Daniel Weissenberger sits down to chat with John and Rob Doncan — the two-man group behind development studio Bad Viking. They released Strange Horticulture in 2022 to rave reviews, and now they’re on the verge of releasing their new title, Strange Antiquities. We chat about design, how puzzles fit into a world with items, and which cat is best. Be sure to keep an eye out for Strange Antiquities which releases September 17th for Steam and Switch!

TRANSCRIPT:

GameCritics.com: Today on GameCritics, we’re talking to Bad Vikings John and Rob Doncan. The developers responsible for the instant classic puzzle game Strange Horticulture. Their new game, Strange Antiquities, is a sequel of sorts set in the same world, but moving the action to a shop for rare and mysterious artifacts. All right, we’re joined today by John and Rob, the two man developer team responsible for the Strange franchise. Is that what you guys refer to it as?

Rob: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s what we’d call it. Yeah. 

GC: In 2022, they gave us Strange Horticulture, a game about sorting and finding rare and mysterious plants. And now upcoming is the sequel, Strange Antiquities. So, can I start right at the beginning? What were your big influences in kicking off the Strange franchise? Like I can go to your website and look at your library and there’s a lot of action games in there and if I looked at the end of the four games you made beforehand. Strange Horticulture is quite a departure. 

Rob: Yeah, it it is. But there’s like… there is history there as well. Like you know kind of point and click games we played growing up and we made a couple of those as well. So kind of puzzly stuff was always in our blood, I think. You know, we… we grew up with games like Mist and Riven and, in particular the Discworld series as well. We loved those games, which obviously kind of more humor, than we necessarily have ended up doing here. But yeah, so I think there is, you know, there’s some history there. And then another thing that we were really inspired by was board games. So I mean you might be able to see behind me.

GC: Katan and Gloomhaven. 

Rob: Yeah, got a little board game collection going on here. So I think specifically stuff like Eldritch Horror and there’s a game called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which you have, if you haven’t played, there’s a similar sort of map mechanic in it where you go around London solving crimes. And so we kind of borrowed that slightly for Strange Horticulture. Obviously, there’s a map in it and you can… you solve puzzles to find your way around to find plants and and uncover the story, that sort of stuff. So yeah, board games, old adventure games and point and click games and puzzle games kind of always been there for us. 

GC: Okay. 

John: Yeah. I think I think… I think with… basically when we came to making Strange Horticulture, we were sort of… we’ve been toying around with loads of ideas for like a year. We kind of had a bit of a failure when we tried to make a sort of artillery game for Steam that didn’t do so well. And we were… we were toying with a board game idea. We were toying with a point and click adventure game set in a town called Undermere. And then it was Rob who came he he went out one day on a dog walk and came back saying I’ve seen an advert for some gardening company or I don’t know what it was exactly but he he he I think it had the word “horticulture” in it and he came back and he pitched he said I’ve had an idea called Strange Horticulture and it’s like about running an occult plant shop and what do you think and I I just said you know what that sounds really cool can we let’s make that game ’cause you know we we we hadn’t latched on to anything in a kind any kind of strong way. We… and we were desperate for a kind of… like… you know something some kind of source of inspiration and that just seemed really cool like I I could instantly kind of see something in that. So we dropped everything else and then it’s funny how like you start borrowing things. If you take the setting from the point and click game that we were sort of half working on, the map from Rob says Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but we’d actually put that into our own little board game thing. And we took… we took that from there and and suddenly we built up this kind of world and obviously we’re just a two man team so we’re like let’s try and keep you know play to our strengths. We really liked the concept of the what they’ done with… what Lucas Pope had done with Papers, Please and having it all on one screen and kind of the tactile feel of the you know stamping documents and opening books and things like that. And we were like that could work really nicely here and having it in a single sort of screen layout. So let’s borrow that kind of game design. But like you’re… you’re studying books and studying law and and trying to find out about plants and yeah, it’s amazing how these kinds of things (work) together. But yeah, if you look at our sort of game history, it’s not the most obvious like of moves, but sometimes you got to move in tangents in this industry and hey, look, now we’re making strange games and having fun with it. 

GC: Oh man. Okay. Now here’s just a game… just a question about playing the game. Am I not playing it right if the minute I started I turned on auto-label? 

Rob: No, I mean look, that’s obviously we kind of know that there’s a subset of people that are going to love labeling their plants and it’s really interesting. We’ve watched a lot of playthroughs, particularly of people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities. Um, and there’s a lot of people who see the popup saying, you can turn on autolabeling if if labeling items isn’t your thing. And a lot of people who say, “No, it really is my thing. I don’t want to turn on autolabeling.” And then equally, there’s a lot of people who say, “Yeah, it’s not my thing. It’s not for me.” And they turn it on. So, yeah, I don’t know what the split is necessarily. Like it kind… I think this kind of game does appeal to people who like sort of organizing stuff, but it’s not that’s not what it’s about. That’s kind of a a side quest if you like, but yeah, you’re not cheating if you turn on auto labeling. That’s why we put it there. 

John: Yeah. But it was always our intention to offer that side of it. It’s like, you know, for people that want to arrange their shelves how they want to arrange them and they want to give each… each plant or each item its own label, you know, there’s something kind of quite fun about that in a weird kind of… like organizational way. Like I think some people get a lot out of that. So, it’s definitely Yeah, it’s just two types of player and some people want to turn them auto labeling on and others would rather label their own plants. And which… either camp you’re in, we just offer different… that play style to both. And it’s up to you. And that’s the great thing about being able to choose.

Rob: The… I will say that the steam thread of how to arrange your plants on Strange Horticulture is the longest thread in the whole back end… in the whole discussion section. So yeah, people get quite into it. The favorite… my favorite one that someone posted was that they arranged them by smell so the nice… the nice smelling ones are near the customers as they come in. 

GC: That’s fantastic. Sorry, that’s very good. It did not occur to me with No, I… I will say that I would have had a much easier time in the endgame if I had sorted them all by what kind of thematic resonance they gave off early in the game. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. 

GC: Like if there’s one tip to make the game a lot easier, it’s the minute you get that lens, put on the labels what kind of… what kind of resonance they have ’cause that is going to save you a ton of time. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. yeah. I think again some people are kind of naturally more organizational and they’ll just do that instinctively. Again, you see it watching people just playing the demo that, you know, different labeling systems. Some people are really organized and other people are just chaotic. I think John and I, well certainly me, I would be in the more chaotic camp. 

John: Yeah. I mean I was I… I think… I don’t think I’ve ever even put on auto labels or done any labeling, but that’s because I know I know the item sort of off by heart. So I just like where’s my thingy? Yeah, I’ll go find that. So yeah, like I think if I was playing it myself from scratch, I’d be an auto labeler to be honest. 

GC: Okay, good. I’m not alone. Is that a real cat’s purr on the soundtrack? 

Rob: I assume so. It’s a licensed sound effect. So…

JOhn: It certainly will be a real cat’s pur.

Rob: I’d be surprised if it’s not… not my, not our cats, though. 

GC: (I’m) really wondering if you recorded it live. 

Rob: That would have been cool. Yeah. 

GC: Is it the same purr in both games? 

Rob: No. A new purr for a new cat. 

GC: Okay. Alright. It sounded different to me. I just had no idea if that was just my ears playing tricks. Alright, at what point did you start coming up with the idea of doing Strange Antiquities? Were you… Did it happen during the development of Strange Horticulture or after it was finished? 

John: Oh, after like we… Strange Horticulture was like… We were so focused on Strange Horticulture all the way through like we didn’t even think about what to do after ’cause we had no idea like how it was going to be received or anything like that. So the focus was entirely let’s get make for us it was about making the best game that we could with our resources. I mean one of the kind of ideas we had during development was let’s make try and make somebody’s favorite game. That was like a concept we were… we were working with rather than trying to make something that’s like going to make loads of money or is going to be critically acclaimed or let’s make one person’s favorite game and see where it goes. So we… we tried that. We made the best game we possibly could and then we released it and gosh the reception was so much bigger than anything we could have imagined like in terms of the feedback, the reviews the audience were they just seem to really enjoy it. And so after that we were like well makes sort of sense to do another strange game I think. Um, and we still felt we had more stories to tell in Undermere. 

Rob: …but we kind of felt like we… we’d maybe exhausted like, not exhausted, but we put all our best plant ideas into Strange Horticulture and we wanted to try something a bit different. So, I don’t think we thought too much. Correct me if I’m wrong, John, but I don’t think we took too long to decide it was going to be Antiquities. I think that strange like occult artifacts kind of made sense to us pretty quickly.

John: Yeah, we were brainstorming ideas for a follow-up. And honestly, it was quite a short list. I think it was like sort of occult items, cryptic creatures, there might have been something else, but basically the natural progression for us felt like yeah, antiquities. Yeah, you know, you go into museums and there’s cursed items and items about witchcraft and all sorts of that. So, it… it works in the world really well. 

GC: Okay. Next question. Now, you’ve already mentioned and gave a wonderful shout out to Papers, Please, Lucas Pope’s just amazing simulator. Were there any other games that really you felt influenced you in designing this one? 

Rob: I mean that Papers Please was definitely the biggest one I think. I mean although it’s interesting we probably get compared more to Lucas Pope’s other big game, the Return to Obra Dinn. 

GC: Return. Yeah. 

Rob: Because the gameplay is perhaps more similar to that… that sort of deductive reasoning.

GC: …looking at all of the oblique clues to put together the answer. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. but that wasn’t really intentional. we kind of yeah that just sort of happened. but yeah I I can’t think of any other specific games that we were in by..

John: I think thematically we you know we had come across things like Cultist Simulator and Fallen London games and things like that and we sort of we we didn’t… Rob’s played Cultist Simulator, I haven’t played these games, but it… it was kind of like looking into those kind of like cultish occult things, we just felt like there was something cool there. And when we started and that was like always the idea, right? It was going to be occult plants. And then we started researching it and kind of looking into it more and you kind of come across things like well in the 15th century that there was a famous botanist in the in in Britain called Nicholas Culpepper and he wrote something called complete herbal which was like a guide to like pharmaceutical plant use and and other uses you know mystical uses more spiritual uses I guess and you sort of get we got a copy of it and you kind of go oh it’s got the plant. The sketch of the plant and like a description of the plant and then what does it do? And you know it can be how from like settling stomach to warding off spirits. And we were like that’s… that’s really cool. Like why don’t we just take that kind of concept and just you know go our go even more sort of supernaturally occulty like fun with it. and that’s kind of what we did. So yeah, those are the kinds of things we were inspired by. less probably like specific games just…

Rob: There was also well as I mentioned earlier the board games but there was also a game called Coffee Talk which itself was kind of inspired by Papers, Please and a game called Va-11 Hall-A, I assume as well which… Coffee Talk is about you know being a barista in a kind of fantasy setting not sure what you’d call it exactly but that that kind of taught us that you can have this kind of slower paced game play. and like it can be kind of chilled and you know it doesn’t… doesn’t need to be fast-paced or frantic or anything like that. You can do quite a lot with a little. 

GC: Okay. Yeah. All right. On the website for the game, Rob is listed as coding and designing. John is doing the art and designing. Who is writing the character dialogue and book entries because there’s so many of them in the game. 

