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

Terraria for PC. Image credit: fanart on official Terraria twitter account

Terraria (2011)

Last year I tried to plug some of the holes in my gaming experience — especially RPGs like Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Planescape Torment, and Persona — but several prominent gaps remain: World of Warcraft, MOBAs, Minecraft. Not playing this latter makes it hard for me to evaluate Terraria in its full context: Terraria’s elevator pitch is “2D Minecraft.” If you, like me, hadn’t played the cubed classic, here’s the gist: you are dropped into a grid-aligned forest with a simple pickaxe and dig, build, craft, dig more, build more, craft more, etc. At night, monsters come out and you may need to withdraw into your fortress and batten down the hatches. Over time you repeat a relatively simple yet satisfying loop where each round of new equipment allows you to go deeper and further to collect the resources to make yet better equipment.

As with Minecraft there is an almost overwhelming degree of freedom in Terraria. Many players spend their time building literal castles in the sky. I whiled away hours of domestic bliss constructing a vast underground library, a rooftop statue garden, a marble-lined indoor pool, and a network of minecart railways to reach the furthest corners of the kingdom. Kelley was more into exploration and combat, mapping out the many surface and subsurface biomes, gathering resources, and thinning out the hordes of undead with her trusty yo-yo. For us, a key feature of Terraria was progression (not to be mistaken for actual story) that provided direction when we felt goal-oriented. Working together to find rare artifacts, fight bosses, and break into harder areas was exhilarating, and I suspect I’ll struggle to find the same motivation in a more open-ended sandbox environment.

Terraria won’t win many points for originality, but it deserves credit for taking Minecraft’s formula in its own direction and supporting their community with a truly insane amount of free content for many years beyond the original release. Kelley and I each topped the 100 hour mark, sometimes playing late into the night, in what was easily our favorite explicitly co-op experience of 2019.

Score: 10 / 10

–Brian

Writing up this Terraria review is particularly timely, given that I started playing Minecraft just last month.  The games have a lot of similarities – you have blocks, you build with them, you explore, you craft, and you stave off mobs of bad guys.  However, the sheer delight that I got from Terraria is far, far greater than any I have experienced in Minecraft.  

Terraria is bright, colorful, dynamic, and chock-full of interesting things to uncover.  Underground mushroom land? Yes. Evil unicorns? Sure. The ability to mine cloud blocks?  Absolutely. The creators clearly had fun coming up with whimsical ideas and incorporating them into the game that made each discovery enjoyable.  I truly loved setting out on an adventure, coming across something I had never seen, and hearing the slight tinge of jealousy in Brian’s voice as I announced my discovery.  (The jealousy thing went both ways.)

The one mark against Terraria was the lack of direction with crafting.  There are literally hundreds of items that you can create, but no in-game guidance explaining how, why, or if you should even bother.  We spent hours on the wiki trying to figure out if, for example, cactus armor was better than tin armor and then what was needed (materials and equipment) to make it.  Every time we had to pull out our phones to look at the wiki snapped us out of the otherwise blissful trance.  

I loved Terraria and do not regret a single one of the 100+ hours.

Score: 10 / 10

–Kelley

Dust: An Elysian Tail (2012)

Too many games start with a conveniently amnesiac protagonist.  Sometimes, this ends up working and the story goes in interesting and unexpected ways.  Sometimes it falls completely flat and nothing feels novel or new. Dust: An Elysian Tail lies somewhere in the middle: there were times the amnesia was groan-worthy, but it also allowed for some plot-driven moments that worked pretty well.

In Dust, you play a character searching to understand who he is and why he came to be in a forest outside of a small town.  A sentient sword (and it’s guardian, Fidget) join with you as you begin to realize the world you have found yourself in.  Beasts are ravaging the land and the Moonbloods, a race with strong magical powers, are dying off and fighting back. Over the course of the game, you learn a lot about the Moonbloods and General Gaius, the ruler of the land, as you run around on fetch-quests, fight beasts with your sword, and perform some solid platforming.  I’m going to stop there to avoid any spoilers.

Dust wasn’t a particularly difficult game, but it was very engaging.  The art style was appealing, with a lot of charmingly-drawn anthropomorphized characters.  The story was surprisingly deep in places and had some turns I did not expect. In all, I enjoyed Dust quite a bit and would play another title set in this world.

Score: 8 / 10

–Kelley

Hexcells Infinite (2014)

This is minesweeper on hexagons. You now have everything you need to determine if you are in or out on Hexcells, or really any Matthew Brown puzzle game. The 36 pre-built custom levels gradually introduce the rules and nomenclature, and the rest is up to your pure, unadulterated logical reasoning. Skills honed on Picross or Sudoku will carry you far, but expect to switch between mental algorithms more often.

For those who groove this vibe, Infinite Mode procedurally generates new puzzles so you’ll never be bored on public transport again. For my taste, however, there just isn’t enough variety or progression to keep coming back. This is the type puzzle game that is perfect for passing the time without shutting off your brain; but I’m not looking to merely pass my time.

