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

So here I am, now a dad of 2 young kids, playing a game where you’re put in charge of one and god damn did I not just want to spoil the absolute shit out of Diana from the second I brought her home.

It’s another day on the job for Hugh, his restraints pulling him tightly back into the seat as he’s launched moonward bound. Why the hell the Cradle stopped communicating with Earth is information that’s beyond his pay grade but it’s still up to him to fix whatever nonsense the scientists up there have gotten themselves into. Arrival on Luna is anything but standard however with the docking bays devoid of any life and, weirdly any of the standard automatons that’d be roaming the facility. Before Hugh has time to think though he and his team are struck by a moonquake and the facility begins to fall apart around him. It’s then he’s revived by the only other human face he’s seen other than his team: that of a young girl wearing and oversized jacket. You give her the name Diana.

Pragmata has that trademark “eastern” aesthetic to it with the environments, UI and animations all feeling similar to other games from other Asia-based developers like SHIFT UP’s Stellar Blade or Black Myth: Wukong. Interestingly this comes to us via Capcom’s in house RE Engine which, whilst having been around for a good while now, still managed to surprise me with its level of graphical fidelity and performance. Indeed Pragmata is at it’s best in the game’s numerous wide open environments where the level of detail in the characters and environments can honestly be pretty overwhelming when you first find yourself in a new area. Thankfully though they’re designed well enough that you won’t be finding yourself stuck in dead end areas or attempting to explore places that the devs have no intention of you going in.

Going through the Steam tags on this game the most apt one, I feel anyway, is probably souls-like as much of the core gameplay, progression and minute-to-minute action mirrors much of what makes that genre great. To be sure it also fits well into the action-RPG genre in many respects as well given the levels of customisation you have over your character and the overall experience itself. You’ll be doing the usual walking through areas, unlocking shortcuts, returning to base, upgrading and going back loop that the Soulsborne series made popular all those years ago. Progression comes to you via collecting an array of different currencies all of which unlock a specific set of upgrades, new abilities and story related items. There’s also a smattering of optional puzzles and challenges which, if completed, help to accelerate your progression substantially. All of this is introduced gradually making it approachable without being overwhelming. Overall it’s got a lot going on, especially with it’s main combat loop being as unique as it is.

Combat, whilst theoretically having all the trappings of a third person shooter, is closer to something like an action-puzzle-solver with a bit of shooting thrown in. You see every enemy you encounter is shielded when you first see them, requiring you to make use of Diana’s hacking abilities to break them open to make your weapons effective against them. This puzzle takes the form of a connect the dots style puzzle which you have to solve rapidly before the enemy manages to get its hands on you. This makes every encounter a much more strategic affair where you have to manage your distance to the enemies, the puzzle that you’re solving and trying to keep your aim on point so you don’t also shoot the floor while you’re doing so.

It makes for some incredibly tense moments which in any other third person shooter would just be another run and gun section. The game is pretty forgiving in terms of solving those puzzles, dashing or losing your aim won’t reset puzzle progress for instance, and there’s a number of enhancements, skills and even weapons that making that hacking mini-game much easier than it otherwise would be. I didn’t manage to get my build to the point where I could continuously run auto-hacking to overheat stun enemies infinitely although looking through some of the post-game mods you can get I think it’s mostly doable but not to the point where you never have to hack an enemy again. All that being said though once you get into the flow of positioning, hacking then unloading round after round into enemies the auto-hack becomes more of a quality of life improvement more than a crutch to be relied on.

Progression comes in a steady pace that can be rapidly accelerated if you’re so inclined. The base currency is lunafilament which unlocks new mods as well as upgrades to them. The second is upgrade components which allow you to boost your HP/damage reduction, main weapon damage and Diana’s hacking ability. The last is pure lunum which is effectively a gating mechanism for the late stage upgrades, preventing you from grinding a section endlessly to make yourself truly overpowered for future sections. Not that there’s much of a need to do that though as the organic progression mechanics seem to get you most of the way there without too much hassle. Should you want to though there’s a training simulator that gives you a number of short challenges to complete which, if done in the specified way, give you access to a number of additional upgrade materials whenever you want them.

