The premise is easy enough to understand: you can start off with washing dishes to make a few bucks before you’ll be given access to a catalogue of scratchers to try and gamble your way out whatever poverty you seem to find yourself in. The secret advantage you have over everyone else trying these scratchers is that you can, through means that are probably nefarious in nature, increase your luck with them. The usual house advantage will no longer applies and you are now free to scratch as many as you want in order to make your coin. But how fast can you do it and, when the time comes, will you be the good company man that your benefactors want you to be?

Incrementals, roguelikes and deck builders alike have all seemed to settle on the pixel art aesthetic for one reason or another. Maybe it’s the disarming sense of nostalgia, perhaps is the ease at which those assets can be created or possibly it’s because simple graphics such as those mean there’s a whole bunch more headroom for performance when you start stressing your poor computer with floating point calculations that are far beyond anything it’s ever seen before. Whatever the reason Scritchy Scratchy pulls it off well, riffing on the Balatro-esque aesthetics with its own unique take.

Scritchy Scratchy is an incremental and we all know what that means: your primary directive is to make that number go up. It’s a simple game of calculating the payback percentage on any particular ticket and then rinsing the one with the highest payout until you unlock the next one that you can start working on. Your main barriers to progression will come in the form of the upgrades available to you, initially starting with more direct things like luck, coin size and coin strength. The last two matter in the game’s early stages as you will be scratching a lot of tickets early on before you start to unlock other items that will allow you to be more hands off. After each round you’ll accumulate a number of points that you can then spend on permanent upgrades which you’ll need if you want to hit those higher numbers in any reasonable amount of time.

The game does a good job of subtly signalling to you when it’s time to end the current run by slowing progress down to a crawl. It’s at this point you can either pivot to maximising the amount of upgrade points you’ll be taking away, usually by going back and winning jackpots you might’ve missed, or simply restart the run and then hope the upgrades you choose make a material difference. If I’m honest most of them don’t feel particularly game changing on their own however there are a lot of them that open up potential additional strategies for progression that help to cover over some of the more boring sections of a particular run.

It took me a few hours to get the hang of everything as I found myself getting through the first couple stages relatively quickly but then started to stall out with Catalogue #2 due to the rather high cost associated with “bad” tickets. Now there are ways to avoid that and indeed one upgrade erases that problem entirely but there was definitely a couple hours there where I felt like there was a gate on my progress that required a lot more manual work than I was expecting. Once you realise that it’s just a matter of the right upgrades and figuring out the timing of when to switch up to the next scratcher things start to feel a lot more even from a pacing perspective.

Then what’s left after you’ve seemingly beaten the game? Well there’s a number of achievements that push you down the non-traditional route and they are quite fun to accomplish. I’ve stopped myself short of trying to 100% the game though as the gap between where I am and that goal is enough to make me question how much fun I’d actually have doing it. I am most certainly the kind of person who could accidentally ruin their impression of game should I keep playing beyond where I felt satisfied with it.

I had only a couple minor issues when playing it, seemingly arising from alt-tabbing at certain sections. There was a part when I was about to end a run (you’ll know it when you get there) where a button simply didn’t register a click for me. Now I’m not complaining too much about that as it did net me an achievement but there were some other times when the hit detection went out the window for a bit. Thankfully the game’s checkpointing is amazing and essentially zero progress was lost when I had to recover from one of those events.

Scritchy Scratchy is everything I need from an incremental game: a good mix of mechanics, the ongoing dopamine hits of bigger numbers and just enough challenge to make it engaging throughout any one run. I honestly did not expect to get as hooked (or nerd snipe my friend so hard) with it but in all honesty that’s the kind of surprise I don’t mind having sprung on me. If this genre is your jam then you can’t go past Scritchy Scratchy, it’s well worth the time.

Rating: 8.75/10

Scritchy Scratchy is available on PC and Android right now for $9.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 8.7 hours total playtime and 85% of the achievements unlocked.

SPOILERS FOR Planet of Lana BELOW

The robots that sought to enslave humanity have instead now become its saviors, bringing with them the kinds of progress that only technology can. Humans are still slaves to the nature however and with the opportunity to drive great progress comes with it the desire to be the one who controls it. Whilst there are many who welcome technological progress at seemingly any cost there are still many of those who wish to continue their lives as they once were, forcing the change to adapt to them rather than the other way around. This tension has begun to boil over and there’s now war brewing, threatening the peace that Lana brought to this world.

Planet of Lana II’s visuals is exactly what you’d expect from a sequel: more and better. The amount of detail in the environment has been increased, lighting effects are better and more liberally used, the colours more vibrant and just generally better overall. The sense of scale is still there too with the camera expertly pulling back and pushing in at the right times to cement that feeling of you just being a small part of a much larger world. Again the music is a highlight which you’d expect coming from the BAFTA-nominated composer Takeshi Furukawa who was also responsible for the amazing sound track of The Last Guardian.

