deserves it’s own section as this was one of the first games I played on my new rig which, to gloat a bit about, is a near top-of-the-line machine with a RTX5090, 64GB of RAM and a PCIE 5 SSD capable of speeds I’m not sure I can readily make use of. I say all that because even with a beast of a system driving it Greedfall 2 will still suffer from level of detail and texture pop-ins all the time, the below screenshot being just one example. I had countless times where NPCs simply didn’t render for upwards of 10 minutes, leaving brooms and other items floating wildly in mid air until the person hold them finally popped in. It doesn’t help that it seems like it renders up through the detail levels before getting to the last one which would do horrifying things like not render a characters teeth during dialogues and cutscenes. Given it spent just shy of 18 months in Early Access I expected better.

Once again Spiders fell into the same trap of simply doing too much, wanting Greedfall 2 to be something a lot bigger than what they had the capability to achieve. To be sure it’s nice to see all the trappings of a fully fledged RPG here: classes, talent trees, attributes, skills, party, real-time with pause combat, management, crafting, an (unfortunately very late in game) open world, the whole shebang. The trouble is though that many of these elements just don’t really work together cohesively, making the all feel like isolated mechanics that have little bearing on each other. This then flows directly into the core game loop which feels very much the same, disjointed and thoroughly unsatisfying at almost every turn. I absolutely, truly wanted to like Greedfall 2 enough so I’d play it through to the end but I simply couldn’t manage it, even after I went back after a couple week’s hiatus from it to play other things.

A big part of this, I feel, is how the progression system is just too damn slow and convoluted to make it feel like you’re really getting anywhere. To be sure, you and your party will level up a lot, but the system from the original Greedfall remains: one level gets you a skill point, the other attributes, another a talent point, etc. Spending these is then buried in multiple layers of menus, each of which you’ll have to navigate in and out of several times to spend all the points across your entire party. Even reaching some of the more meatier upgrades merits not much of anything in the grand scheme of things as I never felt that any of those keystone upgrades really made that much of a difference to anything.

It’s only after reading my previous reviews that I’ve figured out I may have done myself a disservice by choosing a non-melee class for the first time ever in one of Spiders’ games. They have routinely built out those classes as first class citizens with the rest of them seeming to get much less attention when the deadline starts to approach. To be sure that was my experience playing the supposedly damage focused caster class which was basically more utility than anything else. Even putting that to one side combat was slow, plodding and thoroughly unenjoyable just as a general rule anyway. In most encounters I wasn’t really doing much of anything save for wandering around, fighting the targeting system and just generally not having a great time with it. The lack of interactivity is just one issue among many for the combat system though which is not limited to lack of challenge (save for brick wall encounters that seem really out of place), abilities just seemingly not working as intended and the confused “choose your own adventure” of interactivity vs strategic combat modes all of which make little difference to how combat feels.

It also doesn’t help that the game takes a long, long time to get into gear before it’s even showing its full self to you. It takes almost 10 hours to get to the point when the world map is made available to you. Sure, I get that it’s tied to story beats, but there’s so, so many ways to integrate that mechanic earlier and make that extremely disjointed early parts of the game feel like they’re actually part of something greater. You get a sense of that through the first 3 areas you go through but it’s not until you finish the last one that they’re finally all pulled together. At that point though you will have already convinced yourself that they’re places you’ll never visit again.

Which finally brings us to the one thing that can make me forgive many sins: the story. Unfortunately I really have no idea what was trying to be said here that the original didn’t already touch on as much of it felt like “and then” style writing without a kind of driving purpose or narrative backing everything. Like, in a game that takes as long as it does to even get moving properly, there was plenty of time to setup a bigger narrative that could’ve pulled everything forward. But no all the moments that are supposed to be monumental feel completely unearned, happening just because they have to or the story simply couldn’t keep moving on. It was bad enough that I was thinking about deliberately failing everything I could to see if there really was any material consequences to doing so. I’m guessing there aren’t.

This all means that Greedfall 2 feels like it simultaneously has too much and not enough going on. As I said, time and time again in my reviews, if Spiders would only narrow their focus down to what would make their game great I’m sure they’d be able to do something amazing. But even in this, their final presentation to the world, they make the same mistakes they always have. Usually this would have me signing off with my usual schadenfreudian glee, remarking at how these guys seem to keep getting funded, but now it’s just all sadness. Truly I had hope that one day I’d be writing a review where I could say “I’d been with them since long before they were cool”, those hours and dollars I sent their way finally amounting to something. But alas, it is not to be, and instead I sit here, minting yet another middling review score at them, knowing it will be my last for them. Vale Spiders, I wish it could’ve ended better.

