Never did I ever think I'd write about a Peppa Pig video game. In fact, four years ago, I don't think I was even really aware of Peppa Pig. But my daughter is obsessed with her. And has been since she was two. The past two Christmases and birthdays have been filled with Peppa related items. Last month, when my daughter turned four, our house was filled with Peppa balloons, plates, cups, a cake, and so on. My wife and I often keep an eye out for figures that our collection might be missing. We've sat through so many episodes that we even have our own favorites. When it rains, we have to argue about the merits of jumping up and down in muddy puddles. It's a serious phenomenon.
Today was Father's Day, 2023. The day started with my little one climbing in my bed and playing her tablet next to me as I drifted in and out of sleep. I asked her to wake me up when it was time to get ready for gym class, and she did. We got ready and I poured some coffee in a travel mug. Gym class has been my routine with her for at least six months now. Every Sunday morning. It's a cool routine. It's my chance to watch her grow and gain new skills. After that, we went to Starbucks and split a ham and cheese croissant and a bacon, egg and gouda sandwich and then browsed Target for a while. I always need to check the electronics section and she always asks to play with the Switch kiosk. It's funny: Although I'm a lifelong gamer, I never push my gaming on her. She has her own little Kindle tablet that she plays kids games on. But last month she wanted to play with my tablet and somehow that got me bringing up random games for her to try. She got sucked into Wonder Boy, which is honestly too advanced for her. But I loved her dedication to trying the same minute or so of the opening level over and over again. Ever since, she keeps talking about Wonder Boy the same way I talked about Mario as a kid, and I can't help but think that's adorable. Today in Target I watched her try with all her might to get through a Kirby demo of some sort. It was slow and methodical, but she seemed to get the gist of it. So when we got home to a rainy Sunday and no chance of cooking out and playing in the yard, I figured maybe today was the day to finally give her actual access to a console. I asked her if she wanted to play a Peppa Pig game on the TV and she gave me the most serious and solemn "yes" I have ever heard. I installed the game and handed her a controller and gave no direction. And what I saw blew my mind. I watched as my daughter took in-game direction and created a character. And then she was off into an open world that just lets you do whatever. It was a really neat experience just sitting and watching her play for an hour. First she went to Peppa's house and played with some toys. Then they left and jumped in a muddy puddle. Then they walked to Grandpa Pig's house and hopped in his car and explored a rocky beach. She scored me an achievement when she went rummaging for sea life. Then she walked further down the beach and buried Daddy Pig in the sand. Then she went swimming. Then she went swimming like ten more times. She laughed like a troll as she did it over and over again, forcing Mommy Pig to replay her same dialogue. She snickered that Mommy Pig must be getting tired of saying the same thing again. It was pretty funny. She went and got ice cream with the rest of the family and visited a tower where she could look through a telescope. She explored the town and suddenly got tired. But it was a perfect intro to gaming. There was no threat, no need for dexterity. It was just an open world that she already loved, ready to explore. And the presentation was great, as if we were watching one long episode that we could control the outcome of. I never touched the controller once. And yet, it felt like a truly monumental moment in my own gaming life. I was just sitting and watching and sharing the hobby that I've adored since I was not much older than her.
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Inscryption is an incredibly deceptive game. To oversimplify, it's a card game. Which is cool with me as I've always loved card games. Heck, Slay The Spire was my most played game of 2023, with like 117 hours put in this year. And that's a game I've been playing for years. But calling Inscryption "a card game," truly is an oversimplification, because honestly, it is one of the more bizarre games I've ever played.