The core game play of Planet of Lana II is largely unchanged, keeping to it’s simple puzzle platformer roots. Most of your time will be spent moving across the screen from left to right, admiring the scenery as it goes by before you’re dumped into a platforming/puzzle section that you have to make your way through. There’s some additional meta-game elements included in the form of the journal and the collectibles but for the most part they aren’t really aren’t a part of the core game loop. There are some additional puzzle elements that are thrown in here and there but they’re just usually for that section. It might not be the most innovative sequel but it at least recognises the core of what made the original great.

Just like the original there’s nothing in any of the puzzles or platforming sections that will challenge most players. Whilst there are a few sections that will require a bit of trial and error you’re not going to be spending 10+ minutes on a single puzzle just trying to figure out what the solution needs to be. The additional section specific mechanics are introduced well, making sure you understand what it does before introducing you to a novel application of the concept. Probably the biggest new mechanic, and calling it new is somewhat generous, is the addition of another controllable NPC character in some sections with new abilities. Not particularly novel, but it does make for some additional puzzle variety that the original didn’t have.

There’s a few rough edges on some of the game’s main mechanics which usually shows up in some of the edge case interactions. It’s not game breaking, but there were a few untimely deaths or fails on a puzzle because something glitched out. At the same time I spent far longer on some puzzles because I thought I had a solution but couldn’t make it work because Mui or another interaction wouldn’t trigger until I reloaded. Annoying, and definitely frustrating when you’re not sure if you’re barking up the right tree, but once you know that can happen you can at least compensate for it.

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW

The real fault I’m finding with Planet of Lana II though is the narrative itself. Whilst I always applaud those who choose to tell a narrative in a non-traditional sense that doesn’t give you a pass for a badly constructed story. The game’s opening moments setup for a conflict that Lana is then immediately side-lined from, sending you on a long set of fetch quests that doesn’t really help to build out the core narrative at all. To be sure, some of the other sections do build the narrative out, but Lana’s journey for the most part is entirely secondary to what feels like the main storyline that’s going on outside of where you are.

Then there’s the ending which, if I’m honest, was a complete slap in the face when the previous game managed to wrap everything up so well. I get it, you had success with the original and now feel emboldened to chase a much grander vision but to spend an entire game on simply setting up for the next one feels indulgent at best and disrespectful to the player at worst. Will I play the inevitable Planet of Lana III, sure, but narratively this game feels like a complete, unforced misstep from a developer who showed they could craft a solid, well contained narrative.

PLOT SPOILERS OVER

More of the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing and, for Planet of Lana II, it gets almost everything right. The visuals have been uplifted, the music is still great and the casual puzzle-platforming is just as accessible as ever. Where it falls short is in the execution of its narrative, making the mistake of sacrificing this game for the potential of a sequel. I’m hopeful that we’ll see it and get the payoff that a good trilogy deliver but after seeing Wishfully deliver a great, self contained game leaving everything on a cliffhanger just feels like a giant mistake.

Rating: 7.0/10

Planet of Lana II is available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X, Nintendo Switch 1/2 and PC right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5.5 hours total playtime and 80% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.

The ambition of humanity knows no limits. Driven by the desire to spread their reach further beyond the clutches of the solar system that birthed them humanity engaged in an engineering project beyond any they had attempted before. This is what birthed the Marathon, a colony ship that was built from the hollowed out core of one of Mars’s moons, Deimos. The destination was set for the faraway planet of Tau Ceti VI where it was tasked with setting up a new kind of colony, one free of the bounds of its homeworld. The ship went dark some time ago, leaving humanity wondering what had happened to the settlers aboard the Marathon. This is where you come in, having traded your humanity for immortality, you shall die endlessly in order to find out what happened and maybe even earn yourself a tidy profit along the way.

The aesthetic of Marathon brings back memories of the clean future art style that Mirror’s Edge popularised all those years ago. The oversaturated colour palette is something that really needs a HDR monitor to be seen as I honestly couldn’t think of another game that made me just appreciate just how vivid colours in a game could actually be. The rest of the game’s visuals are clean and pristine with environments overflowing with detail that takes some time getting used to. Some of this did come at the cost of asset reuse however, with a lot of areas using the same building blocks just repeated in slightly different ways. Despite all this visual fidelity though performance remains rock solid, even through the most intense gun fights. It certainly shows that Bungie has been no slouch when it comes to creating slick, gunplay focused games.

Marathon is a class-based extraction shooter, pitting you against NPCs and players alike in a battle to scrounge up loot and get it safely back to your stash. Whilst I wouldn’t exactly call myself a veteran of the genre many of the familiar extraction shooter tropes apply: different areas with varying levels of loot, exposed extraction points, the pervasive tension that makes you question every move and a variety of quests to push you to do things beyond just looting and extracting. The class system is an interesting twist on the formula, giving you some options in building out your kit to maximise your innate abilities. Couple that with the faction system which stands in for the usual talent tree and you’ve got an experience that’s instantly familiar but very much it’s own thing when compared to other games in the genre.

If there’s one thing Bungie knows well it’s FPS combat and Marathon is simply the next game in the long list showing this off. Each of the different weapons has its own personality and you’ll quickly find yourself gravitating to one particular style more than others. If I’m honest the TTK for an extraction shooter felt a lot shorter than I thought it would be with some engagements ending about as quickly as a 1v1 match in Destiny used to. That is, of course, a big function of gear and I will say that as I progressed somewhat I did find it easier to survive longer the more kit I was rocking. Still though with the game’s out and out focus on PVP and rapid redeployment maybe the lower TTK is what keeps people locked in the loop longer.