Rating: 6.0/10

Greedfall 2: The Dying World is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $83.50. Total play time was 9.7 hours with 18% of the achievements unlocked.

Taking a quick look at the original shapez shows how the basic concept has remained the same with the increased mechanical depth coming from the increase of dimensions from 2 to 3. The basic premise remains the same though: the portal demands shapes, you build said shapes from the various primitives you have access to, the portal accepts and you’re given access to a wider variety of tools with which to deliver more shapes. Rinse and repeat. Of course just getting the shapes to the portal is only the beginning of the challenge as whilst you could absolutely grind your way through all the levels by just figuring out the base pattern you’ll be stuck to your chair for hours. So the game then changes into one of optimisation and throughput which is a far more interesting and complex puzzle to solve.

I was immediately struck in the face by the art direction I hadn’t seen quite some time: the good old Unity asset store style. Now I’m sure none of the assets that are in shapez 2 are actually from the store but they certainly have that low-fidelity, basic texturing feeling to them that a lot of Unity store assets had back in the day. It’s also likely done very deliberately to keep the CPU/GPU load to a happy minimum as it doesn’t take long for your factory to get a bit hectic which can quickly drop performance. This was one of the last games I played on my old rig before upgrading and I can say that even with a 5+ year old machine shapez 2 didn’t skip a beat. Given that I wasn’t at the limit of all the platforms, tunnels and trains that I could possibly build there’s a very real possibility that things would’ve gotten choppy in the future.

The core loop is very satisfying as it’s pretty easy to figure out the steps you need to do something but there’s a whole lot of variations to get that to the point where it’s truly optimal. At the start your main constraint is going to be throughput as each miner, process and modification that you make has it’s own set of variables in order to make it run at full capacity. Thankfully there’s not many crazy unbounded edge cases to trace down here; everything is a perfectly divisible amount of the maximum capacity that a conveyor belt can handle. The real trick is figuring out how to make all the processes line up properly so you’re not inadvertently blocking one when another is at it’s ideal throughput.

Which, given that you have tools available to see whether or not something is running at ideal capacity, would sound like a straightforward challenge to solve. Trouble is that your factory isn’t a rigid system so changes propagate through it at the speed of a conveyor belt leading to intricate phantom traffic jam problems that’ll cascade throughout your factory. Sure, once you’ve got a validated pattern down this issue is usually easily resolved and you can just wait a handful of minutes to make sure everything is steady state but it’s a problem that only gets exponentially more vexing as your factory’s size increases.

Then you hit the second challenge: floorspace. Whilst certain things are unlimited space is most certainly not and this becomes quite the issue as the steps to create a particular shape become ever more involved. This makes solutions that were once working incredibly obsolete as things start to scale out which usually means tearing down your entire production line in order to optimise it once again. Yes, I hear the screaming crowd in the back saying “BLUEPRINTS” to make the whole process a lot easier and they’re right. However that only makes getting the optimised solution down quicker, it doesn’t solve the reengineering problem to connect it all back together again.

Some of the upgrades make this easier of course and being targeted with them will go a long way to alleviating some of the more frustrating things that you have to deal with early on. There’s also a ton of community built blueprints that you can leverage if you want to short-circuit some of the more fiddly layout challenges but be warned, a lot of them are from end-game players with upgrades that you likely won’t have. That being said the fundamentals they show there can readily translate to any stage of the game, if you know what to look for.

My only real gripe was with how the core progression takes a little bit too long between drinks. There were numerous times where I’d do the calculations on doubling the production capacity and coming up with a figure that looked about the same if I just did nothing (I.E. the build time for it was long enough to warrant not bothering) and once I got the trains mechanic layered on top I suddenly started to feel a bit overwhelmed with it all. Granted, this increase in complexity is the reason you’ll play it but after ~8 hours or so with it I felt it was probably time to leave it alone rather than plug on and burn myself out on it.

For incremental and factory game lovers alike shapez 2 has an awful lot going for it. Whilst the 1.0 release was earlier this year it’s been in Early Access for a good number of years, meaning there’s a solid community that’s sprouted up around it. So if you’re the kind of person to absolutely lose yourself in something like this you’re going to be among a good group of friends. For me, whilst it ticked many of the boxes initially, the complexity grew past the point where I was enjoying it. That’s more a comment on me than it is on the game itself, though.

Rating: 8.25/10

shapez 2 is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 7.8 hours with 6% of the achievements unlocked.