Rob: Yeah, true. Well, that’s Yeah, that’s pretty much all me. Oviously with some help from John as well. And actually John’s wife wrote some of the like flavor text for some of the locations that you can visit in the first game, I believe. 

John: I think… Well, yeah, we sat down together, Steph and I, and just like just took locations and just started writing descriptions and stuff. So, yeah, I think most when I say game design is, you know, it’s a collaborative process and that includes things like the story, we we we come up with some ideas, we we talk about it like and then but most of the writing is definitely Rob’s side of it, but that doesn’t mean to say I don’t get involved. I’ve… I’ve done a few little bits in the game like I think most of the epilogue entries I think are more me in… in the game. So it is a collaborative process. it’s just our main roles are art and code and then we also have loads of other hats that we put on, you know, like sound design, animator, narrative designer, marketing, social media, community stuff. We do… we do so much just as just the two of us. 

GC: Okay. All right. So specifically about the text, what challenges did you face in coming up with the kind of word puzzles that are in the entries? I have to imagine it’s kind of difficult writing these entries that tow the line between legitimately sounding like a description of the item and the history of the item without just giving away what it is… 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Very challenging. And much more challenging designing those puzzles on strange antiquities than it was on Strange Horticulture. Partly because obviously plants all share similar properties, right? So you can describe a plant’s leaves as being heart-shaped or whatever and that could apply to any plant and you have to go and check all of your plants on your shelf and see if they have heart-shaped leaves. Whereas you can’t really do that with items. Like if you say it has a handle or whatever then okay yeah that could apply to a couple of items but not many. If you say well yeah so it’s about like trying to use those broader terms. So trying to… trying to find those broader descriptive terms. So like using the material maybe or you know we might say it’s a pendant or it’s a totem or something. You’ve got lots of those on your shelves. So that’s kind of what we try and do is… is give a broader descriptive clue or maybe try and use a sketch or something like that that could apply to more than one item. And then we’ll try and have other clues peppered in there that will help you narrow it down. where you might have to use some other tools to help you do that. So, you might have to inspect the item in some way, see if it makes a sound or has a threatening aura or something like that. Or you might have to weigh it or use some other items in your shop to kind of help you get there. But yeah, that was… that was certainly a challenge this time round. But I think by working through that challenge, we perhaps came up with some more interesting ideas this time around, and hopefully some more interesting puzzles came out of that process.

John: Yeah, I mean it took longer like… the process way longer than in Strange Horticulture to come up with one all these items visually like plants because they’re similar. You… I just started drawing plants and then you just draw the next one and you kind of find some way of comparing them and making (them) interesting. It’s almost like we designed the puzzles first and then designed the items and then… then you also have to come back and try and throw in little bits of red herrings for other puzzles. And like it’s, you know, it’s about creating a putting in a few clues into the description like as Rob said, one that’s a broader sort of clue, one that’s more of a like narrow it down and a clincher. And but also making it sort of vague enough and interesting enough and appealing enough law-wise that it sort of like it has this richness to it in the game as well. So it’s… it’s an incredibly difficult process. I think it… it’s when we come up with a way that’s to do a puzzle that is unique and completely different to how you’re used to kind of using your book looking for and those are the ones which are, I think, land the best on the player as well. So the more of those we can put in the better really. 

Rob: And some of my favorite ones are the ones where it’s like one small sentence. So you… you know you get ones that are like have three or four quite maybe disguised clues but like…

GC: The insanity card where it’s just like I don’t know what the entry is something (like) “This is as mysterious as insanity in the mind itself.” Thanks. Hugely helpful. 

Rob: Doesn’t give you much to go on, but then you know once you crack it, I think…

GC: Very satisfying. Exactly. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. Great. 

GC: How much and well when you’re writing tests… texts this complex to work as puzzles, how much testing of that do you have to do, right? Do you have people you’d normally test this stuff on? 

Rob: Yeah, I mean obviously as as much as possible is the answer, but that is hard because well one of the biggest problems that we face with a game like this is that it doesn’t really fall into place until quite close to the end of the game like end of development in the sense that as John says you know in designing the items one item on its own is not a puzzle. You need 10 items on your shelf that you haven’t identified yet so that there can be ones to compare it against. So until you’ve kind of designed those other items that might be red herrings, you know, you can’t and… you’ve designed the… the tools to identify these items, you can’t show it to someone and say, “Is this working or isn’t it?” So yeah, that obviously came quite late in development. 

GC: You have to make the game before you know if it’s any good. 

John: Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a game that we could like… Even with Strange Horticulture, it’s not a game that we were able to prototype and sort of and test out on people and say, “Does this work?” We… we just had to go with sort of like a gut instinct and and as you say, just basically make the game and then try it out on people and hope that it works…

Rob: But obviously once then once you do try it out on people, you find out, okay, this one is too hard, this one’s too easy or whatever. And then you can kind of go back in and tweak them all and add in more red herrings where required or clarify certain bits here and there. So we’ve done a lot of that obviously and that’s where yeah play testers come into it. 

John: Yeah, especially like you know we… when we launched the demo one of the things obviously it’s only the first two days but all those are the… the easier side of the puzzle. So it’s, you know, we can see how people are interacting with it, where the points of friction are, try and smooth it through, and then you kind of go, okay, that’s how they’re playing. Is there anything else we need to do further up in the game? Like that will just ease people’s frictions. And we’re never going to get it perfect. Like we… we try our hardest to balance the game as as well as we can. Like not too easy, not too hard. You know, I always sort of try and lean towards making it hard and then we realize we’ve we it’s too hard. We got to go… have to go back the other way. But then we were… we were discussing some feedback and a puzzle yesterday and Rob found a quote by Ron Gilbert who did um… 

GC: Monkey Island.

John: Yeah. And he was like, you know, stick stick to hard basically. I can’t remember exactly what it was. 

Rob: He said yeah he is on the side of making it too hard. What he doesn’t want to do is like, you know, if… if you’ve given the players the tools to work something out and there’s a wrench on the table was his specific quote. Don’t be tempted to make the wrench bounce up and down and flash in their face ‘cause part of the fun of these kind of games is figuring that stuff out for yourself. And you know not… you don’t have to make every puzzle easier. It’s just the ones where you know if… if every single play tester trips up on it, that’s obviously you know that’s a flag. But you know some… some things some people are going to find a bit harder and some people will breeze through it and that’s okay. 

John: But it’s about creating those aha moments where you know where you… you know if it’s too easy you don’t get that reward. If it and it’s if it’s too hard, you also and it doesn’t really make sense, you don’t get that reward. But if it’s hard enough that you can work it out and then you do work it out, the sense of satisfaction you get from that is much greater. 

GC: Oh, I agree completely. There’s a lot of really satisfying moments in the game. There’s some… there’s some tough ones, but when you figure it out, it just feels fantastic. 

Rob: Awesome. 

GC: I was thinking about one particularly difficult one, but I’m not going to spoil it here. I tell you later. All right. Do you guys each have a favorite character in the game? 

Rob: For me, I think it’s got to be Verona Green. Partly because she is a returning character from Strange Horticulture. So, if you played that game, you might recognize her. And I mean, she’s kind of… she’s pretty central in both games. She’s… she’s kind of half based on a kind of Granny Weatherwax sort of character from Discworld, if you’re familiar with her. She’s just… Yeah, she’s kind of the… the beating heart of Undermere. I think she kind of keeps everything ticking over. 

John: I mean, like, it would be remiss if I said my favorite character wasn’t the cat because my favorite character is the cat, you know? He’s the central kind of character throughout the game. Well, both games, obviously. It’s a different cat now. But he’s the constant throughout like, he’s always there. He’s minding his own business. You know, he runs the place basically. You, you’re just like… so yeah definitely I would say the cat Jupiter.

GC: Okay. Yeah, one thing I did love about Jupiter is when he’s napping if you hit the… if you hit the bell, of course he’s alarmed that you woke him up but if you pet him first he’ll be awake and he won’t mind the bell.

John: Yeah that’s like something from Strange Horticulture which was a happy accident just how it was set up like and then people loved it or found it, found out about it and loved it so much and then when we released the demo it didn’t have that and people were like excuse me can you fix that please!

Rob: We added that back in. 

GC: Fantastic! Do you have a favorite one of the items in the game?

Rob: I think I’m going to go with an item called the Bloodbeck which I have to be careful here to not give away any sort of puzzle. But it is this kind of mysterious item that has whispered voices and you don’t know if they’re the voices of the dead or the voices of the mysterious nameless gods.

John: I mean honestly, I don’t know the items like inherently by name or by what they do but I do like as the artist is… is for me it’s how they resonate visually. So, I can say like my favorites there are like there’s a wooden doll item with some markings on his head, which I’ve… I don’t know why. I’ve just always liked it. Like I think it’s cool. It could… I can see it in a museum or something. And there’s also one which has… is it’s like a… a sort of doll, a wooden doll with earrings and a big…

GC:  …Disc headdress on top. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. I just… I just like it those… those ones visually like I don’t know. Like and so when… when I did some stickers for Strange Horticulture for Gamescom recently those… those are ones that got printed up. So yeah like um…

GC: Okay. Yeah, there they are. And of course the skull and the flower that use… 

John: Well, that’s kind of in the game’s loading screen. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s quite an iconic one. 

John: Yeah, it became like early on it it was one of the sort of earlier designs and it became like kind of the the insignia for the game like the emblem and…and so it’s… it’s kind of on the the Steam small banner and we kind we kind of use it as our kind of icon I guess. 

GC: Yeah. No, it… it’s quite an image because it ties things of course back to Strange Horticulture. You got the plant right there. 

John: That’s it. There’s a little bit of that and I think like the kind of skull and like the way it is it kind of feels occult and so which it’s a cool… it’s just a cool design. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. 

GC: All right. Now, here’s a question. How did you decide on the yacht dice minigame as a way of punishing players for just random clicking? 

Rob: That was… I’m not sure exactly where that idea came from. Well, so we had something similar in Strange Horticulture where yeah, if you fill up your rising dread meter, we call it and you get a game over. You have a little puzzle to solve to get back in. And we got some really good feedback on that. Some players really loved it. And then I think the players that hit it quite a lot found it quite frustrating that they were just doing the same puzzle over and over again, which yeah, fair enough. We… we take that on board. So we wanted to do something that could be more replayable. Which is a real challenge when you want it to be something quite simple like not take too long and get you back into the game you know within a minute or two, max 5 minutes, something like that. So yeah it went through quite a few iterations but I think we went with a dice game partly because again inspired by board games and those kind of mechanics. Partly because I think visually it’s… it looks cool having, you know, the 3D dice in there, I think it works really well. And partly because it introduces a luck factor. So, there’s that kind of randomizing element. But then balancing that and making sure because the first iteration we did of it, we, you know, we sent it off to our publishers and like, oh, what do you think of this? And they absolutely hated it because it was just way too hard. And they were just getting so frustrated that they couldn’t just get back into the game. So, we tweaked it quite a lot and made it easier. And we also added in a fun little feature where… so if you roll X’s, that’s kind of like a bad thing. You don’t want to roll those. But if you roll two or more of them, Jupiter can swipe his paw across and reroll them for you, which is, kind of nice. 