Which brings me to the main point about my own experience with the game. I played solo for my entire playthrough and, whilst I don’t wholly regret that, it definitely felt like I was getting maybe 20% of the game and doing it the hard way. Partly this was because of my naive thinking that it was more like Arc Raiders, where being friendly and casual is a given if that’s what you want, but Marathon does not encourage cooperative play between squads at all. So once you’re OK with murder first, ask questions later mentality things start to get a whole lot better but the grind starts to sting a whole lot more.

I had a maybe 30% success rate on extracting which meant that I was pretty low on resources consistently. This also meant that in an hour long session I might be lucky to successfully extract once and that’s not nearly materials to afford any meaningful upgrades which would’ve kept me coming back. To be sure part of this is a skill issue, something which further play might have improved, but without something driving me forward I found it hard to continue on. With a crew that shared sense of loss and going on again was enough to keep me coming back but alone? It’s hard to push past multiple defeats when it feels like every one of them doesn’t really get you anywhere.

Which is a shame as it seems like Marathon could be the kind of game I could really sink my teeth into had I been able to convince my crew to come along with me. Reading up on some of the experiences that squads are having in the Cryo Archive raid had me recounting my time when the Vault of Glass opened up in the original Destiny, something which I thoroughly enjoyed playing not just for the challenge and the loot, but the lore that came along with it. By all accounts Bungie has managed to craft yet another one of those moments which, I’m infinitely happy for, even if I only get to experience it second hand.

Marathon felt like a last chance for Bungie; one last attempt at making something great before the big axe of capitalism came to claim another game developer. Whilst my experience of the game might not be what they intended I can still see it for what it is and truly I tip my hat to them. Whilst this likely means that Marathon is the last thing we’ll see from Bungie for a while I’m glad that they’ll likely be around for a good while yet and, maybe, their next IP will manage to strike home for me. For now though Marathon will be one of those lost loves for me and all I can hope for is that they’re happy with someone else.

Rating: 8.0/10

Marathon is available on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 right now for $59.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5.1 hours playtime and 21% of the achievements unlocked.

Lyca’s premise is simple: you’re a magical wolf who has the power to restore a barren wasteland into a vibrant field of verdant green. You do this by running around, breaking up the ground and spawning wild grasses. The next part is something that’s easily missed but if you run back over the grass you’ll bring it even further into life and generate yourself some currency that you can use on building out the skill tree. That skill tree then unlocks more abilities for you to do your job of bringing life back to the barren biome much easier and so the cycle continues as you pursue the incremental dream of making the numbers go higher.

I’ll admit to the first half hour or so being a bit confusing as I either missed a pop up or maybe clicked too fast on something which meant I didn’t really get the core mechanic. Really it’s simple: you need to “break” the earth to generate grass, then by running back over said grass you get the main currency. Your energy is depleted by both running around and by breaking ground, so the game’s opening moments are a balance between getting enough tiles green and having enough time to activate them. Once you’ve got that settled then it’s a pretty straightforward experience as you start chasing the various upgrades.

From there it’s actually a pretty linear experience as the upgrades are self explanatory. To be sure there’s likely a best path that you can directly optimise for but like most incrementals there comes a point where you’ve ticked off all the upgrades that seem important and the others feel more like nice to haves more than anything else. Lyca’s real trick though is having you build a talent tree all the way to the top only to then reveal that, no no no you’re not done yet, with the second progression path unlocking below. Usually I’d chide a game for a fake out like that but Lyca does it at just the right time in a playthrough; where you feel like you have command of everything and the challenge is starting to drain away.

There are a few technical issues that block one path of progression which was a little irritating. For some reason the game didn’t seem to recognise when the screen was fully filled with grass because of some of the gaps that appear which you can’t seem to fill no matter what you do. This meant that the challenges section of the game simply didn’t progress for me at all, no matter what I did. The Steam community forums had a few others experiencing the same issue so hopefully it’ll get fixed in a future revision.

Lyca is exactly what I’ve come to expect from this genre. It’s simple, has a good depth of mechanics and strikes the right balance between idler and clicker. I needed something like this to get me over the hump I was experiencing and Lyca hit the spot perfectly. There’s really not much more to say about it because if you’re into incrementals then you’ll already know what you’re signing up for.

Rating: 8.0/10

Lyca is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $7.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3 hours playtime and 83% of the achievements unlocked.

The premise is simple: an archer wants to master the bow by shooting at targets. In the beginning you’ll be setting out targets for them to shoot at, clicking at regular intervals to ensure that they don’t waste a second before notching the next arrow. As time goes on you’ll unlock new stats to upgrade, quests to pursue and a kind of talent tree that gives you access to the kinds of arrows that can really wreck some havoc. All that is backdropped by a simple pixel art background and the soft thud and tinkling noises of arrows hitting targets.

