 Blue Prince came out of nowhere. I heard no buzz. No hype. Just all of the sudden it was out and it was the highest rate game of 2025 thus far. The developer was previously responsible for Paradise Killer, a game I'd vaguely heard of but knew nothing about. But overnight, every single podcast that I listen to was suddenly raving about Blue Prince. And to be honest, it didn't really sound like a game I'd be too into. It sounded frustrating really. But it also launched on Playstation Plus, so I had access to it for free. So I'd be stupid not to try, right?
The things that I knew about Blue Prince going into it were the basics. The thin plot is that you're rich uncle left you a house in his will but the stipulation is that you must find the hidden 46th room in order to get your inheritance. And you must do it in a single night. Thus, the game is set up as a roguelike. Nights are runs. The game plays in first person, but there's no combat. No this is really a kind of board game, really. The mansion is spread out over a 5x9 grid. Everytime you open a door, you draft three possible rooms to go into. Each room has its pros and cons. There's perks and penalties for each room. You also have to worry about the layout of doors. You need a path north and you really don't want to force yourself into ultimate deadends. You start the night with fifty steps. Each time you cross into a room, that's one step. So again, this is like a board game. It's also like a strategy game. It's also full of puzzles. And it's also kind of a walking simulator. To put it short, it's not really like any other game I've ever played. I could mention games that are a point of reference, but none of them really describe it. Instead it's like a dozen games, or pieces of them, meshed into something unique. The first time I fired up Blue Prince, I played it for three hours straight and was hooked. I went to bed way too late and continued to think about it. And then I spent the next week obsessed. As the game suggested, I kept notes with any little clue or lead I had that I wanted to remember or try to work out. I had a whole lot of fun and then around hour fifteen I abruptly felt hugely frustrated and made the decision to bail on the game, at least for now so that I don't go mad and change my mind about every single positive thing I've said about the game for the past week. What follows is a mix of snippets of notes that I kept throughout the week along with some further thoughts I'm having about my own descent into madness playing Blue Prince. Be forewarned that I'm going to be pretty loose with spoilers here, as this is not a review. This is my own experience with the game, so yeah SPOILERS ahead! BLUE = ADDITION; YELLOW = SUBTRACTION; PINK = MULTIPLICATION; PURPLE = DIVISION Okay, so one of the puzzles you'll hit is a dartboard with random colors lit up. I had found a note referencing the puzzle and assumed it was math related but couldn't make heads nor tails. I admit I briefly googled to at least get an idea of how it worked, but didn't read too deep into it. Eventually it clicked and I got the hang of it, and it's actually a pretty enjoyable puzzle. The more you play, the harder these puzzles get, eventually throwing in more complicated versions of the math. Another puzzle room is based on the old Labyrinth idea of figuring out which statements are true and which are false. There's three boxes, each with a statement. Two statements are false and one is true. So you have to work out like, if this one's true then that makes this one false automatically. These are more logic than the math one I guess. It's alright but I'd get tripped up on these more often. TERMINAL PASSWORD BEGINS WITH S (SINCLAIR? SWIMBIRD?) - DON'T FORGET MARION MARIGOLD There's computer terminals in various rooms. To access one whole system you need a password, but the one I found on a note was scribbled out. I could tell it started with S. I thought maybe Sinclair. As a note, names in this game reference historical computer scientists, Clive Sinclair and Charles Babbage which I enjoy as a nerd. Anyway, it wasn't either of the passwords I guessed and I had no other leads. I never got into that system. I did however figure out how to exploit the keycard system depending on whether I had found a keycard, or if I was able to knock out the power to the system. I also found a bunch of disks to bring to the terminals and upgrade various rooms to offer up extra perks. This was a cool touch, and one of the few permanent upgrades you'll find in the game. SAFE = 9083; BLUE MEMOS = TRUE/RED MEMOS = FALSE In a couple of rooms (Boudoir and Office) I was able to find safes, but I could never find the code to unlock them. I did find 9083 written on a note, but it was a red note and I also found something later that said that red notes are lies. So yeah, I never did find a combination that did work to open the safes and I have no idea what's in them. OUTSIDE THERE'S A WOODEN GATE THAT'S STUCK (CAN PROBABLY BREAK IT?) AND THERE'S A DARK CAVE UNDER THE MANSION THAT LOOKS LIKE TORCHES CAN LIGHT IT UP At some point I realized I could turn around and walk right outside at the beginning of the game. It's so obvious but easy to miss. Who turns around when you're facing three doors in front of you to start a run? There's things to explore early on, but nothing you can really do. But that's what you do in Blue Prince. You try stuff and make little notes and wonder which ones are just red herrings. DOORS IN THE WEST WING ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE LOCKED? DOORS IN THE EAST WING ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE LOCKED! Again, confusion because of a red note. And I don't know that I ever noticed either wing being locked more often than the other. Maybe it's all garbage clues. CHESS PIECE IN THE STUDY (QUEEN) IS AT D8 There's chess pieces all over this mansion. I'm sure they mean something but I never worked it out. 44 LETTERS IN THE MESSAGE; F = MAIN HALL: FACE/ACE... UNUSED PAIRINGS: GLOVE/LOVE, STING/SING, CROWD/CROW, GROWN/GROW, SNACK/SACK I have no idea what any of this is. I saw this written on a chalkboard. I don't know. I was starting to get overwhelmed here. DOGTAG = 10 A picture I saw in a bathroom. ALZARA (ZOLTAR) The game gets so weird. I found a fortune-telling automaton just like in the movie Big. I used a coin and got nothing of use out of it. At least as far as I could tell. KEYS TO THE CAR... TURN ON POWER TO THE GARAGE... DROP OFF ADDRESS: 14227 SANDY HEIGHTS This sequence of events made me feel good. I was hoping that I'd get to take the car for a drive but no. Just more clues and stuff. TABLE OF ELEMENTS PUZZLE, WTF? I can't even. THE ANTECHAMBER LEVER IN GREENHOUSE IS BROKE (EAST AND WEST LEVERS SHOULD WORK?) LEVERS IN SECRET GARDEN, GREENHOUSE, GREAT HALL Here's where I started to really lose my cool. I finally figured out how to get one of the three doors to the Antechamber open. This presumably will lead me to the 46th room. Opening one door requires luck and RNG. But I was finally able to open up the west door by finding the key to the Secret Garden, and then finding the Secret Garden, then solving the puzzle there that opens the west door. But then the path I created to the Antechamber didn't make it to the west door. So I started another run and guess what? Opening Antechamber doors is not persistent. So wow. I kind of got discouraged and lost all momentum here. After about fifteen hours of being totally compelled by Blue Prince it all blew up on me when I realized that every run is going to remain brutal and dependent on the luck of random numbers and suddenly success felt just as elusive to me as it did in hour one. Like after fifteen hours I should feel like I'm at least close. I'm making progress. I'm getting better. And I mean I'm smarter now and understand the game more, but skill and thought cannot account for the brutality of the RNG. And so I think I need to step away from Blue Prince while I still have fond memories instead of trudging ahead and having fondness turn to hate.