GC: It’s a delightful surprise. Is the first time it happened. Yeah. Just reached in to help me out. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: It’s for us like that… the mini game like the game, we call it the game over minigame internally. And it’s basically… it’s needed in the game to stop people just trying every item on the shelf systematically and brute forcing every puzzle. We want people to actually try and work out the right item. So, we have to have something that takes people out so there’s an incentive to try and get the right item first time round. And obviously, if you’re playing the game correctly, you should never see the game over mini game. You should be able to go through the whole game without seeing it. But it’s there like as… and it’s got to fit sort of thematically like does it does it work like does it work within this world? It’s got to be kind of simple to play. And then we also wanted to try and make it so that if you are coming back to it regularly like you can kind of learn how to play it and then we try and increase the difficulty a little bit as you go along. So it becomes almost like a game in itself which you can kind of have… have and there is some sort of strategy to it. So yeah, I think whether people like it or not, we… we don’t, it’s going to be hard to judge until it comes out, but it’s… it’s the best we were able to come up with for that yeah, that section of the game. 

GC: Yeah. As you say, to keep people from just brute forcing every puzzle because it takes you out of the experience if you’re just click click click. Okay, well that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. Okay. No, it… it absolutely had a great effect there as does the hint system. Did you discuss whether you wanted to have a hint system in the game or was that always the plan? 

John: The… the hint system is there again for, like, people who get to a point where they’re really stuck and they’re going to quit the game and never come back to it. And it’s like, you know, why are we trying to punish people if they’re having a hard time? like let’s give them clues and rather than just telling them the answer, let’s try and like give a, you know, a simple clue and then if they’re still struggling another clue and then if they’re still struggling it maybe a final clue that really hints at it. But like it’s about providing as seamless an experience for everyone. And so having the hints, is something we always plan to do in Strange Horticulture and then for this absolutely we would… we definitely added it. And we’ve done another thing this time round which we didn’t do previously which is we kind of we talked a lot about it and then we’ve just decided to do it anyway is when you solve a puzzle and you identify an item in the in the screen that comes up there’s a popup and we we list the reason…

GC: What the clues were. 

John: What the clues were. The idea being that if someone wasn’t entirely sure why that was the right answer, we’ve given them the clues so that they can go, “Ah, okay, that makes sense.” And also maybe get into the way we think and how we’re setting puzzles, 

GC: Teaching them what to look for in future puzzles. 

Rob: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that was the thinking behind it. Sure. 

GC: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and that’s what it… that’s the effect it had on me. So, I confirm that works. You say the game is largely not humorous, and I think that’s true, but there are a lot of moments of levity in there, like at the time I clicked, you know, to feel what the texture of a bottle’s label was, and the answer was papery. 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure. 

GC: Is there stuff that from there that, like, really makes you guys laugh? 

Rob: Yeah. So when I said (it) is less humorous, I guess I was meaning in contrast to something like Discworld, which is very silly like super British sarcastic kind of humor. We do… we do have some of that kind of dry humor in there as well. You can probably tell from our accents that we’re British and… and that’s yeah, that’s kind of in our DNA there. So yeah, we did put a few things in. I’m struggling to think of any good examples off the top of my head, but yeah, I think certainly Verona adds that partly that’s why I like Verona Green because she adds a bit of that sort of wit to her um… 

GC: ..in her interactions. 

John: Yeah. when we… when we can be witty, we we’ll try and add some wit in just ‘cause it… it works well with the kind of it’s… it’s about a counterpoint to the dark kind of more sinister stuff going on when you can provide moments of levity and I think they’re important. So…

GC: Okay. All right. Now, you’re you’ve already told me that when you’re designing the quests, ‘cause it’s funny, I wrote out my question and it’s like, what comes first? The character who has a problem solved or the item you want to use, but it seems to me the real organ order you’re doing this is you come up with a puzzle you want to do first and then the other two fold into that. That a fair way of describing it? 

Rob: Yes, pretty much, I’d say. Yeah, I think that’s kind of how we approached it was design as many or… or come up with as many puzzles as we could. Like, yeah, I’ve got kind of pages of notebooks filled of just different ideas for item puzzles and… and then you kind of design an item around that. And then because you can you can kind of like not always, but you can kind of tweak the use case of an item to fit where you need it. But yeah, I mean, honestly, this was a real headache for us because yeah, we… we’ve got a narrative going on there as well. So, anyone who comes into your shop, ‘cause it’s not a narrative where you’re kind of necessarily driving it yourself by going out into the world and speaking to different characters, that sort of stuff. It’s more that you… you’re kind of yeah, you’re in your shop and characters come to you and they might propel the narrative forward with a little snippet of dialogue here and there. But then those characters that come in, they… they have to come in for a reason generally. You know, sometimes the character will come in, you know, where we just could not think of an item that this person would need at that point and they just go away and there was no real purpose to their visit other than they wanted to come in and talk to you. But that’s… there’s not too many of those. So yeah, trying to come up with a reason for every single visit and fitting in those use cases for each item. Yeah, real real headache for us and took us quite a long time to kind of unravel that.

GC: Now, for… from a replayability standpoint, at the end of the game, I won’t spoil what happens, but you let us know what happened to all of the characters. How many different character end states did you end up putting in the game? 

Rob: That’s a good question. I… I don’t actually know off the top of my head. Yeah. So, there are… I was going to say there are 10 character characters who kind of have a more central role in the story and that you… give you have bios of them. I think it’s 10. And then there are a couple more who don’t have bios, but they do show up in that endgame summary because they, you know, got intertwined in the story somehow and… and you might want to find out how they turned out. So yeah each of those has you know at least two or three different end states but some of them have quite a few. 

John: Yeah, obviously like you know feeding into that the game has branching points where you have to make choices. And like a character will come in and there’ll be… it’ll be a choice of two items that you can give her and obviously then the narrative branches and we sort of go in different directions and I think we’ve got eight possibly eight eight endings maybe nine endings in the game. And you know, each one has different end states for each of the characters, but it’s based off the end. I think there can only ever be nine separate endings like each one with that kind of summary sheet. 

GC: Okay.

John:  Where some people might…

Rob: No, the summary sheet will be different. 

John: Oh, really? 

Rob: (For like ) the same ending. Yeah. Because there are, you know, there are some characters that…  minor characters that you might have made a different choice with. 

GC: So that doesn’t meaningfully affect the main ending. 

Rob: Right, yeah. 

GC: Okay. Wow. So there’s the nine big endings and then that can have an assortment of character outcomes within the big ending. 

Rob: Right, exactly. 

GC: That is a huge amount of branching. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not… it’s slightly less complicated than it sounds perhaps in terms of the branching. It’s you know there yeah there are certain decision points during the game as John says and again like you know that branch branching it is really really difficult again because you don’t want to run into a scenario where you know you you might need an item on one branch and you whatever like it it yeah it’s complicated fitting it into this sort of framework but we obviously We we kind of learned how to do that from Strange Horticulture to a degree and kind of..

John: Yeah. But you make it sound like that we learned and it made it easier but it’s a tool like I think arguably it was harder this time round. Again I… I don’t know why but it was.

GC: All right. Now this is just a detail that I absolutely loved and I got to know how it ended up in the game. If I look left and right in the shop, it’s not like I’m turning my eyes. It’s like I’m picking up the whole shop and moving it because all of the hanging items swing back and forth. Why is that in the game? 

Rob: I kind of… I almost don’t want to admit this because well, no, obviously I will, but it was… it was basically an accident. I didn’t intend for it to be like that. I put the code for pendulums swinging into the game and I noticed that it was doing this and it was only afterwards and and but I, you know, I saw it and I was like, well, it shouldn’t technically be doing that, but it does look kind of cool, so I think I’m just going to leave it in. And yeah, the reason is that instead of ‘cause… so I can either move the camera right in the back end, I can move the camera around the shot or I can move the shelves. But because when you go down to the desk, that’s… that moves the camera down. But then moving the shelves is like a separate thing. I don’t want to move the camera across when I’m on the desk view. So, the easy solution there is to simply move the shelves, which means that by a happy accident, I’m moving the whole world, which means that the pendulums start swaying just because they… their position moves in the world. 

John: But it creates this kind of like extra tactile quality to everything, you know, like just having things like moving and stuff and like there’s something about Strange Horticulture. We had the plants were all swaying and stuff, but these are static items. It’s like how can we create life? And one of the… the things I think that does that is just having the… the talisman, the pendants kind of just sway when you pick them up and put them down and when you move the shop around. And I just yeah, it feels… I don’t know. It feels more enjoyable as a player when you’re kind of navigating it around. Even though maybe it doesn’t entirely make sense. Though that said, we’ve always maintained like the shop itself is an… is a thing is almost like an entity. I mean, there are some puzzles which require I mean, it’s not a spoiler to say there are some plinths in the counter and that one of the puzzles involves putting items on plinths and then you can go to other locations in your shop and the way we do that is we slam the shelves together and you mysteriously get to a different bit. I mean, so it’s… there is a kind of like, I don’t know, magical quality to the way the shop sort of moves around. 

GC: Well, according to the lore, the town was built around the shop, so that’s not a huge surprise. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. And nobody really knows who built it or how old it is. 

GC:There you go. Actually, when you’re talking about moving up and down to your… the desk you look down at, I did notice that the controls are much more, kind of, intuitive and user friendly than they were in Strange Horticulture. Like the way you… you put the… the magnifying glass on the mouse wheel this time. So, it’s very easy to just zip into that. The ambidextrous controls in the keyboard. Was that based on feedback from people who played Strange Horticulture? 

Rob: I mean partly that just came out of extending the layout. ‘Cause obviously Strange Horticulture is just that single screen. But this time we wanted to put the characters front and center and have the dialogue text a little bit bigger so it’s, you know, not quite as hard to read on smaller devices. so then you know as an extension of that then the desk goes below the main shop window so now you have to move it around. But then yeah so it kind of came out of that, and yeah obviously there… there was some feedback on Strange Horticulture that we had tried to address as well. And some feedback from people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities that we’ve already been able to address. You know stuff like people struggled with exiting various menus. They wanted to press escape, which I always thought that the default for escape would be to bring up the you know the system menu. But we’ve made it so that that will also exit menus and then it will only bring up the system menu if you’re kind of if you’re not in one of those…

GC: And you’re… you’re in the neutral screen. Okay. 

Rob: Yeah, yeah. 

GC: Yeah. I did hit escape a lot. You’re right. Yeah. 

Rob: Yeah. Well, yeah. Players… players wanted it. So, yeah. So obviously having as much play testing as possible allows, you know, enables us to find those kind of points of friction and… and allows us to smooth them out as much as we can. You know, we’re not going to be able to get everything, but we do the best we can. 

GC: Okay. What kind of work went into designing the game’s maps? Like you talked about some of the inspirations with Consulting Detective, but what I was intrigued by was that all three of the maps you’ve chosen to do in completely different art styles. 