Like all incrementals the game starts out pretty slow at first with most of your interactions spent with just keeping the thing going via repetitive clicking more than anything else. The game really starts to get going once you’ve unlocked quests and the wider array of stats that you can build as then you’ll be focusing more on what’s the next objective is that you want to achieve. At the start it does kind of matter which ones you choose (I.E. focusing on the experience once seems to help more) but after a while you can pretty much just set and forget it.

The real challenge in Magic Archery, I feel, is likely for those who want to do repeat playthroughs to beat their time. Whilst I managed a respectable 56 minutes and 14 seconds (with a few of those final minutes spent wanting to unlock everything in the magic tree just for fun) there’s a number examples of people getting 40 minute runs without resorting to any kind of insane tactics or exploits. Whilst I haven’t bothered to do that myself the runs that people are describing there seem pretty self evident once you know what the various options are and their impact on your progression.

That’s really all there is to say about it. It’s a well built incremental that, unlike many other similar games I’ve played before, doesn’t want for more of your time than it needs. It follows all the standard tropes but it does them well making it the perfect distraction if you find yourself with a night free and are in need of some entertainment.

Rating: 8.0/10

Magic Archery is available on PC right now for free. Total play time was approximately 1 hour with 100% of the achievements unlocked.

Romeo was just your average rural beat cop, living out a life that wasn’t so different from everyone elses. That was until one day he came across a woman unconscious lying in the middle of the road. When she woke though she had no memory of who she was and over the coming weeks her and Romeo developed a blossoming romance as they tried to find out her past. That all came to an abrupt end when it became clear that she was just one face of a time-travelling evil as rotters from other dimensions descended on Romeo’s hometown. Luckily his grandfather was a master of time travel and was able to save Romeo from certain death, converting him into something not living but also not quite dead. So was born Deadman, the latest addition to the FBI’s time travelling crime fighting specialist squadron.

If that hodge podge of an introduction has got you reeling then the visuals of Romeo is a Deadman aren’t going to help any. Whilst the main game has you in a third person world that, for whatever reason, reminded me distinctly of the visual style Dead Rising the game’s overworld is done in a pixel art style. All of these elements cross-pollinate between each other in various elements, like the overlays retaining the pixel-art style in the 3D world and some of the artwork using the 3D renders showing up in the overworld. Couple that with the comic book cinematic sections, various surreal 3D renderings and a smattering of other wacky visual elements and there’s a real lack of visual cohesiveness throughout the entire game.

But that’s not the only part which doesn’t really fit.

Romeo is a Deadman is effectively a loose grab bag of a bunch of different mechanics slapped together into a muddled experience. To be sure there’s a solid core of a hack and slash game in here, one that pits you against hordes of “rotters” that you’ll have to massacre your way through to complete your objectives. Surrounding that though is a bunch of ancillary things which are ostensibly for progression and giving you more tools but they all feel tacked on and out of place with the rest of the game. For instance there’s a whole game about farming bastards which are rotters that you control, a katsu curry cooking minigame, a kind of space mining/level selection sim, a maze that you navigate using one of the main currencies to get small upgrades and so on. There’s a lot of these kinds of things and, thematically, they kind of fit but in practice it just feels like you’re playing a bunch of different games that share the same launcher.

The combat is OK in a sense that yeah, it’s your standard hack and slash affair which seems to do its job well enough. However everything feels a bit floaty, imprecise and generally just a bit B grade for want of a better term. This is no better highlighted than in the boss fights where most of them are simply relegated to you beating away at the feet of some giant monstrosity who, for whatever reason, only has a single move to try and stop you from doing that. The levels are all linear with most of the exploration simply having you explore different iterations of the same room over and over again. I really didn’t come in with any kinds of expectations for this game but even that couldn’t stop me from seeing just how unpolished it all was.

This extends to the grab bag of other mechanics that feel like they were just thrown in because they felt like a good idea at the time. Like yeah, I can understand wanting to make the upgrade and progression mechanics different and interesting but they’re all so poorly realised that it makes engaging with them annoying rather than rewarding. Like the bastard farming system which requires you to sit through a cutscene every time you farm one or the maze upgrades which have an obtuse movement scheme that just makes it feel wonky. With so many different things, all with their own way of implementing them coupled with the lack of visual cohesion you are just left with a confused mess of different things that simply don’t work together at all.

Which is then capped off by the narrative which, I get it, is supposed to be surreal but the way it’s told is just simply bad. Like you have multiple rehashes of the initial plot, all of which only seem to add either the smallest detail or simply confuse the events of the initial story just because. Then you’ve characters and dialogue that feel like it was written by a high school student which, I’ll admit, could be due to something being lost in translation but honestly when all of the characters say multiple times things like “Romeo, I mean Deadman” or “Maybe we should call you Deadman” or “It’s Deadman now right?” it’s like, we get it, he’s got a new identity. Or how Romeo’s motivation for finding Juliet seems razor thin and only seems to come up after each boss battle. It’s just…bad.

