Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! This is a bit late this month as I was trying to finish up Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4) before I wrote this up, but that game is damn long! I’ve played almost 70 hours, and I’ve still got like three chapters (out of nine) of the main story to do, so this is going to be a 100+ hour game, you guys.
Anyway, let’s talk about games!
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4) - I found everything there was to find in the game, but because there were some bugs, the game didn’t register my 100% completion, which is very annoying. Triple AAA titles like this often ship with various bugs, and it’s become just sort of the way things work now.
I understand that making a video game is very hard and there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of people involved in making the game, and some bugs are going to slip through. I also understand that, because we now live in a digital age, these bugs will get patched in the near-ish future (as opposed to last time when everything shipped on a disc or a cartridge, and if it had bugs, that’s it, the game had bugs, and you were just going to have to deal with it). I understand all that, but it also feels like a lot of the decision makers in the video game creation ecosystem rush games to meet release dates, knowing full well they are riddled with bugs, and just figuring they will patch everything up later on (Bethesda, makers of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, and Ubisoft, makers of the Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games, are both notorious for shipping buggy games that they eventually patch up). I would much rather a game is delayed and made better and fixed before launch, than after launch. (Edit: This has since been fixed in update 1.05).
Also, I previously spoke about how awesome it was that various NPCs could speak in their native languages and how ridiculous it was that Lara replied in her posh British English. But I forgot to mention how even more ludicrous it is that Lara still speaks her posh British English when she’s UNDERCOVER. There are a few sections in the open world and the story missions where Lara has to don either native Quechuan clothing with a blue heron motif (and she is known as Ixic) or a Kukulkan cult Serpent Guard uniform (and she is known as Ahau). The Blue Heron outfit allows her to interact with rebels, while the Serpent Guard outfit lets her interact with cultists, but while they all speak to her in Quechuan, SHE STILL REPLIES IN POSH BRITISH ENGLISH. Yeah, that is horrible undercover work, Lara.
Undertale (Switch) - This is an excellent RPG in which you don’t have to kill anyone! How refreshing! Mechanically, this is a turn-based RPG, but the fighting is quite original. You still pick an action off a menu on your turn, like you do in most turn-based RPGs (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc.), but when it’s the enemies’ turn, you have to avoid the enemies’ attacks by moving your heart around a box. Sometimes, you have to make your heart jump Super Mario Bros.-style (NES), or move it around Asteroids-style (Arcade), but this part is not turn-based. It is real-time, and it’s awesome.
I haven’t played this all the way through, but what I have played is hilarious and heart-warming, and awesome. As I mentioned, you don’t have to kill anyone, but you obviously can. In fact, you can do a pacifist run (in which you don’t kill anybody), or a genocide run (in which you kill everybody). I am attempting a pacifist run.
Also, I named the main character “Feli” because she kind of looks like the girl.
Donut County (PS4) - This game is hilarious. The whole game is basically making things fall into ever-expanding holes, and it’s awesome. It’s very reminiscent of Katamary Damacy (PS2) (which I love so much, I will buy again in January when it comes out on the Switch), in that the hole starts small and only gets bigger as you feed it more things. But it’s not so simple as that, as successive levels introduce new mechanics, like a catapult that will allow you to shoot one item out to interact with various things, water that will fill up the hole and won’t let you swallow more things until you figure out how to remove the water, fire which will let you burn things and/or make things rise, and snakes that somehow let you push buttons or flip things over. The whole thing is tied together by some really funny writing that features a raccoon running a donut shop, but he doesn’t actually seem to know what donuts are, so when folks order donuts, he just sends a hole that swallows things up. It’s a pretty short game, but it’s fun as heck, and I highly recommend it.
The Gardens Between (PS4) - This game made me cry, and I’ll get to why in a second. This is a puzzle game with a brilliant mechanic at its core: you have to manipulate time in order to solve the puzzles. That sounds difficult (time manipulation is not an easy thing, after all; ask literally any time traveler and they will yell at your face about paradoxes and timequakes and various other timey-wimey stuff), but this game makes it exceptionally simple. Anybody can play this game as there are only three buttons involved: forward, which lets you move time forward; back, which lets you move time backward, and an action button, which lets the two characters in the game interact with various objects in the levels. And that’s it. Solving the puzzles comes in figuring out when to go forward and backward in time, and how and when to interact with various objects. It’s a brilliant game, and everybody should play because literally anybody can.