John: Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it’s funny you say that. I never intended them to be different art styles, but I suppose, like, they’re designed by different map designers. What we… the key thing was we wanted each map to feel different to the last one, right? And… and that extends back to Strange Horticulture as well. We… When we designed that map, you know, when you’re going out looking for flowers, it always felt like it needed to be a wide area. And we set our game in the Lake District in the UK and you go up The Fells and you find rare plants and you bring them back to your shop. And it was all done on a grid- based layout and the puzzles were all all around this kind of grid system. We kind of were like, well, we’ve done that grid layout. We did as many grid kind of based puzzles as we could think of in that game. And we were like, we don’t want to do that again. So what can we do differently? And I mean early on we were like well we’ll just set this in Undermere itself like focus it makes more sense. And (I) really like the idea of doing a street layout map for that. And then we kind of like people loved exploring the maps. Let’s add more. What else can we do? And it was just about trying to find other ideas which would offer us the ability to do different kinds of puzzles. So yeah, again like we don’t want to entirely spoil it for people because I think part of what’s fun playing the game is coming across the different maps as you go through the game and like oh what’s this one got in it and it’s like cool. 

GC: Well, there is definitely a… a spoilery question I would like to ask you about the… the underground map, but I’m definitely not going to do it here. 

Rob: Okay. Sure. 

GC: It was a… it was such a delight to come on that third map and just doing everyone has its own completely different kind of puzzle because for the… the town map it kind of makes sense. You’re asking people who lives across from where? What are the streets named, right? What is north, south, east, and west of place? But then the… for the mansion, right, you’re suddenly asking yourself, okay, now I’m imagining myself walking through this space. Whereas when you get into the underground, it’s all about lore and history. And it’s because it’s interesting because it’s not just three different locations, it’s three different kinds of puzzles. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of it, there’s another puzzle, which is when you get a clue card, we don’t tell you which map it is, so you have to kind of analyze it and work out which one we’re talking about. 

GC: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, not going to lie, getting through all the clue cards. Well, the embarrassing part is, you know, you get the first clue card before you know, you get it right away and you’re like, what the… what does this mean? Is this a story thing? What is going on? 

Rob: Yeah. 

GC: It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out it was a map reference. 

Rob: That’s that’s interesting. Yeah. 

GC:Yeah. 

Rob: Obviously, yeah. Well, that’s again that’s part of the game and that’s part of, you know, it’s that coming back to that Ron Gilbert quote of we don’t want to tell people that, we… we don’t want to signpost it. We want players to have those ah kind of moments and and work it out for themselves. 

GC: Oh, and all right, here’s… here’s a kind of related question just for the player experience. Have you considered adding in a new game plus mode where after they’ve gotten the trophy for unlocking every single item when they restart the game, they can just have everything pre-labeled so they can speedrun getting the different endings they want? 

Rob: So yes, we have considered it. I mean, if it’s just a case of pre-labeled, uh, that’s certainly a lot easier. The part of the reason that we haven’t done that yet, as in, so that feature doesn’t exist yet, is because there’s just two of us and making a game and finishing a game is a lot of work. And that is obviously like there’s… for the big fan for the you know our core fans of the game. We want to be able to give them those sorts of features but it’s not necessarily a core feature for the game. So they’re kind of like really nice to haves but yeah we’re not going to prioritize it until we’ve kind of done everything else basically. So yes, we… we would like to add those sorts of features but they’re not there yet. 

John: There… I would also like (to) point out for anyone playing that is interested in trying to find the different endings, it doesn’t require you to always restart the game from the beginning. We… in the save system, we do have save points at every day. So you can kind of go back in to a maybe where if you make a note of where a branch was or like certainly at the end like when you get to the end of the game there’s kind of a choice to make on where you go to kind of do your ending. Like there’s like different places where ending points can happen. So you can kind of try out the… those different branches by just going back a day and trying them different. You don’t have to play the whole game through again. It’s just like some of the more… 

Rob: If you have… if you have, you know, set up the choices to be able to unlock that ending at all, but yes.

John: That’s true. Yeah, I forget that… there are other bits further back like that can have an impact on where you can go at the end. And…

GC: I definitely did not have a choice of where to go at the end. So, obviously, I screwed something up. Okay. Do you guys have a third installment in the series in mind? Can fans expect to be like running a strange pet shop or a strange bakery in 2028? 

Rob: We, I mean, we… Yeah, we’re not committing to anything at this point, but I don’t want to think that we’re done with Strange or we’re done with Undermere in particular. So, yeah, we… we hope to come back to it, but we’re yeah, we’re… we’re you know, we’re we’re toying with ideas behind the scenes definitely. 

John: At the same time, we’ve been working in… on the strange universe now for five years and part of us is kind of like exhausted with it and needs to kind of maybe park it for a bit. So whether we go straight into, like, thinking about that or whether we sort of pivot for a bit, I don’t know. It’s like this is, you know, we’ve been so focused on finishing Strange Antiquities, getting it out, making the best game we could make. That kind of those conversations about what we do for a third game like we have like had them like little ones from time to time but nothing like properly serious like we are definitely going to do that next you know so it’s like we we we do obviously really hope and especially like well it depends kind of like how people see perceive Strange Antiquities when it comes out if people are loving it and want more and there’s a real appetite for it. It kind of makes us feel like…like well we… we ought to, you know, but if it’s really disappointing, well, may… maybe we’ve had enough. 

GC: Well, you’ve been living in this world for 5 years, So like, roughly how much work have you done on the lore and backstory of this world? Like how much do you know about this world that has never been revealed in the games? 

Rob: To be honest, I think most of that does go into the game in some way. The… Yeah, we… Yeah, I think I think it goes into the game. Like there’s… there’s some lore and stuff that we’ve written that doesn’t obviously, but…

John: But those are more like story ideas that we had like that have been dropped. We’re not like the kind of I guess like TV show designers that have planned out series 1 to 5 and they know where it’s going. We… we’ve made series 1, we’ve made series 2, and now the network says, you need to do three more series. Oh, right. Like, yeah, maybe we need to think about it some more. 

GC: You’re building the railroad as you’re going down it. 

John: Yeah, I think I think that’s definitely more of the approach. We, you know, like, I love the idea of sort of Undermere adjacent stories and, like, and things like that… that you know, writing some stories about the world like that kind of go into the history a bit more and stuff like that. That’ll be really cool to do. 

Rob: One certainly one thing that we have really enjoyed this time round is because it’s a sequel, we can kind of reference back to Strange Horticulture. So there’s quite a few little references dotted back to that game in this one. so you know for fans of the first game, I think you’ll spot a few of those things. Um…

GC: it was nice to be able to go to Strange Horticulture in the (game) 

Rob: Yes. Well, exactly. So that’s… that’s one of one of the little Easter eggs. You can actually visit the shop in this one. And there’s yeah, there’s quite a few little things like that and some like… Yeah, I really enjoyed putting those extra lore elements in there that tie back into the first game and kind of some of them might answer some questions. Like I think one of my favorite ones, I guess I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it’s not a big spoiler. There is the great oak in Strange Horticulture, which is never really explained. It’s just something that’s marked on your map. It’s this huge oak tree. And if you are paying attention in this game, you know, there are some small clues about where that came from. Which, you know, it’s… it’s a minor detail, but we really enjoyed peppering those sorts of things in. 

GC: Yeah, lots of mysterious items with oak handles in the game. 

Rob: Right? 

GC: Definitely tying in if you were go through the book carefully. All right, Sophie’s choice time. You have to pick one cat. Hellebore or Jupiter. 

Rob: Oh gosh, what are you doing to us? It’s… I think it’s Jupiter for me. I think…

John: Oh, you see, I would…

Rob: I’m sorry. (I’m sorry Hellebore)

John: I mean, Jupiter now, like it’s hard to I do love Jupiter with his heterachromia and, obviously my he looks quite… a substantially better visually. My art stuff has improved and things, but I do still really have a soft spot for Hellebore. Especially ‘cause he was such, like, a last minute addition to Strange Horticulture. He’s he was not, you know, there from the start. It was like when we were we basically had the game mostly there like in terms of you know…

GC:  All the mechanics, all the content? 

JOhn: All the mechanics and all the not all the content but like certainly all the mechanics and then we were like something’s missing like what is it? And it’s like, yeah, a cat obviously like that. It’s got to have a cat. Like… And then we like, well, can it just be a cat that just didn’t… it doesn’t really have anything to do with the game, but it’s just there. Yeah, why not? Like, just throw it in. And like, it just… it was such a… a winning addition. I  genuinely believe that Strange Horticulture would not have seen the success it has if Hellebore had not been a part of it. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s… it’s kind of shocking how long it took us to realize that this game needed a cat.

GC: Well, I’m glad you did because that purr and that petting is… is always a pleasure to do. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: Yeah. 

GC: And of course, Jupiter has a bigger role, which I won’t spoil in this game, than Hellebore had in that one. Big question though, the game is coming out. What is the most important thing that you want people to know about the game? Like what is the thing like this is what makes this special to us and this is why we are desperate to share it with you. What are you most excited for people to see?

Rob: That is… that is an incredibly difficult question to answer. I think just the love that we have poured into this over, you know, three years of hard work. And yeah, I think, you know, I just I hope it comes through in all the little details that we’ve put into the game. 

John: Yeah. I mean, we’re just incredibly excited to share it now with people. It gets to a point where you start like you… you’re really proud of your work and then the more you work on it, it starts to, like, go the other way and you kind of want to kick it into the sun at times. And now I I’m just I really wanted to get it to people to show like one the progression like that we’ve made ‘cause I think whilst you know I look back at Strange Horticulture I think we made a pretty good game and obviously you know from people’s perception of it like it clearly resonated with a lot of people but I think we have just taken that and you really improved it on almost in every aspect. Well, at least from my point of view. Like visually, it’s a step up. Like in terms of like the puzzles and the way those (are) done, it’s a step up. Like I just so I just hope people see that as well and enjoy and enjoy it as much as Strange Horticulture and hopefully more. 

GC: Okay. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I’ve learned a lot about the game and as someone who just finished it, I can confirm that it is very much just… Everything you loved about Strange Horticulture has just been moved a leap forward in design this time around. Everything…

Rob: (That’s) very very kind of you to say so. Thank you so much.

GC: Of course!

John: Yeah, that obviously that is what we were hoping for but it’s… it’s lovely to hear honestly. 

GC: No, but I mean the design it’s… it’s so much more playable and so much more in-depth without losing any of the charm. That’s the thing. It really feels like an extension of the world. Yeah. While all of the gameplay mechanics have just taken an amazing leap forward. So, congratulations on how it turned out. 

Rob: Thank you so much. 

GC: Okay. and of course, when is the game releasing and what can people play it on? 

Rob: It’s out on September 17th. And it’s coming to Steam and Switch first, and hopefully other platforms later. 

GC: Okay. Thank you so much for your time and I encourage everybody if they haven’t yet, check out the demo immediately. You don’t have the exploration gameplay, but you do have everything, all the other main parts of the game. 

Rob: Uh, yeah. Well, the exploration is there as well. You just, you know, you have to find that map first, but it’s there. 

GC: Oh, it is. Oh my god. You’re kidding me. 

Rob: No, it’s there. 

GC: I thought it wasn’t there. Oh my god. 

Rob: That but that’s again. Yeah, some people don’t find it. Some people do. 