Score: 4.5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Ibb & Obb for PC; Image credit: gamingonlinux.com

Ibb & Obb (2013)

Kelley and I play a lot of co-op together, and it’s always interesting to see how game design decisions effect are interactions: pursue our individual whims or stick together as a team, communicate constantly or silently collaborate, compete for loot or share resources strategically. Ibb & Obb, a puzzle platformer whose cute cartoon art (reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro) masks a brutal gauntlet of intellectual and dexterity challenges, put some stress on those interactions. I screwed up. She screwed up. There was shouting. We loved this game!

Ibb & Obb eases you in, but makes it clear from the get-go that collaboration is absolutely necessary. You literally run into a wall until you figure out how to jump on your pal’s head and have them boost you higher. Much of the complexity comes from your ability to pass through the ground into a mirror world where gravity is reversed. As you progress through 15 tightly-designed stages, the game introduces new complications like enemy monsters, player-specific portals, bubbles of upside-down gravity, boost pads, and wrap-around physics. There are optional crystals to collect which control how hard your avatars party at chapter breaks and we became rabid about achieving maximum dance. For those who believe their co-op relationship can survive any trial, try the hardcore hidden levels.

Score: 8 / 10

–Brian

 Ibb & Obb was an extremely challenging co-op puzzler with a charming aesthetic. While it started relatively easy with needing to jump on your partner’s head in order to reach a new platform, it quickly became much more complicated endeavor.  There were trampoline platforms, gravity switches, and a lot of communication breakdowns between us as players. The game was pretty kind about resetting when we died, but there were some long sections that were rather tense. It was worth it for the end-of-stage dancing.

In all, a great co-op puzzle game.  Highly recommend.

Score: 9 / 10

-Kelley

Bayonetta (2009)

I’m not sure if there’s a translation issue at play, but Bayonetta’s Wikipedia page quotes the director as saying that the theme of Bayonetta is “partial nudity.” It’s accurate. Our heroine is Bayonetta, a certified product of the male gaze who wouldn’t be out of place in a strip club ad, and yet she managed to subvert many female video game character cliches. It helps that she has the levels of capability, agency, and casually badassity usually reserved for male protagonists like director Hideki Kamiya’s previous creation, Dante of Devil May Cry. She’s also a shapeshifting witch who sports reading glasses.

Bayonetta is over the top in every sense, and the earlier you accept its ludicrous and violent aesthetic, the better your experience will be. For starters, the plot is a mishmash of action movie cliches (trying ever so hard to be cool, and succeeding maybe 50-50) and distorted christian mythology. This translates into surprisingly great gameplay: frenetic hack-n-slash combat against an inventively-rendered angelic host. All four of your limbs are weapon slots, so feel free to equip shotguns on your high heels or shred cherubs by breakdancing on them with magic ice skates. You hair summons demons. The epic boss battles are monstrous incarnations of the cardinal virtues: Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Prudence. 

You can get pretty far fighting just by mashing buttons (wicked fun!), but there’s hidden depths. For all the self-conscious shallowness, the same is true of the rest of the game. Bayonetta’s quest to reclaim her past hits a trope I’m partial to: the loner who reluctantly forms meaningful attachments, in this case with her best-friend-turned-rival-turned-(spoiler alert)-best-friend Jeanne and a young girl who (spoilers everywhere) is actually her younger self. There’s also a token human male love interest, which Bayonetta, and the game as a whole, treats with mild disdain. He’s largely decorative when not filling in as the damsel in distress.

I have mixed feelings about Bayonetta. It’s doing that Charlie’s Angels (Charlie’s Demons?) thing where you have your cake and eat it too, creating an empowered female action hero, but laying on enough sex appeals that even Joe Misogynist can have a good time. But it has a clear and distinctive authorial voice, style to burn, and a missile riding sequence. I support those things.

Score: 7 / 10

–Brian

Human Resource Machine (2015)

There’s a subgenre of puzzle games where you complete programming tasks, often using an unusual visual programming language or under specific syntax limitations. Dry as this probably sounds, sometimes I find these to be brilliant tests of coder talent (SpaceChem is my personal favorite), but at other times it can be a little too close to my day job. 

Human Resource Machine is in many ways, a parody of day jobs, with you playing a balding salaryman assigned arbitrary tasks by a dystopian megacorporation. Each level, classical programming problems like multiplication, Fibonacci sequences, and string storting, are used as a snapshot from a year in the career of our nameless drone. As time passes and your work gets more complicated, we see the world collapsing outside, caught in odd glimpses of news coverage, half-suppressed cries for help, and vaguely amusing cutscenes.

HRM never quite came alive for me. The challenges are often trivial for coders, but boring for non-coders. The story is so abstract, it’s hard to attach any meaning to it. Our hero is intentionally a non-entity. I liked attempting to solve programs in the fewest commands or the fewest steps, but little else felt fulfilling. 