Another plane trip, another number of hours stuck with countless strangers in a metal tube hurtling through the sky. So you try to find some way to keep yourself entertained, slapping your headphones on and jamming your favorite mixtape into your walkman to start passing the time. It’s at that moment something terrible happens: your plane explodes into countless pieces and you find yourself hurtling towards the ground at terminal velocity. Figuring you’ll make the most of it you do some sick tricks, raiding the falling drink cart and doing your best to avoid the falling limbs and other debris. The sweet embrace of the long sleep eludes you however as, upon hitting the ground, you find yourself back in the plane, headphones in hand.

The nostalgia is strong in Freefall ’95, the mid-90s inspired pixel-art taking me back to all those games I spent countless hours on as a youth. Unlike other games which would usually slap on a number of other, more modern graphical flairs on top of that Freefall ’95 keeps it true to form, never straying too far away from its roots with additional visual flair. This isn’t without some downsides though as, given the large number of items on screen at any one time, it’s easy for visual confusion to set in and everything just meld into a bunch of noise. Still the game gives you enough moments to recenter yourself and appreciate the art style for what it is.

The core game loop is a kind of Roguelite time loop adventure centered on busting out the sickest moves to get the biggest combos before you finally hit the ground at terminal velocity. You do this by well, doing tricks but also stacking numerous modifiers that you can get from items that are falling to the ground along with you. Get bitten by a snake, set on fire, chug some booze from the drinks cart, all of these things will up your multiplier so you can reach the higher score. This then feeds into the progress system that gives you access to new abilities, improvements to certain modifiers and drives the narrative forward by keeping additional levels locked until you reach a certain threshold. It’s a tight, well balanced package of mechanics that all serve the core game perfectly.

It’s one of those games that I feel would be amazing to play with friends, sitting on a couch as you each take turns trying to beat the last score. To be sure there’s a leaderboard which you can pit yourself against but honestly the numbers people are pulling in there are of the order that I can’t even understand. It’s also because the core loop does get repetitive pretty quickly and the game’s story, whilst cool, is pretty thin on the ground and didn’t provide me enough drive to play it for any longer than I did.

The narrative has me in two minds honestly. I do like the core premise of it, and each of the characters were certainly given enough personality for me to like them more than your usual run of the mill background NPC. However the story beats that you unlock are a mere handful of lines each and there’s not enough outside of that to want me to keep going. Sure, there’s the upgrades and the various story related challenges, but they just weren’t enough for me. That being said though that doesn’t mean it wont be enough for others as the core game play loop is solid enough that I feel that more…completionist orientated people would get numerous hours out of it.

Freefall ’95 is a competent if repetitive roguelike arcade game. The art work, setting and core game play loop are all great and not something I’d usually expect for a first time release. However there wasn’t enough there to glue me to my seat for long. The elements are there I just feel like there isn’t enough of them. To that end though I still feel like there’s a place for this in every 90s kid’s heart even if it is only for a short while.

Rating: 7/10

Freefall ’95 is available on PC right now for $15.95. Total playtime was 1.2 hours with 28% of the achievements unlocked.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m clued into Don’t Nod’s aspirations but, looking back over my past reviews of their games, I can see that most of them are hitting the level of good enough with none of them ever reaching the heights of something I’d call great. That isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed some of them, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage and Tell Me Why both stick out to me as ones that I have fond memories of, but the scores I gave them at the time tell the story. That’s when the pattern stuck out to me: there were a lot, and I mean a lot, of releases in a short time for what many would consider to be an indie studio.

Sure enough, checking their release schedule shows that the past 3 years has seen them pump out a total of 5 games all of which are new IPs. They had a similar spurt of creative output from 2018 to 2020, riding high on Life Is Strange no doubt, which is only when they decided to give themselves a break for 3 years. Part of this is likely due to Tencent taking a rather large stake in the company in 2021 which has driven a desire from them to see a return on said investment. As with all things like this that money may be the poisoned pill that kills the company as it’s slated to run out of cash in November this year.

I tell you all of this because when I begin my criticisms of what Aphelion is you have an idea of the circumstances that led to them happening. Because in its current state Aphelion feels like an unfinished husk of what it was meant to be.

On the box Aphelion is one of those linear narrative games, one that you can’t really call a walking simulator but it isn’t far off. The core game consists mainly of you walking from one place to another, using some basic mechanics to solve puzzles all whilst the characters narrate mostly to themselves about whatever happens to be going on. It’s a formula that can work well, even when parts of the whole aren’t exactly pulling their weight, but the trouble for Aphelion is that none of them do. What you have is a cobbled together experience where each part feels like it was rushed to meet a deadline and no part of the experience is better for it.