There’s a bit of Metroidvania spliced in here as well with the game’s levels being designed to be revisited once you unlock some of the later game abilities that prevented you from accessing certain places on your first pass through. Thankfully the save points/return to base areas are pretty plentiful meaning that you’re usually not too far away from revisiting an area once you’ve gone through them the first time. Whilst I don’t think it’s 100% mandatory to do so there’s a number of reasons, both gameplay and story wise, for doing so and I personally found it pretty rewarding to go back to those areas to mop up the few upgrades and other items that I’d missed on the first go around.

Pragmata is also very well optimised as I only noticed the smallest amount of slowdown in some of the larger areas which is very impressive given I’m running this game on 7 year old hardware. Like many similar games I did find the control scheme took some getting used to (and it definitely needs a controller) but I also feel that that awkwardness is part of a deliberate game design decision to introduce tension into what could otherwise be a slow, plodding affair. I did have some weird audio issues initially but I traced that back to my headphone software resetting itself to default for some unknown reason. Thankfully it wasn’t like Marathon which still has a weird persistent clicking issue that I haven’t been able to fix.

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW

Where Pragmata really won my heart though was with the story. My daughter is just a bit older than Diana is modelled to be and so a lot of the mannerisms, behaviours and moments that the game created between Hugh and her just hit home. There was honestly nothing more fun than collecting all of the Real Earth Memories and seeing her play with them, leave her stuff all over the shelter or just generally being a kid who also just happens to be a sophisticated android capable of hacking anything that she can see. They also did a great job with Hugh being the unwitting father role although, I will admit, he probably took to it a bit too quickly (even though I loved that about the game).

I’m in two minds about the ending though. Whilst the noble sacrifice to ensure your children survive and you don’t is something I think all parents can relate too I didn’t get the same tragic hero vibes from Hugh like I did with other similar stories like say Joel in Last of Us. The question I’m still reckoning with is: Would the story benefit or suffer if they didn’t have Hugh sacrifice himself at the end? I don’t have an answer to this yet and maybe it’s just me wanting to huff some copium, but the fact that I can’t definitely get to answer even after a month past finishing the game has me tending towards the game actually being all the weaker for it.

PLOT SPOILERS OVER

For a game I had once relegated to the the development hell section of my review queue (due to CAPCOM indefinitely delaying it in 2023) Pragmata has released to be one of this year’s surprise gems. The novel combat mechanics, steady progression systems and overall vibe just resonated with me on so many levels. To be sure there are parts that could be improved but that’d just be window dressing on an already spectacular game. The only thing that has me hesitating is how it all ended and the cognitive dissonance I feel about whether or not the change I want would actually improve how I feel about it overall. All that being said though Pragmata managed to capture the heart of this old gamer and father, and I’m sure it can capture yours too.

Rating: 9.0/10

Pragmata is available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2 right now for $92.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 15.4 hours playtime and 77% of the achievements unlocked.

Hozy is effectively an interior design simulator with a few extra steps. Each of the game’s levels are presented to you as abandoned areas that are filled with trash, long forgotten items and many more signs of long term disuse. After you set about cleaning the place up, repairing what needs it and giving the place a lick of paint you’re then set about staging the area with all the possessions that its new resident will be bringing along with them. Those boxes are about as helpfully labelled as you’d expect as well and expect to do a good lot of rearranging to your perfectly placed items should you forget to unpack all the boxes first. Once you’ve placed all the items the game then invites you to take a screenshot to share with the world. Or no one if that’s how you feel about it.

The game’s dollhouse aesthetic, reminiscent of the Sims but with far better lighting, sells the cozy game vibe instantly. It’s clear that the dev team has spent an incredible amount of time crafting an endless amount of curated assets specifically for each of the rooms, all of which I’m sure can be traced back to real world versions that are likely sitting in one or more of their living rooms somewhere. The circular colour gradient backdrop that’s then contrasted with the lovingly crafted global and local illumination all comes together to sell that tiny model house feeling perfectly. It’ll certainly have you looking around your own room to compare and contrast what kinds of weird items that’d show up if it was to become its own level in the game.

As a cozy game Hozy doesn’t ask much of you, giving you every opportunity to jump in and out of a room as you wish. There’s a small amount of gating behind “completing” a level before you can do the next one but all that you need to do to unlock the next one is unpack everything; the game makes no judgement if you leave everything in a pile on the ground and simply move on. Which is something I did, twice in fact, mostly because I got so goddamn annoyed at some of the levels where there wasn’t any kind of visual cohesiveness that I could discern. Really though that’s kind of on me as I’m not one for the eclectic interior design aesthetic as I tend much more towards function over form.