GC: Apparently, I’m also bad at the demo. Oh, thanks so much. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check out the links for more accessible reviews, interviews, and features at Gamecritics. Also, like the video and subscribe so you get notified whenever new content drops. We’ll see you back here for more. But until then, au revoir!

The post VIDEO INTERVIEW: Bad Viking on Strange Antiquities appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Slo-mo limb-severing explosions.

LOW Replaying the same five minutes ad nauseum.

WTF How big is this dance club?

There are moments in The Cleaner that are magnificently brutal — like when the player’s slow-time ability allows them to weave through a cloud of bullets before shooting three people in two seconds, and then watching all the bodies collapse at once. It looks and feels incredible in those brief moments of balletic viciousness, and if it could find a way to make those moments the meat of gameplay, it would be an incredible accomplishment.

A first-person shooter in the Hotline Miami try-and-die mold, The Cleaner has players controlling an assassin sent to kill a child trafficker in his nightclub office. But is that what’s really going on? The world is much stranger than it first appears, with many locations that make no logical sense. One second I was blasting my way through a well-appointed library, and the next I was jumping from pipe to pipe in a dingy sewer built over an abyss.

So what is going on? I’m afraid I can’t weigh in on that because, despite its solid core mechanic and fascinating level design, The Cleaner botches its difficulty level so badly that I was unable to make it through the game.

The Cleaner‘s biggest problem is that its levels are just too long. A core quality of try-and-die games is their staggering level of difficulty — to learn a level well enough to beat it, players are generally expected to fling themselves against a seemingly impossible challenge a dozen times or more. This naturally leads to extreme frustration, and one way level designers generally mitigate this is by making stages short and sweet. In the genre’s best outings (like Super Meat Boy) it’s rare to see levels last more than a minute.

The Cleaner goes a very different way, offering levels between five and ten minutes long that are full of labyrinthine, ambush-filled passages and ill-conceived platforming sequences. A single bullet will kill the player, just like many others in this genre, which means that at any moment they can find themselves losing several minutes of work — sometimes without even having an idea why they died.

The one tool that evens the odds is a three-second timestop, during which the world grinds to a halt while the player is free to roam at full speed, killing at-will. Using this is always a pleasure, and getting a glimpse of a room’s layout before ducking for cover, engaging the timestop and charging into battle works perfectly. It’s even better when players have run through a level a few times and know exactly where the enemies are located. At this point they can optimize their path until every stage becomes a speedrun.

At first this feels like an engaging challenge, but as the levels drag on, it begins to feel as if the player is the victim of a prank — rather than being a challenge, it comes off more like some other difficult game’s challenge mode since The Cleaner is essentially asking players to play a perfect six minutes over and over again, and I find it to be the absolute nadir of sadistic game design.

If my biggest problem with The Cleaner was just the length of its levels, there is a chance that this would still be a positive review, but the miserable platforming shatters any chance of that.

First-person platforming is iffy at the best of times, with even the best of the genre like Dying Light and Mirror’s Edge being filled with moments where players have literally no idea why they plummeted from the sky — and sadly, The Cleaner‘s platforming is nowhere near the top of the genre.

Jumps are floaty and hard to control and platform edges are ridiculously difficult to gauge, often leading to my character frequently stopping dead in mid-air before falling to my death. Jumping from pipe to pipe is a nightmare, and trying to hop between tables and chairs floating in electrified water is an unacceptable slog that will easily erase the six minutes of work it took to get there. Extended try-and-die gameplay can only work if the player is in total control at all times, and that’s just not the case here, even remotely.

When The Cleaner sticks to gunfighting and slow-mo sequences, it’s a winner, but the platforming and overly-long levels destroy everything it gets right. I want to adore this game and I was more than willing to meet it on its own terms, but it’s just asking for far too much — it’s frustrating to see how badly its flaws undercut the rest.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Dystopia Corp. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed.

Parents: This game was not reviewed by the ESRB, but it contains Blood and Gore, Violence. Most of The Cleaner‘s gameplay revolves around shooting people to death — and those people’s arms and legs can be blasted off with almost no effort. Keep kids far from this one.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I attempted to play it without sound and found it prohibitively difficult. Because any injury kills the player instantly, it’s vitally important to know when enemies are firing their weapons. Without being able to hear enemies moving and shooting, the game will be functionally impossible to play. The is no dialogue or in-game text. This game is not accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post The Cleaner Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

While making the video preview of Sniper Elite 5, I sent a question to the developers inquiring why they added non-lethal options on top of the already-present stealth takedowns and ranged combat. I don’t know if any response could have satisfied me, or convinced me that it was a good idea — I suppose the best possible version would be ‘We really liked the whole ‘clean kill/silent assassin’ thing in Hitman, and we wanted to do exactly that’. Maybe this was all just a huge misunderstanding, and the developers were so laser-focused on the mechanics of their game that they didn’t stop to consider the context in which those mechanics were being implemented.

Part of the response does have that vibe, but another, more concerning part, absolutely does not.

The first section talks about player choice — those who would clear the map, versus those who want to test themselves by being true ghosts, slipping in and out without ever being detected. So, as I said — Hitman franchise stuff.

They also discuss the extra challenge of leaving someone unconscious, because if another guard wakes them up, they’ll be back on-mission and will likely sound an alarm.

We also get the strange justification that ‘knocking people out is silent‘, making it tactically useful. But of course, stabbing people in the throat or brain is also silent, unless the developers have made the decision to make it unrealistically noisier. Likewise, sub-sonic ammunition exists in the world — that’s what allows Karl’s iconic Welrod pistol to be functionally noiseless — it’s not just that the whole gun is a silencer, it’s that the bullet never breaks the sound barrier.

There are all mechanical considerations, though, and have nothing inherently troubling about them — where we run into trouble is the middle paragraph, which talks about the ‘enemy bio’ items that come up when the player uses their binoculars to tag foes. This has been in the series since Sniper Elite 3, and there I found it to be cute, but worried it was being used to humanize Nazis, which is a terrible idea that can only lead to bad outcomes.

My fears have been realized in Sniper Elite 5, as the developer specifically says that the bios are there to give the player more information when making their decision whether to kill or merely knock out enemies.

That’s right — the developers want the player to judge for themselves whether they’re dealing with ‘good Nazis’ or ‘bad Nazis’ and factoring that into a choice to kill or merely subdue. This is reminiscent of Watchdogs‘ mobile phone scanning, where the player can link up with anyone on the street and learn a fact about them. It was a nice mechanic there, because you would learn fun things about random people on the street, and then occasionally one would be a serial killer, and you’d murder them.

The problem with using this mechanic in a Sniper Elite game is that it creates a framework in which such a thing as a ‘good Nazi’ exists. While I was a little concerned about this before, in the end it wasn’t problematic since all the Nazis had to die, no matter who they were. Players would learn a colorful piece of information — occasionally something that might even humanize them a little — but at the end of the day, they’re still Nazis, and as a consequence, they have to get killed. Sure, plenty of them were conscripts, but these are men wearing the uniform of a genocidal regime bent on total domination of Europe and beyond, so it really doesn’t matter whether they love puppies or not, they have to die just the same.

By adding in non-lethal options, however, the developers are saying that maybe it doesn’t matter what actions a person takes part in if they’re a ‘good person’ inside. From a moral standpoint, this is abominable. At the end of the day, it’s not important whether a Nazi soldier loves their children. It doesn’t matter if if they get aroused while setting prisoners on fire. Their internal lives are irrelevant — this is a war, they’re wearing Nazi uniforms, and that means there can be only two ways out — they can abandon the cause and surrender, or they can die. That’s it.

And, as a commando behind enemy lines, Karl Fairburne isn’t in a position to be taking any prisoners.

That’s not the worst of it, though — I’ve been writing this criticism under the assumption that people were going to let the ‘good Nazis’ live, and just kill the ‘bad Nazis’ — but there are people out there with a very different conception of what constitutes good and bad. In Sniper Elite 4, if you didn’t want to kill a specific Nazi based on his bio, it made the game more difficult, because that was one more Nazi trying to kill you. Sniper Elite 5‘s non-lethal takedown mode makes it easier for people to save their preferred Nazis — whoever those might be.

Has Rebellion not thought this through?

They’ve essentially ensured that someone is going to make a video where they play the game killing any Nazi who’s insufficiently passionate about genocide, and preserving the lives of Nazis who enjoy machine-gunning people and love to taunt American prisoners in English before murdering them. It was theoretically possible, with lots of saving and loading, to make that video in Sniper Elite 4 but the non-lethal options in Sniper Elite 5 remove all the difficulty, ensuring that those videos are going to be made using the game engine.

By stepping outside the ‘kill or die’ paradigm and creating a third option in which a soldier gets to decide for themselves which Nazi is a decent person who gets to live, and which is a bad person that has to die, the developers at Rebellion have opened the door to moral depravity, and if they care at all about their game’s impact on the world, they’ll take out the non-lethal options before the game is released and the Sniper Elite franchise can go back to serving its longstanding purpose — reminding us that Nazis need to die, and it’s better if those deaths are brutal.

The post Sniper Elite 5: Preview Follow-Up appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

VIDEO SCRIPT

There’s a new Sniper Elite game coming soon.

On one level this is super-exciting because as a longtime fan of the series I’ve reviewed all of them for Gamecritics, and have watched as the franchise has gradually improved and been perfected over the years by developers with a passion for delivering the most intense stealth and sniping experience possible.

The setting this time — France — promises castles, rivers, ports, and the kind of verdant forests we don’t get enough of in the franchise, The wooded area in Sniper Elite 4 was a delight, and the little bits of nature that I saw in this hands-on preview were both gorgeous and a perfect place to explore and stalk through.

Gameplay-wise, Sniper Elite 5 mostly offers refinements to the design elements we saw in SE3 and SE4.

For example, instead of swapping out their starting kit, players scavenge weapons from the fallen dead and hold onto them as temporary weapons to be used for a few minutes and discarded. It’s a decent system, and does a good job of showing off the different ways guns can be customized, as enemy weapons come with a wide variety of sights, barrels, and magazines. This leads to some questions about why there’s a silenced colt .45 with a 17-bullet capacity lying around a French farmhouse, but players are ostensibly expected to enjoy sampling the armaments rather than worrying about the realism of the situation.

The game even takes a note from Hitman‘s book by setting up specific ways to kill mission targets for rewards. In the level I played, I was asked to drop a chandelier on an officer’s head while he was surveying stolen art in a ballroom. It’s an interesting addition that should encourage players to go back to levels multiple times and test out a variety of approaches.

If these were all the changes that Rebellion made to Sniper Elite, it would be one of my most-anticipated games of the year.

Tragically, this isn’t the case.

Why? Because they made one additional change that transforms the adventure from a delightful fantasy to be savored and turns it into a nightmare to be deeply concerned about.

That change? Non-lethal options.

I was genuinely aghast when I watched the ‘how to play’ video and saw Karl Fairburne — the main character of the SE series, and a man known only for massacring nazis — flip his knife around and clonk a nazi over the head instead of slitting his throat. I don’t have footage of this because why would I ever do something like that in this game? I do, however, have footage of SE5‘s menus which clearly establish that not only does the game have fantasy non-lethal ammunition for weapons, but there are actual badges for getting through a level without killing any non-key targets.