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 Indie metroidvanias are a dime a dozen. At least that tends to be my stance. I can tell you that I've attempted many critical indie darlings that have failed to hold my interest. People loved Animal Well, but I loathed it. That's just me.
I suppose it's fair to say that I have a weird love/hate relationship with the metroidvania genre in general. Just going off the two series that became the genre's namesake, I love Metroid II and Super Metroid. I love Castlevania II and Symphony Of The Night. And yet the genre as a whole? I don't even know. Every once in a while a game pops up that I really get into, but overall I find myself just frustrated with metroidvanias. Ender Magnolia is the sequel to 2021's Ender Lilies. I remember that game getting a bunch of hype in the indie circles, but I didn't really pay much attention to it myself. And honestly, I'm not sure why I decided to take the plunge on this one. I think it was because I was sitting on some PS store credit and only had to pay like eight bucks to give it a try. Off the bat, it's a really great looking game. Ender Magnolia has a lovely gothic anime art style. It's often bleak, but then there are moments where gorgeous colors fill the screen and totally pop given the overall dark atmosphere. Almost immediately I found the game way too hard. I was about ready to just bail on it after a couple of hours, but then decided to lower the difficulty and it actually made a pretty big difference. All of the sudden I was having a blast exploring and grinding. So no shame there. The lower difficulty made the game fun for me rather than just annoyingly frustrating. Boss battles remain challenging but fun even after the lower difficulty. Many of the bosses feel like little puzzles to figure out and I enjoyed this a lot. After four or five hours I started to wonder why this game hasn't gotten a bunch of hype this year. I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts (both mainstream and not) and I don't even think I've heard it mentioned. It's weird. Anyway, there's lots going on within menus in this one. There's lots of stats to keep track of. There's also lots of reason to go off and explore in search of loot. There's abilities to unlock and upgrade. There's new gear to find. There's augments (relics) to your skills. There's parts to find and new equipment to craft. The first real roadblock for me occurred around eight hours in. I came up against a boss that's a huge spider (The King Of Garbage, I think he's known as). Anyway, he's a jerk. Like this was a huge difficulty-spike. I tried maybe ten times and then went off and grinded a bit more. I swapped out my abilities, upgraded some of them, and came back with ten hours under my belt and beat him on my first new attempt. It was right around this time that I realized I was only about halfway through the game. Maybe less. And the very next thing was opening up a whole new giant area of the map. And another boss fight but this time against a boss that's pretty much considered one of the hardest in the game. He wrecked me so fast and that's when I started to feel fatigue set in. I want to point out that in the 20+ hours required to beat Ender Magnolia (probably more hours for me because again, I'm bad) you could also run through Super Metroid and Symphony Of The Night and probably have enough time left over to watch a movie. When did games get so long? If we're aping the style of the classic metroidvanias, then why do we need to double up the playtime on it? So at this point, ten or so hours into Ender Magnolia I'm considering myself burnt out. That said, I had a hell of a lot of fun for ten hours. I truly enjoyed it. And I only played eight bucks for it. So there's that. Honestly, even though I got kind burned out, I still think this is the first pretty great game of 2025 that I've played so far. At least one that wasn't a remake or remaster.  EA was dominating the football space a decade ago. Not only did they have Madden, but they also had the NCAA Football series. In simple terms, this translates to having two games a year that could be built using a single engine. If you want to be super reductive, that's like just updating rosters and printing money. Of course it wasn't that simple. But they definitely were shifting a lot of units and both EA and football fans were happy.