Romeo is a Deadman is a confused mess, the sum of its parts adding up to much less than its whole. Whilst individual elements are competent enough nothing really feels like it’s been made to fit together properly. I can see the argument that this is the point of the whole thing but really, there’s ways to make a surreal/unhinged/disjointed game that still manages to make everything work together. Given I know little of Suda51 and his work this might just be par for the course but suffice to say, even going with no expectations, I still feel like I didn’t get much out of my time with Romeo is a Deadman.

Rating: 6.0/10

Romeo is a Deadman is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $73.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 5.5 hours and 25% of the achievements unlocked.

The peak of Kami stands unconquered, it’s slopes before the summit littered with the gear, memories and corpses of all of those who have dared tried it. Aava though is unperturbed as she has conquered every other mountain in this world and so there is only this left for her. This is no simple lonely mountain however as for many years it was home to a number of Troglodyte villages which have all long since been abandoned. So whilst Aava intends her journey up the mountain will be a solitary one Aava will be accompanied by the ghosts of the past and the handful of those who have decided to remain. All the while the outside world continues to intrude: her sponsors asking for updates, her partner with updates on life outside the mountain and the memories of those left behind who tried the same climb as her. None of this seems to phase Aava though as all that exists for her now is the mountain.

Cairn’s cel shaded aesthetic is as crisp as any implementation I’ve seen before with incredible levels of details in the models, texturing and lighting. As you’d expect the game is at its strongest when you’re out on the side of the mountain, taking in the wide ranging vistas that stretch on well into the horizon. This isn’t to say that the interior sections aren’t well done as well though, more that the lack of details in some areas are more apparent when you’re forced up close. The environments also feel alive thanks to the dynamic weather and day/night cycles which form a key part of the game’s core climbing mechanics. Whilst I’m starting to get the feeling that cel-shading is the next low-poly/low-texture aesthetic trend for indies I can’t say I’m completely upset with that when it’s done this well.

If it wasn’t obvious from the game’s screenshots Cairn is a climbing simulator, one that pits you against a single mountain. You’ll be scouting out for holds, cracks and crevices everywhere in order to make your way up whilst also balancing the numerous survival mechanics to ensure you don’t black out halfway through a climb. You have a few modern conveniences to assist you on your journey: self drilling pitons that serve as rest stops during a climb, a climbing robot that will act as your belay and communications with the outside world and your hiking pole/light. Whilst there’s no in-built progression system you can find certain items along the way that will make certain things easier although they’re by no means required. After each section you’ll likely find a place to bivvy up for a short rest to cook food, bandage your fingers and repair broken pitons. All in all it seems like a very well realised climbing simulator.

The climbing can feel a little GIRP-ish at times as Aava seems to be able to contort herself into all manner of weird and wonderful shapes in order to get herself a good hold. I’ll lay the blame partly for this on the game’s automatic next move system which, depending on how Aava is situated, will select the “best” limb to move with next for you. Now this works most of the time, I’d say maybe 60% or so, but it fails often enough that you can find yourself moving something that doesn’t quite make sense. This can quickly end you up in a tangle as you try to reposition your limbs which, even when selecting them directly, can feel a little bit more like an art rather than a science.

However it seems that being contorted in all sorts of unnatural ways isn’t usually something that’ll send you off the mountain. Most of the time it’ll be a bad grip on something, like if you’re just jamming your foot against the rock face or gently caressing a rock rather than gripping it. That seemed to be what would trigger Aava’s shakes and wobbles the most as no matter how strange of a position I was in as long as I had a firm grip or hold on all my limbs I could stay there basically indefinitely.

After awhile you start to get a good feel for how the automatic system works and how to best position yourself for it to make the right moves far more often. I still found myself reaching for the manual limb selection pretty often to make certain moves but once you’re in a flow with it you can breeze through lengthy climbing sections with ease. What usually becomes the issue at that point though is the fuzziness in gripping your preferred holds as it can be hard to get your hands or feet in the right position so they grip rather than just simply hold. There was many a panicked piton slammed into the mountain because I didn’t manage to grab the hold I was aiming for and the shakes set in with deadly speed.

The increase in challenge is done pretty linearly, giving you plenty of time to get familiar with your limits before the game starts to send some real pearlers your way. I can distinctly remember the first climb where I found myself on my last piton, staring up at the finish line which was still some ways away. Thankfully with careful planning, chalk and smashing some of the carefully hoarded supplies I had in my backpack I made it up there on the second attempt, the first failing because I found myself stuck under a bridge and not being able to climb up on it.

Which is probably the only kind of technical issue I came across throughout most of the game. The detection of walkable areas is pretty on point for most places but there was a non-zero number of places where I found myself flopped over the edge, scrambling to try and somehow get upright before my grip gave out. I did have 1 or 2 deaths because of this as well which was annoying but nothing game breaking.

Cairn’s narrative takes the hard road with such a deeply unlikable character in Aava. To be sure I can understand and share her motivations, putting everything to one side to achieve something that no one else has before, but the vast majority of her interactions with others speaks to that behaviour not being constrained to just when she’s on the mountain. Of course part of this is to highlight the cost that comes with the pursuit of goals such as these which isn’t just limited to the toll it takes on a climber’s body. To be fair to the game though I have it on good authority that you have some level of influence on how that all plays out in the end. I won’t spoil much but for those who’ve seen the below scene in the game will know which path I took.