Like the game’s main mechanic, climbing, for instance. It’s clear that the devs wanted this to be a core part of the game but the experience is so utterly basic that there’s little separating it from the climbing sections that are tacked on in other adventure games. Worse still this game released in the same year as Cairn a game that showed that climbing mechanics can be deep and fun, something which Aphelion simply can’t hold a candle to. That’s not to say if it released say, 3 years ago it’d be much better but the comparison certainly isn’t doing Aphelion any favours.

That could be put to the side though if it was only a small part of the game but the walking/climbing/exploration mechanics are so repetitive that it’s hard to ignore just how bad they are. I caught myself audibly groaning when I saw the telltale marks of a climbing section coming up as I knew that it was simply another wall in the road, something for me to climb over in order to draw out the play time without adding any real value to the experience. Indeed in the 4 hours that I played the game I’d yet to see the point of making me go through so many climbing sections that were basically all the same.

Which brings me to probably the worst part about it all: the narrative and its presentation. There was obviously a lot that the game wanted to be said, with plenty of worldbuilding needing to be done, but it’s done in such a hamfisted way that it never feels organic to the story. All too often your characters will just start talking to themselves, spouting random facts or one liners completely out of the blue in order to explain what’s happening on screen. Worse still the game takes forever to even setup a proper premise for everything, to the point where I still have little idea as to where the story was actually going to go some 4 hours.

I’ve often chided developers for falling prey to their ambition; trying to do too much when a more focused experience would be all the better. Aphelion instead bears the same wounds of that kind of ambition, but the responsible party isn’t the creatives or those with a vision they want realised this time around. Instead it’s in the executives, in those who I feel have come into the industry seeking a quick return on their money only to end up shoveling dreck out the door and wondering why it isn’t working. Aphelion then, like another upcoming game review, might be the swan song of a studio who’s grasp exceeded their reach and we are all the worse off for it.

Rating: 5.0/10

Aphelion is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $45. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3.8 hours playtime and 40% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.

The game gets you going with the premise pretty quickly: you’ve moved to foreign country to run your uncle’s doner shop. Trouble is he’s not exactly leaving it in a fit state so you’ll be starting from scratch, earning back all the things that a successful shop needs. The wrinkle here is that you don’t speak a lick of the local language and so you’re left on your own to figure out how to feed the hungry masses whilst ensuring you’ve got enough doner to make it through the day.

I Can Only Speak Doner starts off easy enough, given you only have a handful of options to choose from when it comes to fulfilling orders. As you roll through the days though you’ll unlock additional ingredients, side dishes, challenges and ancillary activities you engage in to extract even more dollars from your customers. Strictly speaking most of these things aren’t exactly necessary to the core game loop but doing them enables you to reduce the time between meaningful upgrades that even further reduce the time to get more.

Which makes the core game loop really solid as it’s got the right mix of complexity, risk/reward and management mechanics that make your choices meaningful. Go out and party to get lots of repeat customers? You won’t be able to understand their orders and you’ll run out of ingredients quickly. Focus on language? Sure you can take more orders without needing to wait for them to point things out, but you’re probably going to make more mistakes when you start blasting through orders faster with your new found confidence.

All of these things would be even better if the story didn’t stop after the base mechanics have been introduced. It’s not like there isn’t ample opportunity to include this either as all the upgrades could have some backstory attached to them, customers could have banter with you and even getting orders wrong provides an opportunity for a snarky comment back at you. Without it the drive to continue for another upgrade, more ingredients just seems hollow which is what had me putting it down so quickly.

So credit where it’s due: I Can Only Speak doner is strong on a mechanical and concept level. Where it falls down is in its unrealised potential; it’s currently a narrative blank canvas that has the opportunity to tell a great story. But today it doesn’t and that unfortunately had me bouncing off it much earlier than I otherwise would. Perhaps one day we’ll see a story content patch come through for it and, if that ever happens, expect to see me coming back.

Rating: 6.5/10

I Can Only Speak Doner is available on PC right now for $7.50. Total playtime was 0.7 hours.

My long time friend and exceptional writer joyfully introduced our group chat to the The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of newly created words to capture the depth of the complex emotions that we humans feel. At the time I was abrasive about it, my argument revolving around the idea that such things were useless as they’re not part of the common lexicon. How can I communicate something to someone if they don’t understand it? Of course, over time, many of those words have made their way into common usage and, really, it doesn’t take long to communicate new concepts especially when they’re supposed to represent common human experiences. It was through that dictionary that the word sonder entered my usual usage and, when I went looking for the right term for how I feel about Mixtape there was another perfect one to capture my emotions: Anemoia. The nostalgia for a life you did not live.