The story of the game is told through the level design of each level, and super short vignettes that tie every two or three levels together (and I mean super short, like five seconds or so). There is no text in this game, either spoken or written. And yet the love between these two friends is immediately apparent, from the moment Arina moves in next door to Frendt, to the moment they share their last hug as Arina moves away again. And that’s the part that made me cry. I moved a lot as a kid, and I left a lot of great friends behind, so that hit me unexpectedly. You share so much with a best friend -- getting to know each other, playing and watching TV, getting in trouble together, making things together -- and then suddenly, through no fault of your own and without even any consultation, your parents decide it’s time to move. As a child, you don’t really understand why. You don’t have a clear grasp of how money or jobs or really much of anything works. All you know is that you now have to leave a person you love because your parents are making you. It sucks, and it’s sad, and I wept at Arina having to leave Frendt.
Night in the Forest (PS4) - I finally finished it! It took me way too long to finish this amazing game that isn’t actually all that long. 10 hours, maybe? I should have finished it in like two days, tops. You play as Mae Borowski, a 20-something who comes back to her dying hometown to live with her parents after dropping out of college. There isn’t actually a lot of gameplay in this game, not really. The verbs you have are basically “walk”, “jump” and “talk”. Occasionally, there are also point-and-click adventure game-type puzzles to solve. But the gameplay is not the point here. It’s the story. Mae is basically a jerk for most of the game. She is a smartass young adult, and I really disliked her, especially because she tended to treat her friends and family not all that great, including my favorite character Bea Santello. But Mae isn’t being a dick just to be a dick. She’s got issues, and she’s going through some things (and there’s some cosmic horror maybe? don’t even worry about that, though). There’s one bit where Mae gets into a terrible fight with her mom, and I was really sad for a bit. The writing in this is really, really good. Since this game is mostly about the conversations Mae has with the other characters, this game would really have suffered if the writing was even a little bit not as good.
Also, every character is an anthropomorphized animal, but there are also regular animals running about. For example, Mae is an anthropomorphized cat, but she visits a regular cat up on one of the rooftops in her town. That is madness.
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (PS4) - I love the Uncharted series. I played through all four Nathan Drake-starring games, and loved them to bits. The series was obviously heavily inspired by the original Tomb Raider games of the 1990s, and in turn inspired the reimagined Tomb Raider games of the 2010s. But then this came out, and instead of starring Nathan Drake, it starred Chloe Frazer and Nadine Bailey, breakout characters from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3) and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (PS4) respectively, and I knew I had to play it too. It took me a while to finally get to it, but when I did, I played all the way through it at least three times in an attempt to unlock every PSN trophy.
And guess what? I totally did.
This is the hardest game I’ve ever platinumed (though not the hardest game to platinum by a damn sight). I’m not even that much of a trophy hunter, really, but like the LEGO games, Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4), and Marvel’s Spider-Man (PS4), I just enjoyed playing this game so much, I looked for any excuse to go back in and do everything I possibly could. This is the only game I’ve ever beaten the ultra hard mode on! The last time I tried to beat an ultra hard mode in a game was Mass Effect 2 (PS3) (for the same reason I did it here), and I did not succeed. It was too hard. But controlling Chloe and solving ancient puzzles and shooting dudes in the face was just hard enough to make me sweat, but not hard enough that I couldn’t do it. Also, one of the trophies is called “Yas Queen”, and you know that was one of the first trophies I unlocked :D
Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4) - Sometimes, you just gotta shoot Nazis in the face, and Wolfenstein games have always been good for shooting Nazis in the face. I’ve played two or three previous Wolfenstein games (including Wolfenstein 3D (SNES) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PS2)), but they never really had anything you could properly call a story. You really just went through rooms and levels and shot Nazis in the face. This Wolfenstein game had not just one story, but two (sort of).
At the end of the first level of the game, you choose one of two people to save: the experienced British pilot Fergus Reid, or the fresh-faced army private Probst Wyatt III. In my first playthrough, I saved Wyatt because he was younger and had more to life left to live, and then saved Fergus in my second playthrough. Both timelines (as the game calls them) are basically the same (with the same levels and characters), except for one character in your underground resistance cell: the Wyatt timeline features guitarist J (aka Jimi Hendrix), while the Fergus timeline features scientist Tekla (aka a genderbent Nikola Tesla). There are a few gameplay differences as well (lockpicking and shield upgrades vs hotwiring and health upgrades), but yeah, basically the same game. I really only played it twice so I could pick up all the collectibles, and because the news of the world made me really want to shoot a lot of Nazis in the face. That said, the fact that this game takes place in an alternate 1960s in which the Nazis won World War II thanks to super science and now control most of the world didn’t make me feel a lot better.