Cairn was something I waxed and waned on multiple times throughout my playthrough. It was something that’d been on my radar for a while and I was excited for it, but the game’s slower opening hours coupled with the frustration with the movement system made it slow going initially. But after a while of getting into the flow of it suddenly the game became more about conquering the challenge more than anything else and that’s when it’s mechanics really began to shine. I wish I could say the narrative was more of a highlight but, in the end, it just felt like the selfish tale of a climber who put everything else aside in pursuit of one thing. All this being said though there’s precious few games that manage to build an experience like this so just on that point alone I think it’s worth a look in.

Rating: 8.75/10

Cairn is available on PC and PlayStation 5 right now for $43.95. Game was played on the PC with 11.1 hours of total playtime and 51% of the achievements unlocked.

*This is embodied ratherwell in Taylor Tomlinson’s recent special riffing on the concept of Christianity being “Won’t it be great when we can all be dead with Daddy?” and, well, all the dead mum jokes that followed.

The ship is dying, her heart no longer having the strength to continue on. So we must look to you, little one, to awaken and try to stave off the darkness that we seemed doomed to succumb to. There is only bones left of the vibrant world that the ship once held but her voices are still with us, hiding away in their sanctuaries waiting for the end to come. If you can convince them to join with us then maybe, just maybe, the heart can be reassured that all is not lost. Can you do that for us, little spark?

The heavy cel-shading of MIO is done so well that it feels like it’s all hand drawn. There’s a number of great touches that add to this effect: the slightly wonky bordering on all the edges, the coarse shading to indicate light shadows and the subtle paper texturing on every surface. Given this is a fully 3D game all of this comes to us via clever use of shaders (well, that’s my guess anyway) but it’s done so well that the difference between MIO and the fully hand-drawn games I’ve played in the past is quite slim. MIO’s use of colour is also phenomenal with the game’s hues working in concert with the narrative to set the overall mood of each area perfectly.

I was on the edge of calling MIO the essence game for metroidvania, given that the game’s opening moments focused purely in on the things that make that particular genre great. Playing further though revealed a much larger mechanical depth than I’d first anticipated, so whilst it doesn’t merit that particular title it is a rather well realised game in that genre. All the standard metroidvania affair is there: platforming, movement skills, combat/boss fights that require split second precision and a focus on exploration. There’s a couple progression systems thrown in for good measure, giving you the ability to shape the experience to your liking or, if you’re like me, give you the safety net you need to ease the frustration to more manageable levels. It’s easy to see why MIO has gotten the praise it has; it’s built extremely well.

Platforming feels good, for the most part. You’ll get a feel for how the movement works relatively quickly and the additional abilities you’re granted are usually contextual so you’re not going to end up having to juggle half a dozen different movement abilities to make it through most of the platforming sections. I will say that platforming seems to be at it’s best when it becomes muscle memory (or when you’re simply not paying attention) as there were numerous times when I had an amazing run only to fail to do the same thing again when I tried to repeat it. That probably says more about me than anything else.

However the one thing that irks me about a lot of metroidvanias is how they address increasing the challenge when it comes to platforming: increasing the length. Now long platforming sections can be fun, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy a handful of them in MIO, but what broke me was a particular one in the manufacturing area that was well over 5 minutes long with no checkpoints anywhere. After attempting it a good dozen times to only come unstuck at the final point (which, at that point, I could only get 3 tries at) I simply gave up in frustration. It’s sad to have to do that but when you’re simply not having fun anymore I don’t really see the point in continuing.

Combat is mostly OK, even if some of the trash enemies can feel a little bit unforgiving with their timings. Boss fights also feel incredibly unfair when you first get into them, especially when all of them have a second phase that just screams “fuck you player” with some of their tricks, but as always the real boss challenge in these encounters is you. All of the bosses I fought had attack patterns that, once learnt, were predictable enough to avoid them and most of the challenge came from working out the particular gimmick that would rob you of health points if you couldn’t do the required platforming.

MIO’s narrative is one that’s told in fits and starts, giving you small glimpses of the vessel’s past and present whilst leaving it up to you to stitch it all together. Early on this serves you well as it means you’re not wading through walls of text or countless interactions, focusing you in on getting into the game itself. I will say that later on this lack of information does start to hurt a little bit as the drip feed of details never seems to ramp up. This could also be me missing some flavour text here and there as looking at the forums and discussion around it the lore seems to be far more fleshed out than I’d give it credit for. That could also be due to me dropping it early because of my frustration with the platforming too.

Putting this all together MIO: Memories in Orbit sits in that awkward part of my brain where I both appreciate it deeply for what it is but also can’t shake that feeling that I left it on a bad note. The visuals, sound design and mechanics are all implemented well, making for a solid metroidvania if I’ve ever seen one. The extended platforming sections and lack of narrative development had me putting this game down much earlier than I otherwise would have. So whilst I’ll heartily recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good metroidvania it’ll unfortunately be sitting on the shelf for me forever more.

Rating: 8.25/10

MIO: Memories in Orbit is available on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 1/2 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $31.55. Game was played on the PC with a total of 9.3 hours playtime and 35% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.