That isn’t to say that I’m fully divorced from the world that Mixtape portrays. My formative years were spent in very similar ways: the CD player slotted into my cargo shorts, time spent with friends during the long summer months getting up to all sorts of trouble and being absolutely sure about what the future held for me. What gets me though is that, upon remembering that these developers are an Australian lot, that what they showed in Mixtape feels like a decidedly American experience of this time in life. That’s not to say it’s better or worse here but the cultural elements that would’ve been pervasive in that period of life are much different. That’s also partly where the anemoia comes from here: a lot of my childhood was spent on consuming overseas media and when my experience didn’t line up with it (why don’t Australian houses have basements was one of my major confounding thoughts for a long time) I found myself wanting for something that I couldn’t have.

You can see the fundamental building blocks of Mixtape in The Artful Escape with music still being the backbone which everything else is built upon. They could not be more different in terms of production value though with the art style, graphics and overall vibe of Mixtape just being so much grander than its progenitor in every respect. There’s certainly no small amount of Wes Anderson influence to be seen here with the framing, story beats and off-kilter dialogue between characters all feeling like homage’s to that director’s trademark style. I initially found the low frame rate animations a little jarring, feeling somewhat out of place, but just like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse it grows on you over time.

As a game Mixtape is a walking simulator, albeit one that’s backed by a rather high-powered soundtrack that spans the gamut of indie, chart toppers and eclectic soundscapes from 4+ decades. You’ll be treated to a wealth of low-interaction activities that include such things as trying to find VHS tapes to watch while geeked off your yipper, flying through a forest to your secret hideout and pretending to be a dinosaur stomping their way through a valley of lesser animals. There’s no blockers, no puzzles requiring to be solved to get to the next section. All that the game has to give is shown to you and, should you want more, then you’re free to explore and find it.

Mixtape manages to strike the right balance between those mini-games and it’s narrative, giving both the right amount of time so that you never feel wanting for either. Given how the puzzle parts of The Artful Escape grated on me last time I’m glad to see their games trend in this direction. Too often indie developers feel the need to pad out the game’s play time with various mechanics that do nothing but get in the way of the story. There’s great variety in the mini-games and environments too, again avoiding the mistakes of their past title that began to feel repetitive after not too long. It’s also the first game in recent memory for me to replicate That Journey Moment and actually make it its own rather than just copying it almost blow for blow.

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW

With us Millennials now at the age where there’s a veritable treasure trove of ideas to mine for nostalgia value it’s easy to see why Mixtape’s story resonates with so many. Stacey’s unfounded confidence in her future, even when it’s clearly hurting her present, is something I think a lot of us can relate to. Heck even the scene with Cass getting grounded and Stacey getting mad at her for it is probably a scene that’s played out for many of us in our teenage years. Really it wouldn’t be that kind of drama if we didn’t hurt each other unnecessarily now, would it.

I will say though that most of the music, whilst great as a baking track, didn’t land for me. To be sure I had a massive grin for a few of them like The Touch (which holds a soft spot for me because Transformers) and the not-quite-period-accurate Mitch Murder track Remember When but everything else was lost in the wash. That’s probably more a comment on my experience with music more than anything else but it’s safe to say that should you be the kind of person that resonates with even a handful of tracks in the game you’re likely going to get just as much out of it as I did.

PLOT SPOILERS OVER

Mixtape was an unexpected joy, showing that Beethoven & Dinosaur have carved out a niche in music backed narratives that resonate both for them and the gaming public writ large. The story is one that’s going to be familiar to many and the varying hits of nostalgia you’ll get along the way will be as personal to you as they will be to anyone else who gives this game a go. For an aging Millennial like myself there was a lot to love here and I’m now very much looking forward to what’s next from this developer.

Rating: 9.0/10

Mixtape is available on PC, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3 hours playtime and 38% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Gamepass.

The Echelon missions were designed to bring about a new era of prosperity for humanity, all at the hands of the Soltari corporation. The first would survey the world of Carcosa, a place which holds the precious mineral Luncenite, and lay the groundwork for the following missions. Echelon II would then build out the mining infrastructure and begin extraction, ensuring all profits would make their way back to humanity. Finally Echelon III would be the colony, a new home for those hopeful few who wanted to make a new life off world. When the colonies went dark though that’s when the final Echelon mission was dispatch with Arjun, one of Soltari’s elite enforcers, was sent along with his mission team to find out what had happened to the next great hope for humanity.