That’s right — Sniper Elite 5 will award experience points for NOT killing Nazis.

To be absolutely crystal clear, this is the Sniper Elite franchise — a series that leads the industry in depicting the brutal murder of Nazis, and I revel in the joyful depiction of shrapnel perforating the internal organs of Nazi soldiers in gruesome slow-motion. Indeed, the point of this series is to remind people that Nazis are monsters, and to allow them to deliver brutal deaths to the Nazis whose actions have earned them… and yet, apparently the developers at Rebellion have decided you should be able to liberate France and dispense justice without hurting Nazis?

To those who might say — ‘Well, this is for people who don’t like games to be disgusting‘ I say turn off the x-ray death cam.

To those who might say ‘Maybe there should be less-violent options for people who are interested in the story‘, I say play something else — Sniper Elite is, and has always been, a game about murdering Nazis. If you want to avoid killing things, play a Thief game, or play Metal Gear — they require or at least heavily encourage stealth without murder.

For disturbed individuals who want to play as a Nazi, I’m sure EA and Activision will be happy to take your money, but this is Sniper Elite. This is a game about killing Nazis.

What makes this design decision even worse is the reality that in our current political climate, American politicians go in front of cameras and use Hitler as a role model and an actual fascist is in a head-to-head runoff to be the president of France. At this moment in time as literal, real-world fascism is on the rise, Rebellion has decided to make killing Nazis optional. The game is literally about stopping a Nazi invasion of America and the developers think it’s a good idea to say that hey, maybe we don’t have to kill Nazis?

Who was asking for this? What were the developers thinking??

And no, that question is not rhetorical. I actually need to know because this game has been in development for years.

Hundreds of people have worked on it.

At some point, at least one of them had to say ‘Maybe Nazis shouldn’t die in this game.’ and then some number of people had to approve that decision.

And then people had to code in an ‘unconscious’ state to enemies.

And then they had to craft animations of people getting knocked out.

And then they had to design the badges that players get for not killing Nazis.

This didn’t happen accidentally. People decided that Sniper Elite, which had, up until this moment, been where people who want to kill Nazis in videogames go to have the best possible experience killing Nazis — should suddenly become be a game where maybe it’s okay for Nazis to get a pass??

This is disgusting.

Luckily, there’s still time to fix this. Sniper Elite 5 doesn’t come out for another six weeks, and this isn’t a difficult thing to patch out. Remove the ‘knock-out’ button and prompt. Delete all references to non-lethal ammunition from the loadout screen and game world, and erase those badges from the awards menu.

Nazis need to die, and it’s Sniper Elite‘s job to make those deaths as entertaining as possible. So fix this, Rebellion, or be remembered as the company that pulled an abrupt about-face in a world with real, actual fascism on the rise and said ‘Hey, maybe the Nazis weren’t so bad, after all…‘

The post PREVIEW: Sniper Elite 5 Is A Dangerous Game appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The Thoroughly Modern Circe.

LOW The hive queens feel a little OP.

WTF The rhyming pigman!

In the Weird West everything is wrong, everything is brutal, and everything is awful. This is a world wallowing in muck and misery — a place so bleak that there are multiple cannibal groups that number amongst the world’s factions. It’s cold, violent and almost entirely hopeless… and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

A top-down action-RPG with a stunning degree of depth, Weird West wears its ambitions on its sleeve, and it kicks off with as daring an opening as I’ve seen — the player doesn’t control the bounty hunter whose husband is kidnapped and child killed in the first few scenes, but rather, they’re an ethereal force that possesses her and leads her on a journey of revenge.

Not since kill.switch have I encountered a game so interested in having a conversation about what it means to to swoop into a character’s life and start making decisions for them. Yes, that’s very much the nature of narrative-based games with branching stories, but Weird West takes things further by asking what happens when the player ducks out and the people they controlled have to live with decisions that were made for them?

Weird West has one overarching storyline, but players complete it by going through five smaller campaigns, each one starring a different character. The first is the bounty hunter whose family is killed, and once revenge is exacted, the focus shifts to the next character, and beyond. I’d love to mention exactly who those subsequent characters are, but finding out is a good portion of the fun, especially when each new face seems to have been chosen with the intention of making the ‘weird’ part of the title as accurate as possible.

Each one has a main quest to follow that will drag them around a section of the map, getting into fights and searching for clues. There are also optional sidequests that unlock a sidekick or add some depth to the world. However, it’s important to note that Weird West makes these quests meaningful by allowing their resolutions to echo forward from one campaign into the next.

For example, in the first campaign players run into a corrupt tobacco baron who has some valuable information — do they do an awful task for him in exchange, or try to get the information in a riskier way? The results aren’t just a few ticks up or down on a morality meter, they’re seismic changes in who holds power in the West’s various settlements, and what kind of foes or friends they’ll be encountering in their next incarnation.

While it has the look of a Desperadoes-style turn-based tactics game, Weird West gives players direct control of just one character in real time, allowing them to run, gun, and sneak around in just about any way they choose. Most problems can be talked through, but even when combat is a necessity, there’s a huge variety in how to approach it. The quality varies a bit, though. When it comes down to shooting, I felt like controller-based aiming could have stuck to enemies more tightly, but mouse-based shooting was extremely tight. Melee combat was iffy. There’s no weight or impact to it, and up-close battles invariably wind up with characters flailing away at one another until someone falls over dead.

Beyond shooting and punching, every area is filled with opportunities for environmental exploitation. There are pools of oil to set on fire, water barrels to electrify and burst, and so many barrels of TNT scattered everywhere that it has to some kind of a health and safety violation.

In addition to normal combat skills, the each character has a variety of skills and spells that range from temporary bullet deflection all the way up to conjuring a lightning tornado. They can also recruit up to two posse members to fight alongside them, including previous main characters, should the player have left them in a state where they’d be interested in continuing the journey. The partners come with infinite ammo and decent health, so they can do quite a bit to prop up those iffy fighting abilities. Thankfully, Weird West offers difficulty levels that range from ‘very hard’ down to ‘story’ — the easiest setting still has plenty of fighting, but it generally won’t get in the way of even the clumsiest shot seeing all of the narrative ingenuity that the developers have packed in.

Weird West is a truly special experience. While each one of its stories is compelling in its own right, when put together they transform into something fantastic. This is a game that shows its monsters and asks the player to be disgusted, and then turns them into a monster and asks if they feel the same way. As such, every one of the journeys contained within is worth taking, but it’s only once players have trod all of those roads that they’ll appreciate just how amazing Weird West‘s accomplishments are. It’s deep, it’s fascinating, and it’s full of the kind of storytelling that resonates for a long time after credits roll — truly an incredible experience from beginning to end.

Disclosures: This game is developed by WolfEye Studio and published by Devolver Digital. It is currently available on PC, XBO/X/S, and PS4/5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 35 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Strong Language, and Violence. There’s just so much cannibalism in this game. Seriously! There are also drunks, whorehouses, unbelievable gore, plenty of swearing – this isn’t a hard decision at all. No kids anywhere near it.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played most of the game without audio and encountered no difficulties. All dialogue in the game is subtitled. Text can be resized. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Weird West Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Spending time with Original Platcha!

LOW When characters started talking about how the game was almost over.

WTF “I just happen to have brought along swimsuits for everyone!”

At this point, it’s almost trite for me to write a review of a new Atelier game exclaiming that “They’ve done it again!!!” but the inescapable fact is that it’s true. The most consistently-excellent franchise JRPG history has once more delivered a fantastic experience that tops everything that came before it. These games just keep getting better, and while I’m sure that will stop at some point, I’ve been thinking that for half a decade and they’ve spent that whole time proving me wrong.

Like rest of the series, Atelier Sophie 2 is a traditional RPG at its core. There’s turn-based battles, open worlds to explore, and quests to complete. The player assembles a party of up to six characters, then heads out into the wilderness to fight monsters, collect ingredients for Sophie’s alchemy, and uncover the secrets of the ever-shifting dream world in which the game is set.

With the recent Meruru 2 establishing the precedent of beloved characters getting delayed sequels, it’s no surprise that Sophie is getting another shot at stardom. The plucky young alchemist and her best friend Platcha are two of the best leads the series has ever had, to the point that they upstaged the stars of the trilogy they debuted in. The fans wanted more Sophie and Platcha, and the developers at Gust have delivered beyond my highest expectations.

Set after Atelier Sophie but before the rest of the ‘Mysterious‘ trilogy, Sophie 2 finds our pair catapulted into a mysterious world where time stands still, and all of its inhabitants are given the chance to live out their dreams. At first Sophie is motivated only to find Platcha (separated during the transit) and escape, but she quickly learns that the strange dimension’s tendrils reach out across time and space, drawing people from the past and future. Sure, finding out what’s going on and getting home is important, but she’s also got the chance to spend time with the grandmother who raised her and an earlier version of Platcha, so who could blame her for dawdling a little?

To be fair, this ‘jumping through time and space for a teamup’ owes quite a bit to Nelke, the 20th anniversary crossover released in 2019, but where that game was a light comedy about plopping every beloved character into one place and seeing how they’d interact, Sophie 2 is a more serious treatment of the subject matter. While the story is nowhere near as hard hitting as Ryza‘s criticism of colonialism and class oppression, it takes the situation and the characters trapped in it completely seriously. Everyone has been drawn into a land where their dreams can come true, so it’s all about exploring what pursuing those dreams means to people, and what they’ll do when they’ve been accomplished.

Now, what about the gameplay? Of course it’s as flawless as one expects from the series. Every Atelier title polishes existing mechanics and innovates new ones, and Sophie 2 is no different.

Multiple gathering tools for resources have returned, but instead of manually having to switch between them, the game simply uses the right tool at the right location. Major Gathering locations let players snag a glut of a particular resource in one go, as well as playing a minigame to decide what traits the item will have. This adds a new wrinkle to the alchemy process as players can customize the traits that go into each item better than ever before.

Alchemy is presented as a puzzle again – the player is given a 5×5 board, and they have to slot shapes together, hitting bonuses and building chains as they go. For basic items, they can just jam a bunch of shapes onto the board and collect their item. For truly powerful crafting, however, they have to use an altered game board with blocked-off spaces, forcing them to worry about not just having enough of a given element to unlock a particular ability, but finding the exact right shape to fit into the perfect location. Ryza’s basic item board worked for that game’s focus on combat and story, but Sophie’s story has always been about the main character seeking to perfect her craft, and the puzzle-based gameplay fits this concept perfectly.

In terms of combat, it’s absolutely solid. All six of the playable characters enter the fight simultaneously, with three in the front and three in the back. This sets up the combat system’s key element — twin attacks.

The player gets tactical points by starting fights with an ambush or by performing certain tasks in combat, and can use these points to call in a helper to attack simultaneously or swap places on the battlefield. Every Atelier is, to a certain extent, about a group of friends learning to trust and rely on one another, and Sophie 2 brings that element to the forefront by encouraging the player to constantly use these double strikes.

Increasing friendship levels high enough unlocks ‘dual triggers’, in which pairs of characters figure out how to partner up for ultimate attacks, and the dual trigger meter is powered up by performing twin attacks. Every part of the combat is built around reinforcing the idea that all obstacles are more easily conquered by working together.