Back in 2013, the NCAA was wrapped up in legal red-tape regarding college athletes profiting off their likeness. As such, that year's NCAA Football 14 was the last game in the series for a very long time. But in recent years some things got ironed out. I don't know the details exactly, but I do know that college athletes are now able to make money. I've seen Livy Dunne in commercials. Just saying. And so now, for the first time in over a decade there's a new game in the series. Although because licensing is weird, it's now called College Football 25. Fans were elated. Me? I'd never played any of those NCAA games. I never watched college football in real life, either. But having played College Football 25, I'm now thinking maybe I should. Labor Day weekend meant that it was time for pumpkin spice and football. I had big time fall fever. Our summer was rough. But fall was a new leaf. We had moved into our new house. My daughter was starting kindergarten. I just wanted football. So I downloaded College Football 25. First up was the character creator for Road To Glory. I made a dude way more muscular than me. He goes to Boston College. In hindsight, I wish I had chosen UMASS, as I'm a fan of the band The Minutemen. But oh well. Straight away, this game makes me want to re-watch We Are Marshall. Totally underrated movie, by the way. And also, this game looks incredibly good. The players, the field, the stadiums, the weather. It's all incredible. PS5 at its finest. The music is also great. Instead of a bunch of licensed stuff, it's got marching bands. Maybe this is lame, but I like it a lot. Marching bands pump you up. It is what it is. There's something almost primal there. It turns out that college football is way different than the NFL. College is all about the running game. As such, games have a totally different flow to them. There's less crazy passes. Less holding your breath. More aggression and immovable objects up against unstoppable forces. Possessions end more often with no points. It's nail-biting in a different way than NFL games. And as a rookie starter quarterback who has spent so many years playing Madden, I got destroyed a lot. I dug into the player progression, the leveling up, the perks, the almost visual novel aspect of the choices made between games. And I got humbled. College Football 25 is a much harder game than any Madden in recent memory. There were so many sacks and so many interceptions. I never totally trusted that my defensive line had things under control so I was always under pressure. Passing was always horrifying. But when I did make an amazing pass, I felt like a golden god. I cannot tell you how many possessions ended with me marching methodically down to the other team's 30, 20, 10 only to throw an interception and blow the whole thing up. In my worst moment, I was sacked in my own end-zone. The majority of my season was legitimately embarrassing. But I loved every minute. That's the mark of a good game. You're losing, and you're losing really bad. And it's still fun. College Football 25 crystalizes the drama of college football. I managed to eek out six wins, and then the season just sort of ended. I thought hard and long and ultimately re-upped for another school year. But more importantly, I'm looking forward to exporting my saved player into Madden 25, which is an option that was a great move on EA's part. For the first time in over a decade they have a reason to sell us two football games in a single year. Bravo.  My commute is about forty minutes. That means that I'm in the car for around eighty minutes a day. Which means I'm driving alone four hundred minutes a week. So maybe it's not shocking to say that I end up listening to a lot of podcasts. And spoiler, they're pretty much all video game related. And because of this, I can't help when I start to hear trends. And I also can't help when those trends make me curious about a game. If I listen to five podcasts in a week and all of them are talking positively about the same game, then it kind of sounds like a consensus, right? Even if that experiment is using a generally small sample pool, the repetition can really start to pique my interest.
Often that curiosity pays off. Balatro may have flown under my radar, but as I write this I've got around 140 hours into it. So that was obviously a good recommendation. But other times I'm left a bit let down. Which brings us to Animal Well. Trying to think back, I'm quite sure that I heard many podcasts speaking lovingly about Animal Well. The Game Informer Show? MinnMax? IGN's Game Scoop or Beyond? Some or all of these shows really praised Animal Well. And when I looked it up, it turned out that it was included with Playstation Plus, so why not give it a go, right? Now some of the praise should have scared me off right away. The term metroidvania can go with one of two ways for me. While I myself do love Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, that doesn't mean I love the myriad games that have aped the blueprint over the decades since. And then there was talk of how this was a metroidvania with no combat, but rather effectively puzzles in every room. Again, this could go either way. Are the puzzles intuitive or am I going to be expected to poke around endlessly? It turns out it was the latter. But let me rewind. Animal Well is a metroidvania with some very old school sensibilities. It doesn't look like a PS1 game or a SNES game, but rather more like an MSX2 game that couldn't have actually existed because of the insane level of detail or the granular physics. But still, it feels very dated right down to the scanlines. Which is fine. It's an obvious aesthetic choice, and I can even find it visually pleasing. You play as a little... ball thing. It kind of looks like a walking potato. Or maybe a bastardized Dizzy. Remember Dizzy? The little egg guy from European computers? Anyway, your potato guy can't really do anything other than walk around and jump. Sometimes he finds firecrackers which he can use to scare away animals. Animals are the main enemies here. Some are more passive than others. And some are very ghostly and aggressive. The whole point of the game is just to open up the map and progress. I guess. But I didn't make it very far. I mean, I opened up plenty of parts of the map, but I was often met with dead ends. These were probably spots where I was intended to figure out some trick to advance, but I just got really bored and frustrated attempting to proceed. I can't help but think that Animal Well is the sort of game best played with friends. Not friends sitting next to you exactly. But I think this is the kind of game that works best if you're chatting with friends about what you've done, what you've seen and how you solved a puzzle. It harkens back to the old 8-bit era of figuring out games via pieces together sections with help from friends on the playground or finding little hints in magazines. In other words, Animal Well feels best suited for a pre-internet world. At least to me. I'm sure I could easily look up a walkthrough by this point and breeze through the game handily. But where's the fun in that? In some ways, this is my own personal catch-22. Playing Animal Well completely on my own blindly is just annoyingly opaque. And yet at this point in my life (I just turned 43, ugh) I just don't have time anymore for hanging out on video game message boards or making plans to game with friends. There's no happy medium for me. It's either go at it alone, or resort to a walkthrough. In that sense, Animal Well makes me think of another beloved indie from recent years - Tunic. Where that game played like a modernized Link's Awakening or something, this one just happens to be a metroidvania. But both are adored for their decision to tell you practically nothing. They are confusing games that invite you to experiment and just spend time picking a direction to walk in and slowly chip away at the game's challenges. I didn't have the patience for Tunic, and I certainly don't have the patience for Animal Well. I'm sure this is a fine game, just not for someone like the 43 year old version of me. Oh well.  I don't even know where to begin talking about Balatro. It has kind of a weirdly forgettable name. But it's an example of why I love video games. I had never heard of it until the day I bought it. I was perusing Metacritic's list of best games of the year and this one caught my eye. The description was basically that it was a roguelike poker. I wasn't convinced, but I downloaded the one hour demo. Almost instantly I was warned that my hour was almost up, so I plunked down my cash.