Saros’ visuals have the unenviable task of having to balance on the knife edge between visual candy and performance. For the most part it achieves this, with the games numerous wide open environments feeling alive and rich as you speed your way through them chased by various brightly coloured particle effects seeking to ruin you day. Of course stopping and getting up close with things reveals the sacrifices that have to be made for this balance but Saros isn’t a game to force you to dwell too long enough in one area where that’s a problem. There were some areas that had some performance issues although I’m sure those will be patched in due time. Overall it’s a fantastic looking game and most certainly a step up from what they showed us with Returnal.

The core of what made Returnal so good returns in Saros with a lot of tweaks to make it far more approachable and with a helping hand of permanent progression mechanics to boot. You’ll still be engaging in the same kind of run and gun, bullet dodging platforming that we came to love in the original but this time around you’ll have a few more mechanics up your sleeve to deal with the challenges thrown at you. The procedurally generated maps (made up of different chunks that are rotated and scattered with varied hazards) are also back, making everything familiar yet different for each run. It does really feel like Housemarque listened to the feedback about Returnal’s punishing gameplay and gave players a more approachable way of engaging with it. Good news for the sadists though, you can make it harder than Returnal if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.

Combat is still as fast paced as ever with the calm of the first few rooms swiftly replaced with a hail of unrelenting bullets chasing you down. Differing from Returnal is the inclusion of a shield mechanic, allowing you to absorb certain coloured projectiles in order to use it with your power weapon. This plays heavily into boss and elite enemy fights as they’ll often corner you in ways that you can’t really dodge out of. Getting a hang of the shield (and it’s later iteration, the parry) goes a long way to taking the heat out of a lot of the game’s encounters.

Weapon variety is also good with almost all players having different tier lists and rankings for which one should be on top. I will admit that I lent on the Smart Rifle quite heavily for a lot of the game as it gave me more brain space to focus on my movement and dodging than other weapons did. That being said though the Repeating Crossbow and Myriad Chakram are right up there, offering up some fresh gameplay style whenever I wanted it without feeling like I was gimping myself. This all being said though I get the feeling that basically any weapon past level 50 is going to absolutely wreck anything as even when I was forced to take a weapon I wasn’t keen on at that stage I still felt like I was in control of everything.

The progression system is probably the most welcome change as it provides a path to increase your overall effectiveness without having to risk a run through lower levels. There’s two types of currency: lucenite which unlocks your typical kind of upgrade nodes like additional stats, base level increases and some ancillary skill improvements. Halycon is the more rare of them and is reserved for upgrades that have a bigger impact like more heal drops, increases to more valuable stats, etc. It’s not a free for all though, you’ll have to unlock later parts of the tree by defeating bosses and that’s definitely been a sticking point for a few other players I’ve seen on the /r/saros subreddit.

The game will take mercy on you though should it see you struggling for too long, unlocking some of the game’s other systems to let you tilt things in your favour. The Carcosan modifiers allow you to tweak things like enemy’s damage, corruption generated, healing effectiveness and a bunch of other things to make the overall run easier or harder depending on which direction you want to move the needle. For me I took a few choice mods like removing the negative effects from artefacts (even though they clear after each boss win, something I didn’t know) and extra damage to enemies/less to me. For the game’s final areas which are…more demanding in some respects I tweaked a bunch of things to amp up my power level to the max. To be sure I could’ve probably ground out a number of more runs to get a similar effect but honestly there’s only so much of that I can do before my eyes start to glaze over.

I will admit to being slightly annoyed by the metroidvania-esque level design of “Oooohhhh you can’t go there…yet” places that were obviously going to be unlocked later on by some gated traversal mechanic. It’s a problem I’ve had for ages as it always felt like that was forcing you to come back to an area that you’ve quite possibly already gone past enough. In Saros’ case at least the traversal mechanics were fun enough and the rewards for going back over were in fact worth the trouble so it got a pass from me on this in the end.

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW

There was someone on Reddit who mentioned how refreshing it was to play a main character that is just simply unredeemable and having sat with the ending (the true ending mind) I have to agree. At the start I was all on board with Arjun’s journey to win back his wife as he seemed like someone who was doing a lot for the people he loved and making mistakes in the process. Of course the game masterfully strips away each one of his excuses as you progress through the game and in the end you’re left with a character who’s got what he desired but you as the player in no way agree with him.