Swann sits in her car, hands gripping the steering wheel as she stares at the billboard across the road. It’s been 27 years since she was last here and her mind is racing whilst her mum tries to talk to her on the phone, asking all the probing questions that Swann doesn’t want to answer. There is one question that keeps replaying in her head over and over though: why did it take this long for her to come back? These were her best friends and the final summer they spent together was nothing sort of incredible. What happened to them? Why did they drift apart? What starts out as a reunion of friends long since estranged quickly turns into a replay of the traumatic events that led to them making that promise: to never see each other again.

Lost Records’ aesthetic instantly reminded me of Life is Strange, albeit with the increase in craftsmanship that you’d expect from a now veteran developer house. The stylized realism, coupled with the soft lighting and vivid colour palette, gives it a very dreamlike quality. That’s amped more in the flashback sections, providing a kind of visual distinction between the past and present sections. The camcorder view is a nice touch too, the slight blur and coarse pixelation instantly taking me back to the days of making and viewing our own home family movies. There could be a bit more attention paid to optimisation in some places as there were a good number of sections where the framerate dropped right through the floor only to recover once I’d exited the area. Overall it’s level of quality I’ve come to expect from a DON’TNOD game.

Lots Records is an interactive fiction game with a heavy focus on player choice. Most of your time is going to be spent making choices in dialogue with the other characters, shaping the narrative arc as you go. There’s an exploration mechanic included by way of Swann’s camcorder. As you explore and record the world around you there’ll be different categories of things to film which you can then create short movies out of. Mostly this is just a way to get you to explore the world, unlock additional dialogue and engage in a bit more worldbuilding to flesh out the world that Lost Records exists in. There are puzzles too although they’re usually pretty straightforward and the other characters will start to relentlessly drop hints if you’re showing signs of struggling. Nothing exactly earth shatteringly unique here but what it does, it does very well.

You’ll spend your time between two time periods: current day (late 2022) and the past (mid 1995). The choices you make in the latter have an effect on both, either opening up or closing off dialogue options depending on the previous choices you’ve made. There’s also an undisclosed relationship meter hiding behind the scenes with various choices changing it for the better or worse. You’ll start to get a feel for what kinds of choices are the right ones for the characters although, like all real world relationships, there’s really no hard and fast rule to figuring out what the right thing to say is.

I will admit to being somewhat frustrated with the game’s pacing initially. There’s an incredible amount of foreshadowing very early on and so you’ll often find yourself asking how the events that are being replayed in front of you are in building towards those major plot points. Much of the game’s early parts are focused on building out the base relationships between the characters which, I’ll admit is necessary, but it does sometimes feel like certain points are hammered home so many times that the story gets bogged down before moving onto the next arc.

Things do pick up somewhat in the game’s second half though as the game focuses less on building up the world and more towards the core narrative. I think this is also partly due to the exploration mechanics toning down somewhat as well as, early on, you’re scanning the entire environment for things to capture. That’s partly due to my completionist kicking in, I’ll admit, as I wasn’t certain just how many things I’d only have a single opportunity to capture. The game does give you multiple opportunities to capture all the major mementos though so some of the game’s early pacing issues could be addressed by making that a bit more clear.

SPOILERS BELOW

It was interesting to compare/contrast my playthrough with the global averages as it highlighted the real level of impact that your choices and preferences will have on the game’s narrative. It also brought up some potential gaps in the story’s arc as, I feel, the way that I played it felt pretty canon narrative that the writers were going for. This is wholly due to me falling for Kat early on, not knowing that the second half of the story was going to be almost exclusively focused on her. The choices of Swann as a result of that then seem to make a lot of sense, like going into the forest at the end, as without that level of relationship with Kat things would feel a little forced.

I am somewhat interested to see how things would turn out if you hadn’t say, invested and/or deliberately took the wrong choices for an extended period. A lot of the narrative growth comes from you yourself understanding the characters and making the right choices as, even very late in the game, there are options available to you that very obviously not good. Indeed I feel like there’s a version of Swann in the game that’s the exact opposite of what I played.

SPOILERS OVER

Lost Records: Blood & Rage is a game that I didn’t expect to grow on me. Whilst the game’s disjointed pacing early on can make it hard to really engage with the narrative your patience will be rewarded if you’re able to push through. Whilst I think there’s some improvements that could be made to take it from good to great I do feel like it sets up a universe that is worth exploring. I may have missed the boat with this in Life is Strange but, hopefully, I won’t do that again with this new IP that DON’T NOD has brought to us.

Rating: 8.0/10

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is available right now on PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 right now for $60. Game was played on the PC with a total of 11.2 hours playtime and 61% of the achievements unlocked.

In the far future the world has been besieged by machines of an unknown origin. Dubbed ARC they first went to war with humanity, their ruthless efficiency in pursuit of their unknown goal driving the last of the world’s population underground. There they have survived, bolstered by the brave few who dare the surface in order scavenge the materials that they need to keep the subterranean cities functioning. You are one such raider, tasked by various members of your contrada (one of the many arms of the underground network called Toledo) to seek out what they need whilst avoiding the watchful eye of ARC. They aren’t the only ones you have to watch out for though, as not all raiders are out there to help the greater good.

