Outer Wilds for PC (Epic store timed exclusive). Image credit Xbox & Play Games
Outer Wilds (2019)
Today is your first day as an astronaut and a whole solar system of mind-boggling cosmic phenomena and ancient alien secrets awaits your discovery! That’s the good news. The bad news is there are only 22 minutes until your local sun goes supernova.
Outer Wilds isn’t a short game, however, as you’re caught in a time loop reliving the end of the universe, giving you essentially infinite opportunities to investigate that hollow shell planet, or that storm-racked ocean world, or that binary orbit situation. This is one of the most truly open and purely exploration-based games I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. To appreciate how pure, here’s a list of things not in this game: weapons, combat, bad guys, bosses, xp, skill points, abilities, an inventory, collectables, crafting, pushing/pulling objects, fetch quests, doors that need keys, levels, checkpoints. And yet I always felt like there was plenty to do, especially as the game pulls you into its network of cerebral sci-fi mysteries, largely hinging around messages, artifacts, and ruins left by a previous alien race called the Nomai. (Full disclosure, Outer Wilds does have you hunting about for text logs, but gives the concept a unique spin.) There are puzzles, but they are extremely well integrated into the environment and usually take the form of, “How do I safely reach this place?”
This isn’t a perfect game, but it offers something so unique, wonderful, even awe-inspiring, that I’m willing to forgive its shortcomings. But they are worth pointing out. Firstly, there is a tonal mismatch between its laidback NPCs and faintly cartoonish aesthetic and the demanding traversal and brutal lethality of the environment. Despite some fairly forgiving physics, like a liberal buffer between what counts as landing vs crashing, you are always a short misstep from death. I like the sense of danger, but lacking a save mechanic means that failing to guess exactly what the game wants or just failing to execute, means replaying long stretches on the next attempt. Imagine Groundhog Day, but you have to watch Bill Murray learn French and ice-sculpting in real time.
I consider time-wasting and repetition cardinal sins in video games, so the time loop premise was always going to be a struggle for me. A triple-A studio would probably have provided quality-of-life mechanisms to relieve the strain (several systems come to mind), not to mention smoothing the difficulty and upgrading the graphics, but what triple-A studio would have the imagination or guts to make a game like this?
Score: 8.5 / 10
–Brian
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (2014)
The Borderlands games can be love-it-or-hate-it affairs, sometimes in a single sitting. The franchise formula isn’t immediately predictable as a box-office success: an irreverent sci-fi co-op shooter with a cartoon aesthetic and a very Australian sense of humor (complete with some thick accents). If you haven’t played a Borderlands game, the style is Mad Max meets Adult Swim in an outer space gold rush where mercenaries, thieves, hunters, and every manner of opportunist have gathered at the ass-end of the galaxy to search for vaults of ancient alien technology. If you’ve played a Borderlands game, here’s what’s new: freshly-minted classes (all playable characters are formerly NPCs from previous games, including villains and sidekicks), freeze weapons, a low-gravity moon, and oxygen management (which is frankly a bit annoying).
The writing is sometimes hilarious, sometimes obnoxious. The various areas are sometimes jaw-dropping jungle gyms, sometimes bland but convoluted labyrinths. The gameplay is frantic, rampaging, barely-controlled chaos that is amplified by couch co-op synergy, but can also be repetitive and wildly inconsistent in difficulty. What redeems many of these caveats is the loot and gear systems. Kelley and I were maniacally competitive about ransacking every new area for guns and money. The guns, which have tiered rarity, procedurally generated stats, all manner of crazy effects (corrosion, electricity, burst fire, exploding on reload, etc.), and even bizarre scopes, are perhaps Borderlands signature feature. You’ll spend a lot of time selling off garbage weapons that you couldn’t be paid to slaughter aliens with, but when you find that special hand cannon that feels just right, it is a thing of loud and brutal beauty.
Score: 7.5 / 10
–Brian
I genuinely had no idea what to expect when we fired up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for the first time. The name alone had me perplexed, but struck a tone for the humor that we were about to encounter.
First-person games are not my thing. I find the perspective extremely disorienting on a screen. Though I operate as a first-person human in my day-to-day life, I find that third-person games provide me with a greater understanding of the world around my character. As a bonus, I also can give myself motion sickness in first-person games. Borderlands did a good job giving me a near-constant close-up object (my weapon) that I could use as a focal point. This cut down on my headaches. Borderlands also provided a side-by-side split-screen for couch co-op. This small change made it easier for me to visualize my place so much more easily than the wider, but more compressed top-and-bottom version (also included).
Borderlands was fun and so very colorful. The humor wasn’t my style, but I appreciate the amount of time they put into all of the dialog and voice acting. The cartoonish-nature of the graphics and the completely ridiculous plot brought a lighthearted air to what could have been an extremely violent game.
Score: 6 / 10
–Kelley
Graveyard Keeper
Have you ever thought that you would be great at running a medieval-esque graveyard, navigating church politics, and making zombie-like drone workers ? Graveyard Keeper may be the game for you.
Let me start by saying that I really, really wanted to like this game. It combines time management, dark humor, and a lot of crafting. For the first several hours, I really enjoyed myself. The game walked you through collecting the bodies of the dead, prepping them for burial, and how to keep your graveyard as aesthetically pleasing as possible. The goals and quests started simply enough, but it all quickly got bogged down in crafting menus.
As you’ve read in my previous reviews (she types, making a huge assumption), I love a crafting game. However, I’ve started to get pickier about what I need from a crafting game in order to help prevent frustration. I need you to tell me what ingredients/components I need, what machines/alchemy tables I require, and I do not want to have to go on the internet every five minutes to try and figure it out myself. My biggest problem with Graveyard Keeper was the complete lack of direction. How am I supposed to know that crafting a paperback book requires me to skin a corpse at the Preparation Place, turn that into pigskin paper at the Church Workbench, turn the paper into a chapter at the Desk, make a softcover back at the Church Workbench, and then combine it all at the Desk? Oh, and the Preparation Place and the Workbench are in different buildings.
My favorite crafting mechanics are the ones that tell you in the quest or recipe book that you “fill in” where you need to make the final product and what other pieces of machinery are needed to accomplish that goal. Bonus points if they also tell you how many of each ingredient or have submenus where you can click on the components to see their crafting cost, location, and speed. (My Time at Portia did this very well.) Graveyard Keeper had so many layers in the crafting that didn’t clearly link to each other that it got too complicated too quickly.
By the end, the only thing I was crafting was my own frustration.
Score: 4 / 10
–Kelley
Significant Gamers 