There’s a few areas of polish that could use some attention (especially since I didn’t see any notes about them in the 1.1 patch notes that were released after I finished my playthrough). The physics on the cleaning items feels real wonky, especially if you move a bit too fast. I do get it, you don’t want this to be a rushed experience, but their movement just feels every so slightly off. Hit detection on some items also feels tuned a bit too far away from being as generous I think it should be, given that this is a cozy game after all. I spent a good deal of minutes trying to track down that small part of a window I didn’t clean or the hidden out of sight part of the wall I needed to paint. Not a dealbreaker, but there’s no reason why it can’t be better.

I also totally get that Hozy isn’t meant to be this kind of game but it does feel like it’s screaming out for mods and a level editor. The curated experience definitely helps in keeping those TTP times manageable, I get it, but it feels like this would be a great platform for people to build upon.

Hozy does everything it says on the tin: setting you free to interior design the hours away on an eclectic bunch of items that’s been lovingly curated by the developers. It asks very little of you and gives back some pretty pictures in return. It could do with a bit more polish, and maybe some extensions to give it some amazing longevity, but even in its current state it’s likely worth a look in if you’re needing something in this particular genre.

Rating: 7.75/10

Hozy is available on PC right now for $19.99. Total playtime was 3.5 hours with 100% of the achievements unlocked.

Ah Caleb, welcome. You’re here to go back to the past and find those memories of pure joy, love and happiness. We’ve found here that focusing on these memories helps with our process immensely, helping us to form a core of wonderful experiences that we can then use to build on further. Now, of course, everything you see here isn’t real and has been designed with your utmost safety in mind. So just relax and listen to my voice, we’ll be getting to work shortly, and remember to stay on the path that I set for you. We don’t want you straying too far from your happy core now do we?

The work put into the assets of Subliminal can’t be understated as they are right up there with numerous other games that have gone for that pure, photorealistic aesthetic. There’s no doubt in my mind that a lot of time was spent wrangling photogrammetric assets, refining the lighting to get that harsh fluorescent glow and so many other processes and details that I’m blissfully unaware of. The result speaks for itself although I will admit the screenshots don’t really do it justice as it really something else to see it in motion.

Subliminal isn’t a walking simulator per-se, although it’s really not far from it. The core game loop is exploration based, having you explore through the environment you’re in to find things, discover puzzles and generally get familiar with the environment before you tick off that one thing it wants you to do to progress. There’s a number of what are effectively quick time events without the on-screen prompts for the…higher-tension sections of the game but apart from that there’s really not much that changes from level to level. That being said though the problem that I had, and many others did it seems, was just how weird and intractable most of the puzzles are, something which the narrative unfortunately can’t make up for.

The opening sections of the game weren’t too bad for this as the mechanical complexity was low and the narrative pace felt right. However that all slows down significantly in the following levels, especially when it’s not exactly clear just how you’re supposed to progress a particular section. Suddenly you’re running around in circles, wondering if there was some switch or pattern you simply didn’t recognise all the while the narrator is completely silent and the environment gives you no further clues as to what the narrative might reveal.

Which had me asking the question of whether or not I’d seen everything I needed to in order to make an assessment of it after only an hour and a half. The honest answer was yes and it was mostly because whilst the game was making an attempt to draw me in with the bit of worldbuilding it did at the start it failed to capitalise on that in any way. I know, doing full voice overs for games like this is an expensive endeavour in all respects, but the many games that Subliminal takes inspiration from were good because they made that investment to make sure that the player was still engaged even when the puzzles were failing them.

To their credit though the devs have heard this feedback and are taking steps to make it more approachable to a wider audience. Despite what a few vocal detractors have to say on the Community Hub that’s a good thing and something I hope we see more of. You really have to look no further than how Supergiant games changed up the narrative of Hades II based on the critical reception it garnered to see how these things can be for the better. Art can be art for its own sake but there’s much to be said about making it fit an audience. We may not be asking Banksy to change the colours of Girl with Balloon, but you sure as shit can find enough examples of people doing exactly that because that’s how they’ll enjoy it.