Unlike many other titles that come to us via the Unreal 5 engine ARC Raiders has managed to avoid that typical feel that seems to come along with it. It doesn’t take much searching to see why: their first game, The Finals, was built on it but they’ve also made deliberate choices to use third party solutions for certain aspects in order to create the visual experience they’re after. The result is incredible, from the tightest indoor areas all the way to the vast open areas you’re assaulted with a highly detailed environment that’s simply begging to be explored. Not only that the whole thing runs absolutely glass smooth, even on a rig like mine which is fast approaching it’s 7th birthday. Embark really have done an amazing job of building, fleshing out and optimising the world of ARC Raiders.

ARC Raiders represents my first foray into the extraction shooter genre as a whole as my only real experience with something similar was the Dark Zones that were, strictly speaking, optional content in The Division. Still I can see the core aspects that the genre has expanded on here: the PvPvE construction of the core game loop, using what you can find, the risk/reward balance of good loot locations and the tension that comes from trying to read other player’s motivations when you stumble across them. There’s a number of traditional progression systems here though as well: skill points you gain as you level up, blueprints to unlock crafting for certain desirable weapons/mods/consumables/etc., crafting station level ups and, of course cosmetics galore. Whilst the live service title usually comes with a lot of ill-connotations ARC Raiders, along with others like Helldivers 2, feels like a template for how they can be done right.

The core loop is pretty straightforward: choose a map that you want to explore, build out the kit you want to take with you (or choose a “free” loadout if you think things will get hot), deploy, explore and hopefully extract. As you explore around though things will start to get in your way. That can be something as simple as the platforming required to get to the place you want to loot all the way through to the various ARC enemies and fellow raiders who can potentially end your run without you even seeing them. What this does is create a sense of low, but unrelenting tension that only breaks when you finally extract. It’s hard to put words on it but it feels like you’re both in control and completely out of control at the same time. You can totally do a low stakes run, risking only what you want to lose, and will most of the time come out OK. On the other hand you can go balls to the wall with everything, going to the hot zones and seeing whether or not you’ll make it out alive. You only control your choices though, not that of the other players.

Which is where the genius of the aggression based matchmaking system comes into play. Among all the other metrics that Embark uses to put players together on a map one of the key aspects is just how much you engage in the game’s PvP aspects. There seems to be some contention around whether or not being in a group has a higher propensity towards more aggressive lobbies than singles do but given I’ve only ever played in groups I can’t be quite sure either way. What I can say though is that, after playing with a friend who’s almost exclusively PvP, I spent a great deal more time dodging bullets in subsequent matches than I ever had previously. But it didn’t take long for us to return to our usual, much more chill lobbies where much of the challenge came from taking out ARC.

Even with the PvP aspects tilting towards the calmer end of the spectrum I wouldn’t say player interactions were any less intense. To be sure when I’m playing with the casual crew you’re much more likely to have someone shoutout “Hey buddy, friendly!” right when they spot you but that still comes with a few tense minutes where we figure out just how genuine that friendly voice is. Probably the best example of this was when we went to extract and saw another duo running to the same spot. We were all good and just about to hit the button to extract when another 4 separate players all show up together. Not a single shot was fired but holy hell, having that many people show up so quickly was enough to ratchet up the pucker factor significantly.

I remarked to my friends early on how accessible all the higher tier loot seemed to be which, for anyone who’s played ARC Raiders for a spell will know, is for a reason. That reason is, of course, that in any run that you die on anything that’s not in a safe pocket is lost. Suffice to say the first time that happens it hurts, especially when you lose one of your best guns with all the mods that you’d scrounged up. This of course feeds into the need to gather just about everything you can on any run as you never know when you’re going to find yourself coming back completely empty handed. Even though it can be painful I do like how that helps to level the playing field somewhat. To be sure higher gear is still locked behind progression mechanics but even those can be stormed through with the right person to guide you along.

There is a narrative but honestly it pales in comparison to the stories that you’ll forge either with your crew or on your own. You’ll bond over stories of how you felt like that leaper you saw only a couple hours in looked doable (Read: it was, barely), how you finally found a cat bed only to have forgotten to put it in your safe pocket before you died or that time when you brought all these resources for your friend only to have them die in a rather undignified way and lose them all. They won’t mean much to anyone else who you tell them to, but they’ll mean an awful lot to you.

ARC Raiders shows how the live service model can work and not simply be yet another way for VC and private capital to extract value from a large number of people. The game is extremely well crafted; from it’s amazing visuals derived from Embark’s mastery of the Unreal 5 engine through to the mechanical depth that you can get into using the games various progression and crafting mechanics. It’s a game I expect to come back to from time to time, not because of any burning desire to or that there’s new content I want to explore, more that it serves as a great medium with which to have a great time with mates. It might not fill the Abiotic Factor hole I and my friends have within me, but it makes for a great distraction none the less.

Rating: 9.0/10

ARC Raiders is available on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 right now for $60.78. Game was played on the PC with a total of 12.3 hours playtime and 30% of the achievements unlocked.