When you first fire the game up, you're presented with a title screen that resembles an old computer game. I'm talking Commodore 64 or maybe Apple II or something. The option for a new game is grayed out, so all you can do is continue. So then you start the actual card game which looks more like a gritty PS1 game. The game itself plays not unlike Slay The Spire. Except most modern card games explain everything to you. Inscryption explains nothing. And part of what makes it so gripping is that you play by learning. There's so much trial and error. What cards are good, what do Sigils do, what is anything in this game all comes down to putting the time in (or googling, I suppose). I could write a thousand words and have trouble summing much of it up. You use Squirrel cards as free sacrifices. You need to pick between Squirrel cards and your deck proper. At certain points you can risk putting your cards next to a fire to up their stats, or possibly have them eaten by starving travelers. Other times you can sacrifice a card permanently to add its Sigil to another card. You can trade furs. You can make weird figurines that augment your run. You can pull out your own tooth or gauge out an eye to hail-mary. In other words, this is a grotesque card game. Also, you play against a sort of dungeon master who sits across the table from you and dons unsettling masks to take on the roles of other characters. And when you lose, he takes pictures of you. It's completely weird. Weirder still, some of your cards talk to you. And they begin to give you hints on how to beat the bigger game. The bigger game is actually getting up from the table and exploring the cabin that you're trapped in to find a way out. All while playing a card game. In this sense, Inscryption feels like a mash-up of card game and escape room. One of the more unique mechanics is the Death Card. Every run, when you die you get to create a new card based on cards you've picked up. You choose a Cost, Power, Health and Sigil and then name it. And later on, you can actually draw the card that you created. This adds some incredible depth. As a card game, Inscryption is nowhere near as engaging as Slay The Spire (or Hearthstone, Marvel Snap, etc), but as an experience it's really hard to describe. It's a card game, but it isn't. More, the card game is just a skeleton that the actual game hangs on. It's interesting and creepy and completely worth checking out. Phoenix Point was one of my most anticipated games of 2021. It's also one of the most frustrating games that I've played this year.
If you're not aware of this one, Phoenix Point is a spiritual successor to XCOM. Developed by Julian Gallop - creator of the original X-COM games - this is basically Gallop's own attempt to make his own new XCOM. There's a whole lot of reasons to be excited about this. Especially if you're a guy like me who discovered Terror From The Deep at a young age, and fell in love with the turn based strategy genre because of it. And definitely if you're a guy like me who spent hundreds of hours playing Enemy Unknown, Enemy Within, XCOM 2, and War Of The Chosen. The truth is, I wasn't expecting XCOM 3, here. I know that Gallop's studio doesn't have the resources of 2K. But still. For every good idea that's brought into the fold here, there seems to be some other frustrating that negates it. On the upside, the bones of the game are certainly good. There's definitely a decent game hiding here. But what bugs me is that this has existed on PC for several years now. It's had time to cook. It's had time to work the bugs out. Heck, there's even a bunch of DLC included here. I didn't play it on PC, though. I for sure don't have a capable PC to play it on. But I had to think that when it finally reached Xbox, it'd be ready to make a splash. Not the case. Not by a long shot. But wait - I'm sorry - I meant to focus on the good first. The good is that the story is cool. The whole pandora pandemic thing? Timely anyway. And the vaguely oceanic aliens? Pretty awesome. And the branching story and factions? I can dig that as a fan of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The problems, though... the problems are all seemingly technical. There are so many issues here that impede my enjoyment of actually playing the game. First of all the loading times are just embarrassing. The game loads before and after each mission, and these loading times can stretch into several minutes. Like, legit get up and go get a drink and come back and still wait. It's baffling. It feels like the least optimized game I've ever played on Xbox. Granted, I don't have a Series X (yet) and maybe that would fix it. But in a world of chip shortages, I'm far from alone trying to play this game on an Xbox One. So this is just not a good look. The controls and UI are also an issue. Not so much in-mission. But on the Geoscape I'm constantly getting mixed up on what buttons do what and how to access what menu. And sometimes button presses don't register, making feel like the game is struggling to keep up with each menu change. It makes EVERYTHING feel like a chore. Add to all that the random crashes. Yup. Those exist in a commercial Xbox One game in 2021. I can't tell you the fury I've felt having a mission take minutes to load, then only minutes to play, then minutes more to load only to see the game crash and my progress get wiped. This should not be a thing. And THEN there's the unintuitive UI. My goodness. As said, I've spent hundreds of hours across the XCOM games. So why is it that after spending 15 minutes I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get certain recruits to get on one of my ships? So I'm at a point where I don't even know how to send them on a mission I want to send them on? And how do I intercept this big flying creature? I can click on him. I can send a ship in his path? How do I interact with him? Nothing seems obvious here. It's a lot of work - again - when things take so long to load. I'm just really disappointed in this one. Even if it had been a pretty competently performing XCOM clone, I'd feel like it was a successful side entry. Instead, it feels undercooked after YEARS of me hyping it up in my head. Bummer. |
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