I've never been a poker guy. But Balatro is truly something else. I say this as I'm nearing 80 hours in the game with no sign of slowing down. Balatro is the game that has dethroned Slay The Spire as my constant go-to between other games. And that's saying a lot, because I've been playing Slay The Spire at least weekly for the past five years. It's the game I play when I don't know what else to play. It's the game I play when I have just a little bit of time to kill before bed. It's one of the most perfectly executed games I've played in a long time. So how do I explain a roguelike poker? It should be simple, right? And it is. It's simple to pick up. But it's oh so deep to master. Alright, so you've got your basic poker hands: straight flush, four of a kind, flush, straight, three of a kind, etc. And each of those has a multiplier. Makes sense, right? So a given hand is the value of each card (chips) times the multiplier. And from there, things get more complex. Much more complex, actually. It all starts with Jokers. You can buy Jokers, of which you can have five of them under normal circumstances. Jokers can do all kinds of crazy global effects. One Joker might add a +4 multiplier to any Heart card you play. Another might add 50 chips to any even numbered card. Another might add X3 multiplier to the final hand of every round. There's even Jokers that allow you to make flushes and straights with only four cards and another lets you skip a sequential number in a straight. And so on. The more you play, the more Jokers you'll unlock and the crazier they get. The key is obviously to know what kind of run you're aiming for and to find and add Jokers that augment accordingly. Then there's Celestial cards, which can actually upgrade your hands. So let's say you want to run a Flush deck. You'll be looking for Jupiter cards which will upgrade Flushes. Now each flush adds extra chips and multiplier to your hands. Then you can get Tarot cards and Spectral cards which do all kinds of crazy global effects. Maybe you can add effects to specific cards. Maybe your King of Hearts has an extra 50 chips when played. Maybe your 2 of Clubs gives you $3 if you're holding it at the end of a round. You can also buy specific cards to add to your deck. Maybe you just want more Clubs. Or maybe you want to collect odd numbered cards. Or maybe you want face cards. Or maybe you want wild cards that have no specific suit so that you can up your chances of a straight flush. The world is your oyster. And then there's the decks. There's a bunch to unlock. Early decks give you simple obvious perks like an extra hand, or an extra discard. Later you'll get into crazy things like decks that only contain two suits. And after you beat the game with one deck, you can keep going deeper with harder versions of it. Now you've got less hands, less discards, less interest earned on winning, harder enemies, more expensive shops... I guess the real beauty of this game is that while it's built upon poker, that's just the bones. It's the roguelike nature of it - the crazy stuff that happens and all the RNG - that makes Balatro worth playing. As I write this I'm closing in on a hundred hours played. And that's over a few short months. And I see no sign of slowing down. It's hard to imagine I'll find a game that I connect with so deeply in 2024. And honestly, I can see myself sticking with this one for years to come. I'm sorry, Slay The Spire. You were a legend for the past five years. But now I think you've become dethroned  Four years ago, there was an epidemic that shut nearly everything down. It was one of those once-in-a-hundred years kind of things. It was easily the weirdest year of everyone's life that lived through it. And strangely, sitting here now it seems like a distant memory. Like a fever dream that happened decades ago. Maybe we choose to just not remember unpleasant things. Maybe I do, anyway.