Anyway, getting off my philosophical high horse here, this puts Subliminal firmly in the category of wait for now. Whilst it gets so many things right the puzzle pacing and overall narrative means there’s just not enough there for me to recommend it right now. I’m glad the devs are listening and maybe there’s hope that future episodes will pull me back but even should that happen I think I’ll be watching a Let’s Play before I dive back in myself.

Rating: 6.5/10

Subliminal is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 1.5 hours with 4% of the achievements unlocked.

Raccoin, which its full name Coin Pusher Roguelike describes aptly, puts you in charge of extracting a set amount of value out of one of those tried and treasured coin pushers. The base mechanics are easy enough to understand: put coins in, they fall in and push others out, simple. The challenge comes from the ever-increasing score you need to achieve which is only possible through the strategic use of special coins, items and the various interactions that all of these have with each other. It’s very much in the vein of Balatro where the initial mechanics seem straightforward enough but the real depth comes from the complexity around the interactions of all the different mechanics.

The visual style of Raccoin has its feet in two camps: on the one side it would seem like your typical low poly/low texture indie but, with the addition of some rather clever filtering it becomes a kind of retro-future pixel art interpretation of said style. The most fun part about this is when you’re given the option to choose your pixel size as one of the starting options which, should you choose to max it out, does help to sell the premise that this was some kind of found-game from a bygone era of CRTs and limited graphics budgets.

The game’s tutorial does a good job of getting you familiar with the core mechanics in a limited setting before unleashing you on the game proper. There is still a lot, and I really mean a lot, that’s not said as part of that tutorial though as it basically boils down to strategy. Pushing coins, choosing things that look cool and just generally fumbling your way through will probably get you half way through a run (which goes for 15 rounds) but it will become obvious rather quickly just how much steam your current build has. This is, of course, by design: you don’t start off with all the coins unlocked, there are numerous ones that don’t synergize with your chosen character class and simple luck of the roll will determine what tools you have access to.

For instance the game lets you play past winning the current round which, if you’re feeling like you’re onto something good, can be a good way to bolster your ticket reserves which are the main currency for upgrades. Doing that though could land you in a lot of hot water for the next round though, as a bunch of coins dropping after the fact do not count towards the next rounds score at all. So even though your total score might be well beyond what the current round requires you still need to earn whatever that round demands.

That’s only example as well and keeping track of all these different mechanics and how they interact is going to be the difference between consistently winning rounds and being taken by the will of RNGesus at every turn. For Balatro veterans this is really nothing new; learning which mechanics you’ve got and how they can scale is part of the core game loop. For newcomers to this kind of genre though it’s likely going to be daunting and a little bit frustrating given just how many different ways there are for things to interact with each other. Thankfully though the devs are frequent posters in their own subreddit providing some great clarity on how things work.

Some keen readers may have noted in my opening paragraph that I mentioned I’d been on an incremental binge and that Raccoin, despite one of its core features being big-number-go-up, isn’t one of those; it’s a Roguelike deckbuilder. Therein lies the rub as to why I didn’t gel with it as much I think as whilst I certainly had fun in certain runs (all of which the screenshots in this review are taken from) I didn’t get that same hook into me like I usually do with incrementals. Funnily enough this kind of echoes my experience with Balatro as my initial review capped out somewhere at 5 hours or so. Today though? I’ve got over 30 hours played in it, far less than some but still a pretty good innings for a game that I’d basically thought I was done with at the time. Does that mean Raccoin is due for a second wind post-review? Maybe, although I’ll be honest and say I haven’t really felt the desire to go back…yet.

Raccoin does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a roguelike deckbuilder that uses the genre as firm basis whilst showcasing it’s own unique take on the idea. The base mechanics are solid, making it easy enough to get into but incredibly challenging to master. Of course there’s numerous posts, videos and guides out there showcasing absolutely ridiculous numbers that can be generated and I’m sure many Balatro faithfuls will find a good home here. For me, whilst I enjoyed the time I spent with it, that same big number hook I’d been craving just didn’t seem to catch. Maybe it will someday but for now I think I’ll be giving this genre, and all those like it, a rest for a while.

Rating: 8.0/10

Raccoin is available on PC right now for $17.75. Total playtime was 3.2 hours with 13% of the achievements unlocked.