After finishing HRM I was not surprised to learn it was developed by Tomorrow Corporation. Their previous work includes the critically-acclaimed, but vastly overrated Little Inferno, which depending on who you ask, is either a waste of time or a satire of wasting time, a distinction I was not able to discern.

Score: 5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Witcher 3 for PC; Image Credit: Pocket-lint

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

When I was school-age, my heart would jump at the prospect of a new 100-hour RPGs. What better way to stretch my meager resources for maximum entertainment? But there comes an age where video games take up a smaller proportion of time and attention, and most of those games elicit something between an exhausted groan and a hard pass. Random battles? Dungeon labyrinths? All that grinding for XP and loot?  It takes a work like Witcher 3 to remind me that a grueling epic can be worth it. 

I dived into the series having bypassed the first two entries and would recommend a primer for anyone doing the same, since appreciating the history, both personal and political, will help you immerse in one of the richest and deepest fantasy worlds the medium has to offer. You play Geralt, a well-connected mercenary monster hunter, who is searching for your adopted daughter. She’s fleeing from a ghost army across a war-torn medieval landscape and you’re always one step behind. Yennefer and Triss, powerful sorcerers and former flames, are among the allies aiding the hunt. They are two of the most fully-realized and capable female characters in RPG history, but they have plenty of reservations about you. 

Games get labeled ‘mature’ because of unthinking violence or nudity, which are certainly on display here, but the Witcher’s real maturity comes from its willingness to grapple with a world where few things are black and white. War has ravaged the country. Both sides are guilty of atrocities. The average citizen is just looking to survive. Others maneuver for power, strive for ideals, or run amok in the chaos. Magic spells tend to impress less than food and medicinal herbs. Engaging with the cultures of exotic creatures is a thin line away from being torn apart by a monster. Witcher 3’s signature subplot is an early episode based around a local warlord called the Bloody Baron, a master class in nuanced world-building, complex characters, and tough decisions. 

My only substantial complaint is that for all of Witcher’s rather over-complicated systems (more alchemy, concoctions, weapon oils, bomb types, crafting items, horse trophies, and perks than anyone needs) the combat doesn’t have enough meaningful progression to keep up with the vast open world and long winding story. I often preferred to pass time playing Gwent, Witcher’s totally unnecessary, but absurdly fun CCG minigame.

Score: 9 / 10

–Brian

TowerFall Ascension (2013)

In TowerFall, each player controls a figure in a wrap-around one-screen platforming arena.  Armed with your bow and a very small number of retrievable arrows, you work together to fend off waves of attacks from fantastical creatures and bosses.  Oh, and there’s friendly fire. This was particularly important when considering the wrap-around nature of the screen. There were so many occasions when we thought we were going to hit a bad guy, but instead watched the shot sail off one side of the arena and into the back of our teammate on the other side.  Oops?  

I’ve had mixed success with archery mechanics in games.  Often I don’t agree with the trajectories of shots and find the often-more-complicated series of button presses needed to activate archery to be clunky.  Somehow with the cartoonish style, the simplicity of the arena design and control scheme, and sheer absurdity of repeatedly accidentally shooting your fellow player, it works in TowerFall.  

Score: 7 / 10

–Kelley

TowerFall Ascension, by the creator of Celeste, is best known for its party-friendly deathmatch, but Kelley and I were both a little underwhelmed until switching to the co-op campaign. Though the controls are minimal and the “dungeons” are a just single screen where you fend off 5-10 waves of monsters (think Joust or the original non-super Mario Bros), there is enough complexity to give hardcore gamers something to master (dashing, arrow catching, wall-jumping, fast falling, looping, specialty arrows), with enough chaos to give even beginners a chance.

The co-op campaign is hard, bordering on unfair at my intermediate skill level, and a bit repetitive, but the fast reflex gameplay and relatively short sessions brings out that “just one more try” urge. I appreciated that while Towerfall Ascension could have stuck with just the casual party game audience, there area ton of unlockable secret characters and stages that kept us returning for more.

Score: 7 / 10

–Brian

Clustertruck (2016)

What can be said about the little-loved genus of the novelty game? Shall I discuss the aesthetic and sociological values of silly names, surreal moments, gimmicky premises, unpolished gameplay, janky physics, self-sabotaging controls, and cult fandoms? The defense of these messy black sheep lies somewhere in their amusing playfulness, child-like abandon, and the gleeful scuttling of games as art.  Or perhaps that’s what makes them art? At their best they have the secret brilliance of the court jester.

But what is Clustertruck? It is the panic of leaping between semis as they careen downstream like stampeding wildebeests. It is the absurdity of taking this sweat-soaked white-knuckle serious, as siege engine hammers swing through traffic, lava rises, and laser beams splice the very air. Can you keep this up while launching off ramps? In outer space? In hell? Thank god for short levels, instant restarts, and a handful of special abilities: double jump, slow time, all the usual suspects. Clustertruck is adrenaline mixed with the best scene from a bad action movie. If only the controls were not quite so awful.

Score: 6 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.