I was deemed an essential worker, and so I'd drive into work each day and shut myself in an office where I could get my work done in semi-solitude, conducting most functions via phone and email. At the time, my daughter was barely a year old and so we had to keep family and friends at a very long arm's length. My hair grew way too long because nobody would get close enough to me to cut it. And my wife didn't trust herself enough to give it a try. I can vividly remember longing to do something so simple and normal as to just browse Target with a cup of coffee in my hand. I bring all this up because back in 2020 I was mostly playing games on a Switch. It was a cheap and easy way to play new games at the time. But by the end of 2021, the new consoles were finally becoming easier to find. I think September of that year was the last time I even touched my Switch. And eventually, I sold it off because we were going to moving into a small apartment while we looked for a new house and I needed to declutter. But I can tell you that I played a lot of Splatoon during quarantine days. It was competitive, sure but it was also pretty breezy. It had bright colors and low stakes. It was pure fun. And in a weird way, playing online games like that made me feel like I was connecting with other gamers enjoying the hobby and making our way through the weirdness together. Having said all that, when Foamstars was announced I was excited. I can tell you from perusing various gaming sites that I was in the stark minority. Foamsters was Square asking, "what if Splatoon, but on Playstation?" The gaming world at large just shrugged. But me? I was all in. Since that announcement, Square has gone out of their way to shake off the obvious comparison, and insist that Foamstars is totally not Splatoon. Sure, it's a bright and breezy game where two teams shoot colorful stuff at each other and nobody dies, so it's not about kills. But Square insisted they were very different. In Splatoon you shoot ink, while Foamstars has foam. In Splatoon you swim through the ink to get around quickly, but Foamstars has surfboards. It's absolutely definitely and without doubt not the same thing. But look, who are we kidding? Foamstars is certainly Splatoon for Playstation. Let's just all be okay with that. Splatoon is a fun game, and why shouldn't Playstation gamers have access to something similar? That being said, just mimicking a fun game does not make you a fun game. Foamstars is built upon a sound concept, but I can't say that it actually pulls off the execution. Although it approaches the blueprint by using heroes (think Overwatch) rather than just classes, the problem is that the game forces you to level up and outfit each hero with specific perks. In this way it sort of meshes the Overwatch and Splatoon system. Which would be fine, but basically to get anywhere at the beginning of the game means playing hours upon hours of single player missions or PVE missions online. And these missions are absolutely tedious. Maybe the online ones would be more fun if you were playing with friends, but I don't have time to schedule game nights with friends these days (long work hours, being a husband and a day, looking for a new house, etc) so I'm just grinding through the tedium with strangers and my mic shut off. I suppose that the unlockable cosmetics, upgrades and perks would all be fun to nerd out on if I could muster up the strength the care. But Fomstars doesn't give me much reason to do so. The single player stuff is really boring and yet pretty much necessary. Even months after launch, there's no wiki I can find that outlines desirable upgrade paths. This isn't a good sign for an ongoing game. And neither are the long queues I've sat through just trying to get into a proper match. Which makes me think that very few people are playing Foamsters even three months after launch. I'm kind of bummed to say that the future looks bleak for Foamstars. It came and went without much fanfare. Nobody seems to be playing it. And ultimately, it was a decent idea, but pales in comparison with its obvious inspirations. I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd say that by this time next year Foamstars probably won't even be a thing anymore.  I think that when it comes to survival horror in the 90s there were two kinds of gamers. You were either camp Resident Evil or camp Silent Hill. And while I always like an appreciated the Silent Hill games, Resident Evil was just a huge deal to me. The original Resident Evil felt genre-defining for me, whereas the original Silent Hill was just a cool game.
Of course, the 80s and 90s felt like a very Capcom vs Konami period. And while it's easy to lump those two series together, they are vastly different in execution and in tone. Resident Evil was built on the blueprint of Dawn Of The Dead. It was a zombie renaissance, and it owed more than a little bit to the hoaky dialogues, stupid storylines and over-the-top gore of cult-classic VHS b-movies. In short, I loved Resident Evil because it spoke to a very specific audience - one that grew up watching USA Up All Night. Silent Hill was never like that. Its horror was deeper, darker and more existential. In a Silent Hill game the self was often more terrifying than any specific lurking fear. George Romero wasn't even on the radar. Instead, Silent Hill drew inspiration from more mind-effing cinema along the lines of Don't Look Now, or the early (pre-Twin Peaks) work of David Lynch. Silent Hill was a series built on absurd nightmares. The original Silent Hill (1999) was an absolute classic on PS1. It introduced us to the basic framework of the series: an outsider visiting this town to find something or someone, and finding themselves trapped in an abandoned nightmare world where nothing makes sense. Any youngin's reading this might point themselves to Stranger Things as a thematic point of reference, I suppose. To really bring home the themes of nightmare/subconscious, you might take not of the fact that the school in the original game was modeled after the set of the movie Kindergarten Cop, while all of the teachers were named after members of the band Sonic Youth. The whole thing is absolutely surreal right down to the hidden UFO endings. But it was the sequel, Silent Hill 2 (2001) on PS2 that tends to be remembered as the high water mark. That game's influences included everything from Dostoevsky, David Lynch, Jacob's Ladder and explores themes of grief and mental illness while incorporating bits and pieces of both real life events and pop culture, again weaving in odd snatches of reality to give the whole thing a dream-like feel. After that, things started to go a bit off the rails. Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) were actually developed in tandem. The fourth game in particular was an odd duck as it doesn't even take place in the titular town, and instead the whole thing is basically in a single apartment complex. Silent Hill Origins (2007) was a prequel to the original game. Silent Hill Homecoming (2008) was accused of westernization. Shattered Memories (2009) ended up being a kinda sorta remake of the original game. Silent Hill Downpour (2012) was deemed a bit of a return to the roots of the series, but also a kind of mediocre game overall. So to recap, the first two games in the series are oft considered classics, but after that Konami seemed to spit out sequels as fast as they could with a sort of throw-things-at-the-wall sort of approach. Sure, the series has its diehards - much like any series, really. But most would probably agree that Silent Hill was never the most consistent as far as quality was concerned. While a full on remake of Silent Hill 2 has been in the works for what seems like forever, it was a total shock when I turned on Sony's State Of Play on in early 2024 and saw a new Silent Hill game announced. A game that was out now. A game that was free. I mean, what? Given a decade of apathy from Konami, it was certainly exciting to find out that they had a new Silent Hill game that nobody knew about it and it was available now. But it was a free game. Could that really be a good sign? Either way, I downloaded it immediately. Upon booting up Silent Hill: A Short Message I was a bit confused to find that this game was a first person walking sim. At least at its core. Sure there's some sections where you must evade a single unkillable enemy stalker. But the majority of the experience is walking around and reading stuff to get the gist of the story. In short, it's not much like any Silent Hill game that's ever come before it. At least not exactly. Of course it's near impossible to talk about A Short Message without bringing up PT (2014). I'd have to assume that anybody talking the time to read this already knows about PT. I'd also have to assume that anybody taking the time to read this is me. But, just in case, PT was a free demo (Playable Teaser) on PS4 that was made by Hideo Kojima and Guilermo Del Toro. Those two names together should be exciting but more importantly, the experience was made as kind of teaser for Silent Hills, the game that they were supposed to put out but that was ultimately canceled. It was also a short, first person game that I guess you could call a walking simulator except that it was extremely scary and crammed full of weird secrets. After the cancelation of Silent Hills, PT only gained notoriety - especially after Konami pulled the demo from the PS4 and forced the whole thing into a cult-classic status that has actually made PS4 consoles that have it installed go for a pretty penny on ebay. So in some ways was A Short Message made as a kind of mea culpa? I don't know, maybe? But if so then Konami is even more tone deaf than we thought. Fans of both Silent Hill and Kojima were frothing at the mouth for Silent Hills and that's what made PT so appealing. It's hard to imagine that anyone playing A Short Message is feeling like it's a proper replacement for Silent Hills, especially given that the game was created by a currently Kojima-less Konami. The best thing I can say about A Short Message is that its existence is interesting. The game itself isn't really, but it's at least interesting to ponder why it even is a thing. It certainly doesn't work as a consolation for the cancelation of Silent Hills. It has nothing to do with Silent Hill 2, so you can't really view it as a tie-in or promotion for the upcoming remake. On all counts, it's a mediocre and baffling game that I struggle to find a reason for its release, or even an audience that it should be aimed at. I mean obviously diehard Silent Hill fans will play it. But will any of them actually like it? Probably not. And yet it's a free game. One that I downloaded and played (albeit briefly) before deciding it wasn't really worth my time. But here I am rambling on and waxing semi-poetic about what the point of it even is. Again, not the point of the game. Because I'm just not invested enough to care. But rather the point that Konami was trying to make by letting it loose on the world. Why on earth is A Short Story available but PT no longer is? There are many great mysteries in gaming history and this... this is a new one.  I've been somewhat interested in the Yakuza games for years now, but I wasn't always sure that they'd be for me. For most if its existence, the Yakuza franchise was known as a mostly beat-em-up style game, but on that told a very long and winding story of the length of currently nine mainline entries as well as a bunch of spin-offs. The games were known for being grounded dramas with great writing and kind of insanely over-the-top niche works at the same time. In fact, I was really only made aware of the first Yakuza when reviewers started calling it the spiritual sequel to Shenmue (also published by Sega). And really, all of that made sense. Both games were hyper detailed and mundane, while also having an almost soap-opera plot. Both games strived to make you feel like you were living in Japan during the time of the story. The difference is that while Shenmue was a critical darling, it never really sold. Certainly not enough to make back its insane budget. But the Yakuza games sold. Each installment seemed to sell more than the last. And with each new entry it seemed like the buzz grew, and suddenly Yakuza's cult status bubbled up into the mainstream.
By all accounts, Yakuza should have been a series I was into. It's respected enough by mainstream press to be considered an event when a new entry is released. It's also niche enough to be hip. Really, it's that rare series to draw in respect from both sides: the so-called hardcore gamers and the gaming industry at large. And I've always landed somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. And yet, over the years I've bought several entries with the intention of playing them and then never actually played them. The eighth game was released in 2020 and this was interesting. This one used "Like A Dragon" as its subtitle, which has always been the Japanese name for the series. It also made some major changes to the formula by giving the series a new protagonist and changing the battle system to a turn-based one that harkened back to the old Dragon Quest games. This game felt like a hard reset, so I started playing closer attention. A spin-off, Like A Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name (2023) followed and unified the naming conventions for the series globally. And then Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth followed soon after in 2024, and served as the ninth mainline entry. As far as I could tell, this was going to be a terrible jumping on point. This was a game that had built on nearly twenty years of story, characters and lore and was going to be tying them all up together. So I'd be an idiot to start with this one. Right? But here's what happened. First of all, Infinite Wealth has been hyped all year. The game was released in January and yet it's rounding out the year as the eleventh highest rated Playstation game on Metacritic. I mean, that's saying something. I've also spent the past year listening to countless gaming podcasts bring the game up as a contender for end of the year lists. But none of that should matter. Certainly none of that should make me want to spend $60 or $70 to jump into a game that might confuse me plot-wise. Okay so, I also have a certain annual tradition. For years now I've used my Christmas vacation as a chance to dive into a lengthy JRPG after my wife and daughter go to bed. Usually this means something that's been on my backlog for a while, but I kind of feel like there's bonus points if it's a current year release. This year the holidays kind of snuck on me, though. Thanksgiving was later, and then my daughter got RSV in December and everything was just kind of chaotic so I hadn't even thought about what game I might want to play. And then Sony announced a ten hour demo for Infinite Wealth the day that my vacation started. It was as if the decision had been made for me. And so against my better judgment, I just shrugged and fired it up. Or at leat that's what I would have done except our whole vacation was derailed. The weekend before Christmas, my daughter's RSV turned into an ear infection and pneumonia. So things got even more chaotic. So really, I didn't