Another thing that merits discussion is just how fantastic the cutscenes are. While almost every JRPG has moved into real-time cutscenes with 3D models, the Atelier series is unique in just how fantastically rendered those scenes are. The developers never take the easy way out and cut from character to character as each one reads their lines — they’ve clearly put thought into how best to stage each conversation. It’s stunningly well-directed.

Year in, year out, the Atelier series never fails to top itself. Atelier Sophie isn’t just a check-in with beloved character — it manages to meaningfully increase our understanding of that character by giving her the chance to interact with her closest companions in an entirely new context. For fans of the franchise, this is one of the most satisfying experiences that Gust could have offered, and for anyone looking for a chill, accessible JRPG, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Gust and published by Tecmo/Koei. It is currently available on PS4/5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 80 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Fantasy Violence, Suggestive Themes, and Use of Alcohol. To be honest, I didn’t even notice the alcohol use, and the suggestive themes are more playful than lascivious. The violence is bloodless and surprisingly upbeat. This should be safe for even younger teens!

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played most of the game without audio and encountered no difficulties. All dialogue in the game is in Japanese, and there are English subtitles. Text cannot be resized. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Players control Sophie’s movement with the left stick, and the camera with the right. Face buttons control attacking, gathering items, and jumping. In menus the left thumbstick move between options, and face buttons operate them.

The post Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist Of The Mysterious Dream appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Gross neck stumps all around!

LOW Everything else.

WTF Two missions couldn’t end because boss death animations didn’t load.

Taking its plot from a film of the same name, MalnaZidos has an interesting enough premise — during the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, a fascist officer is forced to team up with a team of Republican commandoes when they find themselves surrounded the living dead, the result of sinister Nazi experiments. It’s a premise that could easily have a strong game built around it, but unfortunately, that’s not what happened here.

An almost criminally short third-person shooter, MalnaZidos asks players to control Jan, a fascist rebel, as he sneaks and shoots his way through a handful of bland, linear levels. This is action gaming at its most uninspired, and stealth at its most inept. Malnazidos‘ gameplay is inexcusably shoddy in every way. Jan moves as slow as molasses, aiming weapons is haphazard at best, and the less said about the terrible melee combat, the better.

It’s rare to see a game with controls this terrible — the camera is awkward to use, and has dire effects on attempts to move Jan around the world. Even when not aiming a weapon, he’ll always try to face the camera, and the game has trouble transitioning him from forward to sideways movement. As such, turning the camera during movement can have the effect of freezing him in place temporarily. It’s not the greatest thing to happen when a horde of zombies is bearing down on him.

Well, not ‘horde’, per se — more like a scattering. There’s rarely more than two zombies onscreen at a time, or at least two that need to be dealt with. Every now and then MalnaZidos will offer two paths, one with a glut of zombies, and the other with just two or three, all facing away from the player. The choice is obvious.

This brings me to the game’s stealth system. By crouching down, the player can sneak up on zombies and snap their necks, avoiding fights completely… unless the zombies are on a slightly different elevation, at which point the game will get confused about how to move the player model into place for the ‘neck-snapping’ animation, causing the whole game to lock up.

It’s rare that I find myself completely unable to say anything good about a game I’m reviewing, but Malnzidos is certainly testing my abilities. I suppose that the cell shading on the character models looks fairly decent. Unfortunately the rest of the graphics aren’t drawn with the same style. The vehicles, environments, and furnishings feel like generic low-detail assets compared to the cartoony characters.

There’s not even any satisfaction to be found in the combat. There are just two types of zombies, some that slowly walk towards the player, and some that sprint. They take the same amount of bullets to kill (too many!) and neither type reacts with anything but a generic flinch to taking damage, which makes fighting them feel like a repetitive chore. The game’s lone boss — a hulking Nazi — should have offered more of a challenge, but he froze in place when I detonated a barrel next to him, and from then on he was content to stand in place until I’d finished shooting him to death.

After beating the campaign in just under two hours I was shocked to discover that the game was already over — I’d completed it in about the same time it would have taken to watch the movie it was based on.

Malnazidos does have a second campaign, in which the player goes through much shorter versions of the levels they’ve already played, this time controlling the Republican commando characters. For some reason these levels are hidden away on the level select screen, so if I hadn’t been checking on missing collectibles I might never have known they existed.

Malnazidos is awful in every way a game can be. I’ve played countless free titles with better controls and combat. The Unreal Engine offers tutorials on how to make games that play better than this in just a couple of hours. Literally the only good thing I can say about it is that when zombies are shot in the head a few times, their skulls explode in a decently disgusting manner. When that’s the only positive a game offers, it’s safe to bypass it entirely.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Gammerra Nest. It is currently available on PC and PS4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood, Language, and Intense Violence. The intense violence likely refers to the exploding heads mentioned above, and really, I wasn’t that shocked by them. What’s a little more troubling is being asked to play as a fascist fighting for Franco’s army – the politics of which are not commented on at all in the game. No kids near this one, just to be safe. Also there’s better things for them to play.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Games: You should have no trouble with this game. You might get ambushed by zombies that normally alert players via moans, but you have to fail a QTE before zombies are allowed to hurt you, so that shouldn’t pose a major issue. All dialogue is in Spanish, and subtitled in English. Subtitles cannot be resized.

Remappable Controls: This game’s controls cannot be remapped. Also, the game can only be played with controllers, not a keyboard and mouse.

The post Valley Of The Dead: MalnaZidos Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The reveal of what’s going on with the villains.

LOW Trying to fight anything but the lowest-level monsters with a sword.

WTF There are two different monsters, both called “Rippers”.

ELEX II opens with a dangerous move — the first game was a sprawling, open-world adventure unique in the freedom it gave players to approach its story and world at whatever pace they chose. This even extended to the ending by offering a large number of options determining how the world of Magalan would be reshaped in the aftermath of the campaign. This freedom of choice was a major selling point.

The first thing ELEX II does? It lets the player know that their choices were irrelevant since there’s a canon ending now, whether they like it or not. This might feel capricious or alienating to fans of Elex, but the developers have a story they want to tell, and it’s good enough to justify stripping away some past agency in order to make sure it gets told.

An action-RPG truly ambitious in concept, ELEX 2 builds on everything the previous game accomplished while also improving everything including the combat, the storytelling, main character Jax’s iconic jetpack and more.

The story picks up ten years after the ending of the last game, with the first hour offering a bracing dose of cynicism. As the credits rolled on ELEX, Jax had convinced three factions to unite against a common foe and discovered that an even greater enemy was on its way. He then spent the next ten years attempting to convince people to prepare for the onslaught, but had no success. This left him a bitter, broken man, and to top it all off, he gets bitten by an alien in the opening sequence which provides an in-universe justification for why a legendary general has suddenly dropped back down in experience to level 1.

With all this taken into account, it’s up to the player to power Jax back up, rebuild old alliances, and find a way to push strange purple aliens — dubbed “Skyands” — off of the planet. This feat is accomplished, predictably, by a lot of combat.

While there are plenty of quests which can be beaten via dialogue choices and skill checks, ‘A’ is the first letter in ARPG for a reason, and Jax will spend most of his time fighting a variety of monsters and soldiers.

Most of the first Elex‘s menagerie returns here, and the graphical improvements made to the coterie of disgusting mutants and huge monsters are something to behold. ELEX looked fine for its time, but the developers have taken what were interesting concepts for monsters and rebuilt them in stunning detail, letting the player get a good look at every dripping fang and bulbous fold. The new enemy class is similarly impressive — the Skyands have their own variety of mutants, all built around a purple/white color scheme with plenty of curves and spikes. They’re instantly arresting, and look nothing like the rest of the monsters, which does a great job of reinforcing just what their invasion represents.

Unfortunately, ELEX 2‘s monsters fare better than the combat. In a crucial failure for an action-RPG, the fighting just isn’t great. Ranged combat is generally fine as there’s light lock-on aiming and plenty of amazing weapon types to try out, but it never feels more than functional and there’s no sense of impact. Shooting a creature doesn’t rock it — the shots just tick off damage until they die.

There’s also little weight to the melee. The developers have added parry-based staggering and stamina bars in an attempt to create a more complex battle flow than ELEX‘s hacking and slashing offered, but it doesn’t work. Human enemies block continuously unless they’re actually attacking, leaving players with no options but to parry their attacks or do power moves to break their defense. It’s slow and repetitive, and this setup completely fails whenever there are multiple enemies attacking at once — which is most of the time.

This combat model simply doesn’t allow for crowd control in any meaningful way, and if Elex II wasn’t meant to be played with an AI partner constantly by Jax’s side, melee builds would be completely non-viable. Heck, there are whole classes of flying enemies that never stop pelting the player with projectiles from afar. Anyone attempting to play a purely-melee build absolutely needs to have at least a few ranged weapons ready to go at any moment.

As just mentioned, ELEX 2 does offer a partner system. There are a wide group of recruitable characters, each with their own backstory and questline to be completed. In addition to a handful of familiar faces, there are new partners, each one hailing from a different faction. They do a great job of building out the world and give the player a chance to understand where each group is coming from. Well, except for the Morkons — they’re a death cult so cartoonishly evil that even the partner representing them can’t take their absurd goals seriously.

Quests offer experience and information about the world, but most importantly, a chance to decide what kind of ending Jax is working towards. In contrast to the previous hot/cold slider representing whether the player felt closer to logic or passion, ELEX 2 offers a creative/destructive dichotomy that asks whether the player is prioritizing destroying their enemies or building a stable world. High-destruction runs offer the most powerful weapons, while playing for creation gives the player the chance to avoid fights and turn enemies into allies.

Beyond this basic twist on the morality meter, there’s an interesting amount of political wrangling in the narrative. Two different factions — the Outlaws and the Clerics — can only be joined if the player infiltrates another faction first, making betrayals a core component of the story. There are also power-plays going on within individual factions and wars going on between them, giving the player plenty of opportunities to put their thumb on the scales one way or the other. It’s worth spending time in every area and truly getting the lay of the land before deciding exactly how things should shake out.

While it might not mean much to newcomers, it’s remarkable to see what an amazing job the developers have done with rebuilding the world and showing the passage of ten years between stories. While most of the map is the same, the action has been moved a good deal east. All of the old landmarks and fast-travel stations are in the same places, but the world is almost unrecognizable. A desert is now a lush forest. Great sheets of ice cover what was formerly volcanic stone. A giant crater has been transformed into a city. As always, these areas are a breeze to explore using Jax’s jetpack — it’s the greatest gift to open-world traversal I’ve ever seen.