I’ve got Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (PS4) (a prequel that takes place during World War II) waiting for me, and I will also get Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (PS4) (a sequel that takes place in the 70s) sometime in the nearish future (one assumes between Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4) and Kingdom Hearts III (PS4)).
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4) - This is what I’ve sunk most of my time into this past month. This is the first Assassin’s Creed game I’ve ever played (if we don’t count the three times I started the first Assassin’s Creed (PS3) in which I did the introductory level three times, and then stopped three times), and I have been enjoying the heck out of it. Assassin’s Creed as a series never really clicked with me, and I’m honestly not sure why. I like assassins, I like assassinating things, and I like history, which is a big thing for AC games (each one takes place in a different western era, including the Crusades, the Renaissance, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in London). The last two games, however, have gone further back in time than any other game: Assassin’s Creed Origins (PS4) went back to ancient Egypt times and was about the founding of the Assassin’s Order, while Odyssey went back even further to the Peloponnesian War of ancient Greece. These two games have also added a lot more RPG elements than previous installments, with leveling and numbers coming out of enemies’ heads. Odyssey went even more RPG than Origins, with dialogue choices and multiple endings. You also get to choose between two different characters, but we’ll get to that in a bit. This apparent hard left turn to RPG has angered a lot of longtime AC fans who are saying Odyssey isn’t really an AC game (also the fact that Odyssey takes place before the founding of the Assassin’s Order, so there aren’t even any actual Assassins in it), but whatever. I love it. In terms of mechanics, it’s a little bit Mass Effect, a little bit Breath of the Wild, and a little bit The Witcher (but not as good as any of them :P ). The story is fun, most of the missions are fun, and I get to beat up a couple of Greek myths, and that’s super fun.
So, you get to choose between two characters: Alexios, a male character, and Kassandra, a female character. In terms of story, they are brother and sister, and depending on which character you choose, one becomes the older sibling and the hero of the story, and the other one becomes the younger sibling and the villain of the story. As far as I can tell, the story is exactly the same with only the characters being swapped out. Even the dialogue is the same. I chose to play as Kassandra because whenever there is a choice between male and female characters, I always pick the female character because there aren’t enough female protagonists in games. I almost chose Alexios because I was excited about playing as a bisexual male, but I ultimately didn’t. And good thing, too, because playing as Kassandra is a much better experience. There are so many NPC interactions that would have felt super skeevy if it had been Alexios instead of Kassandra. The relationship between the main character and Phoibe, the young girl who looks up to the main character, feels very different if you’re playing as Alexios instead of Kassandra. Also, Kassandra has a muuuuuuuuuuuuch better voice actor in Melissanthi Mahut. She is just so much better at delivering the dialogue than Michael Antonakos, the voice actor for Alexios (there are a couple of YouTube videos showcasing some of their lines one after the other). That said, this game was clearly written with a straight, male lead in mind. There are a lot more female love interests than male, and there is a whole quest line with the Olympics in which the main character participates in, but all the opponents are male, which doesn’t make sense (also, women weren’t allowed to participate in the Olympics in ancient Greece, so there’s that too).
But yes, this game is pretty great, and I’m enjoying it a lot :)
My pre-order of this game will eventually allow me to get a remastered Assassin’s Creed III (PS4), which is the one that takes place during the American Revolution. It will also come with a DLC called The Tyranny of King Washington, which sounds like a fun bit of alternate history. If I enjoy that, I think I’ll also take a look at Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (PS4), which is the one that takes place in London during the Industrial Revolution and you play as another brother/sister team, but you actually play as both instead of one or the other.
And that’s it for this month! Coming up next month, I would like to pretend that I’m gonna finish Undertale (Switch), Kentucky Route Zero (PC), and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4), but really, it’s gonna be Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4) all day everyday. Actually, since I can’t play it until the 26th, I will probably play some more Odyssey today, then play the first DLC for Marvel’s Spider-Man (PS4), which is dropping tomorrow, and then start Red Dead Redemption 2 on Friday, and then playing nothing else until I finish it. So expect an essay on Red Dead Redemption 2 next month :D
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