even get to spend much time with Infinite Wealth until the week between Christmas and New Year's. But what a week it was. I plowed through ten hours in four nights and I absolutely loved every moment. Like, way more than I expected to. First of all, Ichiban is a compelling character. I mean he's an ex-Yakuza. And I don't know him from his straight up Yakuza days. But in this game he is on a path of redemption and he's just so good, humble and endearing. In many ways, he's kind of a dork. But that just makes him more endearing. Everything about Ichiban is likeable. And his story of redemption after the dissolution of major Yakuza families (presumably a story told in previous games) is a gripping one. I genuinely liked Ichiban and constantly wanted to see him succeed in his endeavors. Likewise, the other characters I've encountered have all been unique and interesting and worth getting to know. His two friends in Japan (again, from previous games) as well as his new and old acquaintances in Hawaii are great additions to the party. While the characters and plot suck you, Infinite Wealth is so much more than just that. The flow of the game is a whirlwind, always throwing some new surprise at you. In one moment you might be fighting street toughs, but the next you're naked on a beach, and the next you're finding out some gut-punch detail about your friend's health. The whole game is just constant new stuff that keeps you on your toes. There's not a lot of RPGs out there that have parodies of both Pokemon and Crazy Taxi within them, but here we are. I'm sure at least some longtime fans of the series were bummed about this one taking place outside of Japan, but rest assured, the Hawaiian setting is solid. Though in fairness, this may mean that the setting might be a little tonally brighter than you're used to given the tropical locale. Oh and also there's the major selling point for me: the battle system is incredible. Infinite Wealth made grinding an absolute joy. At its core, the game uses an old school menu system of fight/magic/items, and yet there's so much nuance. Position on the field plays a major role. Maybe you want to line up your attack so that your stumbling enemy hits the one behind him causing residual damage? Maybe you want to hit him towards another party member so they can get an extra hit in for you? Maybe you want to use a bit of the environment to inflict extra damage? All of that is valid and adds to the strategy. I often found myself trying to figure out the best way to maximize damage so that the enemy may never even get a turn. So you've got an incredible battle system and mission variety that constantly keeps you on your toes, along with a riveting plot? Where I come from that's called an excellent game. In fact, I'm rounding out the year by proclaiming that Infinite Wealth would easily be my #2 favorite game of 2024, beaten only by Balatro of which I've spent 240+ hours playing this year. So that's saying quite a bit. I realize that I only got to play ten hours and I've never played another Yakuza/Like A Dragon game so I'm not the ideal judge of this game. But still. This game is incredible. Given that Christmas just ended and it was an expensive season and an expensive year, I'm not going to splurge on paying to unlock the full game yet. But I do intend to get back to Infinite Wealth whenever I catch it in a deeper discount. It was a fantastic experience for ten solid hours, and I really can't wait to see more of it.  Sea Of Stars is one of those indie darling RPGs that I figured I'd love. Instead, I just kind of liked it. At least what I played of it. But more on that later. I think it's safe to say that Sea Of Stars draws heavily from 16-bit RPGs. Namely, the SNES era. You know the big hitters - Chrono Trigger and Secret Of Mana and so on? If you like those games, then Sea Of Stars is probably for you.
Personally, I like both games but also think they're slightly overrated. Chrono Trigger has a great story and great time-travel mechanic, but... well, I guess I don't really have a thought to finish that sentence up. Chrono Trigger is pretty great. Yeah. But I still don't love it as much as say Final Fantasy IV - another SNES defining RPG. Secret Of Mana is also pretty great and gorgeous and had a unique multiplayer mechanic. I guess I can't really disparage Secret Of Mana, either. Though I do prefer the simplicity of its predecessor, Adventure Of Mana (or Sword Of Mana, or Final Fantasy Adventure or whatever you want to call it) as far as action RPGs go. But what the heck even is Sea Of Stars? It's somehow a prequel to The Messenger, which I don't really get but I haven't played The Messenger yet so probably it makes more sense if you had. I just thought that The Messenger was kind of a Ninja Gaiden or Shadow Of The Ninja sort of knock-off. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm too tired to google. I guess the neat thing about Sea Of Stars is its multiple characters. Again, drawing from those SNES era RPGs, there's a full cast to play as. You start with two, and eventually get six. The visual aesthetic is solid with its 16-bit throwback and anime cutscenes. Meanwhile, the storytelling is dense. Probably the biggest bit of forward-thinking here is the battle system. It's got kind of a rhythm game component to it. There's also a mechanic of gaining MP via normal attacks, which is a pretty great touch as it adds a risk/reward thing to mashing attacks versus throwing powerful spells and gets you to think and conserve turns thoughtfully. But none of this really matters to me because of happenstance. I really only jumped into Sea Of Stars because it was "free" on Playstation Plus. I played a few hours and thought it was pretty charming and was liking it (not loving it, but liking it) for a while and then some other game caught my eye. I figured I'd get back to Sea Of Stars eventually. So right there I'm like, yeah it's good. But not good enough to suck me in. But good enough that I want to get back to it when something more gripping isn't in front of me. In December, I decided to go back and try to play as many 2023 games as I could to kind of binge for the end of the year. So I fired Sea Of Stars back up and guess what? My save was gone. I have no idea what happened. But I lost hours of gameplay and that just completely bummed me out. Basically, if I want to play the game now I'm going to have to go back and replay all the opening stuff. And I really have a hard time doing that. You know how some demos don't let you carry progression over? I hate those demos and won't play them. Who wants to redo all the slow opening parts of a game over again in quick succession? Not me. So I guess that's where I stand. Sea Of Stars is a good game. It's possibly a great game but I won't know because of a glitch and my aversion to restarting a game over again so quickly. Maybe like five years from now I'll have forgotten the opening hours and it won't be so painful to try again. Maybe.  Who doesn't like a chill game? Though I don't get into them all that often, I've definitely fallen for some over the years. I don't have an exact definition of the chill game that I'm referring to. But I guess I just know it when I see it. Probably the first game I played that I'd apply such a tag to would be Animal Crossing (2001), which I received as a Christmas gift and got deeply obsessed with. I was in college at the time, and living in a small studio apartment out in the country. I had no cable TV, and the internet back then was dial-up. I was in school all day, working until around ten, hanging out with friends until way too late, and then unwinding with Animal Crossing.