ELEX 2 outdoes its predecessor in every way. The story is more interesting, the character writing is even deeper, and the threats are far more colorful and deadly. While the ending promises a third chapter to come, I only hope the devs fix the combat next time — perhaps they should just ditch melee entirely? Ranged weaponry is the only thing really working here, so perhaps double down on that and focus entirely on guns, arrows, and spells — it works well enough in games like Mass Effect, so why not try it in an open-world context? ELEX 2 is just one failed element away from being a truly great game — unfortunately, that element is ‘Action’ and it’s an Action-RPG.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Piranha Bytes and published by THQ Nordic. It is currently available on PC, XBO/S/X and PS4/5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 60 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence. The ESRB really dropped the ball on this one — the gore and swearing notes are accurate, and yes, there’s some relatively chaste romance, but they completely missed out on all of the alcohol and drug use. The entire game is built around various factions using body enhancing chemicals one way or another — whether it’s Albs using Elex to make them invincible, or Outlaws cooking drugs to up their stats for a few minutes at a time, drug use is all over this game. While it’s coded as a negative thing, players are still encouraged to use them. No kids near this one, please.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All dialogue is subtitled. Subtitles cannot be resized. Enemies approaching from offscreen are marked on a radar, so you likely won’t be surprised.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Elex II Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Executing a perfect set of dodges and then walloping a goon.

LOW Minibosses showing up whenever they want.

WTF Sucker-punching is the ultimate technique.

Sifu is constructed around an ambitious concept that I suspect appeals to extremely few people.

In many ways, the ‘brawler’ genre its apotheosis with Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequels. They found a way to make a fight look and feel like a martial arts film, with a single hero battling scores of enemies simultaneously — and they did it all without getting into the minutiae of specific mechanics for every blow.

The innovation that made this possible was the ‘counter’ button, a single tap of which interrupts whatever the player is doing, and has them deliver a punishing blow to the foe about to attack. Dozens of other games have copied this structure to great effect, and it’s one of those indisputable evolutions in game design which feels so natural that in hindsight, it’s amazing that someone didn’t invent it sooner.

Sifu‘s angle is to go in the opposite direction by sweeping that elegance off the table and asking the player to map out every single blow and micromanage every detail of a fight in an attempt to simulate realistic mechanics of battle… and then it doesn’t give the player any of the tools necessary to make that possible.

A third-person brawler/roguelite set in the kind of locales where one might expect to see a martial arts fight take place, the nearly-plotless Sifu puts players in the slippers of a martial arts student who witnessed their family being massacred eight years earlier, and has spent the intervening time preparing themselves for a vengeance quest.

They’re aided in this quest by a set of magic coins that resurrect them any time they’re killed. The price? Years are tacked onto their age with every revival. Failure, in this case, costs time, with the player starting at 20, and failing their run if they die over the age of 70.

While that may sound like a huge number of chances, in practice, players can go through that lifetime incredibly quickly as the penalty grows each time. After the first death they’ll be 21 years old, the second will put them at 23, and so forth. That counter can be lowered by defeating powerful (sometimes optional) enemies, but for the majority of players, Sifu will frequently star a grey-haired master of Kung Fu.

This time passage mechanic has interesting effects on gameplay. The older the player gets, the more damage each individual strike does, and the shorter their health bar becomes. Health can be recovered by performing finishing moves on weakened enemies, so the general idea is that at the beginning of a run the player the player can absorb a few hits as they learn enemy patterns, but the further they get, the more they’ll have to rely on dodging. Any random enemy can kill the player with just handful of strikes, and bosses put the hero down with just a couple of solid hits.

Sifu lets players learn new moves through runs based on a ‘sample before paying’ kind of system. Killing enemies awards experience points which can be redeemed after death or at bonus shrines that appear a few times per level. Skills are fairly cheap to unlock, but if players want to keep them unlocked in all future runs, they’ll have to pay five times the base price. Sifu wants players to be absolutely certain before they commit to any one technique. This isn’t excessively punishing, however — in a nod towards old dogs and new tricks, every skill has an age beyond which it can’t be unlocked, so by the end of a run, there’s literally nothing for the player to spend their experience points on other than permanently unlocking their skills.

Perhaps Sifu’s greatest strength is its fantastic environments. From slums to art galleries to burning rural villages, each location is gorgeously rendered, packed with minute details that make them a pleasure to run through over and over again. In a departure for a roguelite, locations and enemy positions aren’t randomized, so players will be fighting the exact same battles in the exact same order. While there’s a certain degree of tedium inherent in this design, it gives the players a chance to attempt different approaches to a fight until they come across one that works for them — it adds a sort of ‘puzzle’ feel to the fistfights.

While what I’ve described so far seems well and good, but as a combat game Sifu’s biggest problem is a huge one — the combat.

Here’s the thing — Sifu’s developers wanted to take the incredibly precise, reflex-taxing combat of a fighting game and move it to the world of brawlers. The problem is that those things don’t fit together at all.

Players don’t only have to worry about attack and defense in Sifu, they have to be concerned with every minute bit of the action. Holding the block button protects from blows, but raises the player’s break meter, which will eventually leave them staggered and open for attack. They can always dodge attacks, but that requires them to move in the correct direction based on the enemy’s attack — and given how quickly everyone throws punches and kicks, telegraphing basically isn’t a thing.

Theoretically, players can stagger enemies by intercepting their attacks with parries, but the timing required is the most strict I’ve ever encountered. Games generally give players a third of a second before an attack lands to tap the parry button and stagger their opponent, but in Sifu it’s closer to 1/10th of a second, and only the lowest-level enemies are staggered with a single parry. Most enemies ask the player to intercept a whole flurry of attacks before they’ll get a chance to strike back! Also, tougher enemies will regularly throw out attacks that can’t be blocked or parried with no advanced warning. It’s a mess.

All of this can be manageable (even thrilling!) during one-on-one fights, but when multiple enemies attack at once, the mechanics simply can’t support what the game asks players to do. The big problem is a lack of crowd-control options.

When there are four enemies charging, I should have an option for hitting all of them at once, or at least separating out the one I want to focus on. Sifu has nearly no options for this, and instead encourages the player to constantly vault over waist-height obstacles, forcing foes to chase them around the arena. It works most of the time, but it also creates a situation where the player will have to constantly dodge out of the way, get a few hits in on one enemy, then dodge again, and this is repeated this until everyone is taken care of. It’s tedious and tiresome.

Sifu even finds ways to make foundational tactics frustratingly ineffective. When faced with a horde of enemies, the most effective tactic in most titles is to take out the fodder quickly so that one can focus on the toughest opponents. In Sifu, nearly any enemy can reveal themselves to secretly be a miniboss when the player tries to perform a finishing move on them. Remember, finishing moves are how the player regains health, so the act of trying to heal oneself will frequently spawn the second-toughest class of enemy in the game.

If all of that weren’t bad enough, the camera works to actively sabotage things.

Let’s say that players have the reflexes necessary to read their opponent’s moves and perfectly dodge or intercept them, but all of that is only possible if they can actually see their foe’s arms and legs. If the player gets anywhere near a wall, doing this becomes nearly impossible.

While the game can visually ‘phase out’ the waist-level obstacles and furniture, it can’t do that to walls, so any time the player gets close to one, the camera zooms in to the point where all that’s visible is the hero’s back. In order to have a chance of seeing what opponents are doing, the player has to stay in the middle of any room and give up the tactical advantage that walls provide. There are setpiece battles where the camera pulls back — such as a stunning tribute to Oldboy — and the boss fights tend to take place in open areas with good sightlines, but other than that, the camera proves to be one of the most implacable foes.

There is certainly an audience for Sifu — it’s stylish as hell, and the kind of people who are happy to spend the dozens of hours it takes to master a fighting game character might find the same sort of precision-based pleasures here that the developers’ previous game, Absolver, offered. However, Sifu’s developers set out to make the player feel like they were actually doing the fighting, but instead gave them tools suitable for a one-on-one fighting game and expected them to work against six enemies at once.

They don’t.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Sloclap. It is currently available on PC and PS4/5. A copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on PC. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood, Drug Reference, and Strong Language, and Violence. It’s a game about a martial artist on a murder spree, so no, it’s not appropriate for kids. Also, the crime syndicate he’s up against is involved in a drug-manufacturing concern, along with other hideous crimes.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. No audio cues are necessary for play. All dialogue is subtitled. Subtitles cannot be resized. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post Sifu Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Both phases of the last boss fight.

LOW That damn chaser dragon.

WTF How is this game-within-a-game so addictive?

Taking Bionic Commando‘s grappling hook-based platforming and placing it in an ultra-cute environment may not seem like an obvious move, but Grapple Dog proves it to be a fantastic idea.

A 2D platformer just this side of sadistic, Grapple Dog opens with the titular puppy getting a grappling hook and accidentally helping a robot start the apocalypse. Armed with little more than the ability to swing through a variety of colorful levels and bounce off of robots’ heads, it will be up to the player to save the world before it suffers a dimensional collapse.

Grapple Dog‘s controls are immaculate. It’s important for any platformer to have rock-solid rules for momentum, but GD goes above and beyond. While Pablo, the titular Grapple Dog, can run, jump, and swim around the various levels well enough, the meat of gameplay is finding blue-tinted objects, attaching a hook to them, and swinging.

This is where the importance of control consistency becomes vital — players press the grapple button to latch onto an object or wall, then tilt the control to swing side-to-side before jumping off. Pablo leaves at a different angle and speed based on the point of the swing that he jumps off, and success in the game is based entirely around practicing these jumps until hitting the exact angle becomes second nature.

Grapple Dog gets players to that point via impeccable level design. There are five worlds, with five levels and a boss fight each, and each one introduces a new obstacle type, giving the player time to familiarize themselves with the mechanics before adding complicating elements like spiked floors and killer robots. The first world gets the player comfortable swinging, jumping, and using cannons to move around levels. Then, gradually, they’ll find themselves dealing with conveyor belts, rotating grapple anchors, floating water spheres, and more.

In addition to the basic obstacles and enemies, levels are packed with secrets to ferret out. There are five hidden gems and two hundred and fifty pieces of fruit in each stage, and while the game can be completed by grabbing just a handful of gems and fruit, the true ending is locked away unless players are willing to swipe absolutely every last shiny. It’s a rare thing for me to 100% any game, but there’s an infectious joyousness to Grapple Dog‘s platforming that had me going back until I’d seen everything it had to offer.

The thing that sets Grapple Dog apart from so many others in the platforming genre is just how forgiving it is. Yes, it’s challenging and requires split-second reflexes, and a few of the boss fights are incredibly brutal, but it never feels like it’s trying to punish the player unfairly. Pablo has four hit points, enemies regularly drop health on death, and falling into a chasm teleports him back to the last stable area at the cost of a single damage point, rather than shunting him all the way back to a hard checkpoint. Yes, there were times when I yelped in frustration after screwing up a set of swings and the final boss is extremely nasty, but at its core, Grapple Dog is the kind of platformer that wants the player to succeed and is more than willing to meet them halfway.

Loaded with surmountable challenges, cute characters, and fantastic level design, Grapple Dog is the rare all-ages platformer that really could appeal to anyone interested in the genre. It’s simple enough for a child to use it as an entry point for platformers, yet offers challenges daunting enough to frustrate the most jaded Super Meat Boy player. Grapple Dog is a absolute treasure.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Medallion Games and published by Super Rare Originals. It is currently available on PC, SW. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 25 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. No time was spent in the game’s co-op mode.

Parents: This game rated E by the ESRB, and it contains no content warnings. The only violence in the game involves bouncing on robots, there’s nothing questionable here.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. No audio is needed for successful gameplay. All dialogue is presented via text, which cannot be resized. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Players use the thumbstick to move Pablo, and face buttons to jump, grapple, and stomp.

The post Grapple Dog Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.