Nitya’s revelations at the end, that this was her dream not his and that his relentless pursuit without a care for what she actually feels is what drove her away in the first place. The audio logs showed she found happiness, lived countless lives and then for it all to be ended when Arjun blasts his way through the remains of her dream and the shore. It’s one of the few endings I can think of in a long time where I can say that it’s brilliantly done and I don’t like where it sits in the end (which I feel is the point so I do…like…it?).

PLOT SPOILERS OVER

Saros shows that Housemarque has mastered the niche that they created. Everything about the game is what I loved with Returnal but better. The bigger environments, the included progression systems, all of it just feels bigger and grander. There’s a few small areas where things could be improved but man, it’s nothing 1 or 2 patches (which might already be out at time of writing) could fix. Whilst I’d be the last one to pigeonhole a company into making the same game again and again I can’t say I’d be upset to see Housemarque riff on this formula again and maybe a couple more times after that.

Rating: 9.25/10

Saros is available exclusively on PlayStation 5 right now for $99. Total playtime was approximately 23 hours with 65% of the achievements unlocked.

The concept is pretty straightforward: you start off as a kind of amorphous blob that has the ability to move, dash, headbutt and consume whatever you decide is food. That allows you to grow and evolve which will present you with a list of evolution options which include fun things such as growing all manner of limbs, claws to attack and a litany of other abilities and buffs that you’ll need as the world around you starts to get increasingly hostile. Like any good roguelite there’s synergies across the various different abilities, many of which become utterly broken when combined in just the right way. Difficulty scales as you do too with each of the main bosses appearing at set intervals as you level up. There’s a host of challenges, starting modes and other modifiers you can use to ramp up the difficulty and earn yourself some different starting options in the process.

The pixel art is simple, charming and clear. This is one of those games where things (including yourself) could easily start blending into each other as it’s rather easy to annoy a whole bunch of creatures in short order and have them piling on top of you. Every animal is some kind of weird mishmash of a number of different real world animals which, on the surface, sounds positively horrifying but the artists have done a great job of making everything inexorably cute even when it’s trying to take a chunk out of you. As you’d expect performance is top notch although I have noticed that I have to stop myself from ticking the “unlimited” option on the frame rate limiter these days. There are many, many games that will completely flatline your hardware doing so for absolutely zero benefit when a capped 120fps keeps the hardware from screaming its head off.

Progression during a run comes at a steady clip, ensuring you’re never too far away from getting another evolution that could make or break your current build. The game deliberately doesn’t tell you a whole lot when you’re starting out, preferring instead for you to learn through your inevitable failure, which does mean some of the nuances of certain mechanics will be lost on you. For me that was the DNA drops (mutagens) which can be spent to reroll your choices, straightforward enough, or upgrade the rarity which for your chosen upgrade sticks around afterwards. Whilst this isn’t exactly build/run defining it does make those particular choices much more meaningful once you get a feel for the ones that work well for you.

Given this is a roguelite you are very much at the behest of RNGesus for every run which is both part of the fun and annoyance all at the same time. Once you’ve landed on a solid build pattern you often want to replicate it and quite often you simply won’t be able to recreate that same magic once again. The devs are aware of this and have structured many of the challenges and their rewards around experimenting with things that, honestly, don’t make a ton of sense up front but can get you to experiment out of your comfort zone. Plus sometimes it’s fun to make the biggest or smallest character you can just because.

I found the jumps in difficulty between pressure levels pretty savage even with my choice genetics giving me a solid starting point. This would be fine for the most part, you need more challenge to keep things interesting, however the lack of variety in enemies and overall game play made those challenge jumps more defeating than encouraging for me. The lack of a meta-progression system also meant I really didn’t feel much drive to keep on playing once I felt the challenge had run out at my current level and the next didn’t have much more to offer me.

So whilst putting a game down around the 4 hour mark might be somewhat premature I was at a point where I’d seen what I needed to see, enjoyed my time with it and wasn’t in the mood to potentially spoil that by trying to push through another level.

Everything is Crab has all the trappings of those roguelites that you can easily lose weekends to. The pixel art graphics, the fail-fast-fail-often gameplay loop and the RNG evolution mechanics that make chasing the dragon of that perfect run just oh so sweet when it comes off. What had me putting it down was the repetition without a bigger overarching goal I could sink my teeth into. That’s not to say that everyone would find similar fault, indeed many people have sunk many more hours than I into this and are still finding enjoyment in it, but this old gamer decided to tap out rather than potentially ruin a good thing.