Over the years, I've gotten into a fair few games that I'd apply this label to. Minecraft is really obvious. And to a degree, I guess I'd say that Cities Skylines is one as well. It's also a total masterpiece. But today I'm playing Dave The Diver, which is blowing up review scores and has landed on Playstation Plus so it's like, why not? It's free to me, right? So let's give it a go. Although they are very different in execution, I think Dave The Diver most reminds me of Stardew Valley. Whereas that game was an overhead game about farming and bonding with towns folk, and borrowed liberally (and proudly) from Harvest Moon, Dave The Diver is its own thing. It's a side-scrolling game that incorporates elements of roguelikes, fishing games, and restaurant management sims. It's an odd combo that does actually work. More importantly, it focuses on two things I actually love in real life - the ocean and sushi. The art style is probably what reminds me most of Stardew Valley. It's kind of a 16-bit homage. Or more probably, a 2D 32-bit homage. Again, harkening back to the PS1 days of Harvest Moon. But it also goes hardcore on character and charm. There's cut scenes and some pretty fantastic music. There's some really impressively rendered 2D aquatic life. The story is simple. Or at least I think it is. I'll be honest, I skip a lot of the dialogue. But you're Dave, who is a diver. You're called by some guy called Cobra to come out and dive for exotic fish and then work in a sushi restaurant. It's a pretty simple set up, but it makes the gameplay loop make sense. So let's talk about the gameplay: 1. The first half of the gameplay loop is the morning/afternoon where you will go for dives. You can think of these sections as roguelike dungeons. You'll dive in and your primary goal is collecting fish or other sea life to prepare as sushi in the evening. You'll start off with a basic knife and harpoon to catch the fish. But you'll also find new gear to collect and upgrade so that you can catch bigger fish. As the story progresses, you'll also be doled out other secondary objectives like collecting so many shells for research, or investigating new areas to open up the map, or finding rare fish for new recipes. 2. The second half of the gameplay loop is the restaurant. Here you'll start off each night by managing things economically. You'll prepare a menu based on what you've caught for the day. You'll be responsible for placing ads to attract new employees that you'll need to train. You'll run the restaurant's social media profile and try to bring in new patrons. Then you'll open the restaurant for the night and be tasked with pouring green tea and getting the correct orders to the correct diners. Ultimately it's all pretty simple, but there's a lot of variety and tinkering and there's just always something else to do. There's some other menu to go into and explore. There's something else to upgrade or cross off a list. To put it bluntly, this is the sort of game made for anyone with a compulsive personality. The kind of person who never feels content knowing that there's just one more thing they could accomplish for the night. And as such, I can understand the chill nature and the compelling nature of this game. But it's not just the relaxation that gets you. It's the loop. It's the "one more thing" to check off your list. That's the stuff that keeps you going. And soon enough you'll find yourself up against the sheer weight of economics. It's a story as old as time. The better your company does, the harder it is to maintain. Good sushi means good word of mouth and more customers. More customers means you need to hire more wait staff and chefs. More staff means you need more expensive sushi and more customers. And so the whole thing becomes a gigantic house of cards. Watching your sushi shop fill up with customers only to run out of fish is gutting. As is having so many guests that you can't possibly get them their meals or tea fast enough to keep them happy. Likewise, each dive becomes a risk/reward calculation. Do you fill up your pack with an abundance of small and easy to catch fish that will sell for little, or do you risk your neck trying to hunt something more deadly that will go for a premium? Or do you ignore the fish and try to knock out some of the more exploratory missions in your list in the hopes of getting extra money or unlocks or perks? There's a lot of decisions to be made moment to moment, and I suppose that's the beauty of the game. Over the past seven hours, a bunch of stuff happened. A celebrity chef came to film an episode of his show. He ranked my sushi restaurant an eight out of ten, and suggested that I serve beer. There was a jellyfish festival on the island, so I stockpiled as much jellyfish as I could and that seemed to get us some good attention. I've helped dolphins escape nets. I've done battle with poachers. I've been harassed by activists. I've found mermaids. I've followed an octopus. I've trapped tuna in nets. It just seems like there's always something to be doing in this game, and because of that, always a way to lose more time to it. Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that I'm not even certain that I like the game. Not by any traditional sense. There's no one thing that I find particularly riveting. It's not a game that I'd go out of my way to suggest that anyone else play. I can't even exactly put my finger on why I keep playing it other than that I find it kind of relaxing. It's like, there's lots of things to think about and lots of menus to muck around in. But when you're out there diving it's almost mindless zen garden relaxation. So I guess I do like Dave The Diver, but not because I think it's some incredible game. Instead, it's just a kind of incredible time-killer that kind of soothes me. I like the ocean. I like sea life. I like sushi.I like economics. I like fiddling around in menus. So I guess it makes sense that this game speaks to me on some level. |
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