Rating: 7.75/10

Everying is Crab is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total play time was 4 hours with 15% of the achievements unlocked.

All R.E.A.C.H knew was how to help. Help its operators, help humanity, help those who needed it. But the man who created it drove it and himself too far, the limits of man and machine stretched beyond their designed parameters until something broke. What was once digital is now physical. What was once Warren is now R.E.A.C.H. Alone and hunted, pushed out of its safe world of numbers and patterns into a place that wants nothing more than to eradicate its existence R.E.A.C.H. has only a single goal: protect this body, protect Warren.

Ever since The Last Night exploded onto the scene (and then promptly disappeared from it) I’ve wondered if anyone would ever expand or implement on that art style that they created. It seems that REPLACED is just such a candidate and it does far more than just simply imitate what The Last Night showed us all those years ago. All the environments are seeping in detail which adds an incredible layer to everything. The environmental storytelling is top tier with each section given adequate attention to properly set the vibe before a single line of dialogue is shown. There are some truly amazing set pieces and cinematic moments scattered throughout the game as my 30+ screenshots attest to. From an aesthetic perspective I’m super keen to see more titles experiment with the visual language that Sad Cat Studios has pioneered here.

REPLACED is a blend of a traditional side scroller platformer interspersed with 2D beat em up action sequences. You’ll spend the vast majority of your time navigating platforming sections, avoiding hazards and doing simple puzzles to unblock whatever it is happens to be preventing you from going forward. The beat em up sections are effectively live action puzzle sequences, pushing you to use every tool you have at your disposal to counter whatever particular brand of violence the NPCs are about to inflict upon you. There are upgrades to be had which are mostly obtained through a modicum of exploration, following dialogue trees and, in a refreshing change of pace, mini-games based on old-school favourites that most people will likely recognise. All of these elements work together well and feel like natural parts of the game, making REPLACED (at least at a mechanical level) a well balanced game.

Like with most beat em ups you’ll flit between feeling like an absolute god when you decimate a bunch of enemies without even thinking about it to a total clown when you get bodied by a run of the mill enemy moments before you’d complete a section. Most of this is on you of course as there’s really not a great amount of ramp up in terms of enemy variety and powers as the game progresses. There is progression of course, although most of the things you’re given come with enemies that need that new ability in order to counter them. So really, like most games these days it seems, the real final boss of REPLACED is you and your ability to git gud. Having said that though I don’t think most people would struggle with the combat sections, even if they took a couple tries to get through.

Where the game falls down though is in its pacing. There are many, many long sections of the game where you’re basically just running from point A to point B without much progression in well anything that makes those sections worthwhile. This is compounded by the fact that the game heavily implies that exploration is rewarded (and it is, sometimes) but that also leads you to spending vast amounts of time trudging up and down dead end paths which do nothing except add additional time to your playthrough. Weirdly too is that the developers seem to acknowledge the need for proper pacing, with you returning a specific spot multiple times to a safe place to let you breathe easier whilst still progressing the story, but given those stretches you’re returning from are so long in comparison that beat in the action just feels like more unnecessary downtime.

Which is probably why the narrative didn’t feel anywhere near as impactful as it could’ve been for me. All the pieces are there: meaningful time given to background characters, an overarching plot to drive things forward, an in-built self narration mechanic to help you understand the main character’s motivations, etc. But with the large gaps between story beats you lose a lot of the momentum that’d carry you through it all with those moments at the safe haven feeling far more impactful because of it. I still have the unfounded hope that we’re past the days where game length was still seen as a meaningful metric to judge games but I know it’s still pervasive from both players and publishers alike. The cost to that though is games like REPLACED, ones that are far longer than they need to be and all the worse for it.

Putting this all together though, for a first time studio to put out a game like REPLACED certainly is something to admire. The art style, sound design and overall vibe of the game is just extraordinary. Even at a bare mechanical level REPLACED is more than competent with it needing the right amount of skill from the player, giving meaningful progression where it’s needed and keeping the challenge at an acceptable level that a lot of people could enjoy. The pacing though just kills the momentum which resonates through the rest of the game’s narrative. There’s so much that could be cut and the game wouldn’t be any more the worse for it. Brevity here would be its own art and who knows maybe one day Sad Cat Studios will give REPLACED the director’s cut treatment that it sorely needs. Until though I’m not going to feel bad about saying wait for a sale.

Rating: 7.0/10

REPLACED is available on PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 10.3 hours playtime and 67% of the achievements unlocked. REPLACED is also available on Xbox Gamepass