Significant Gamers

Super Mario Odyssey + Nier: Automata + Gunpoint

Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch; Image Credit: playcalendar.com

Super Mario Odyssey (2017)

Finally Mario’s hat gets its own game. (The Justice for Waluigi people have something new to cry about.) Mario is there too, because the hat needs somebody to throw it. The player takes command of a mario-version of whatever the hat lands on (Bullet Bill, electric wires, a fish), providing a huge array of alternative control schemes and special abilities beyond Mario’s already impressive moveset. Switching between Mario variants is key to collecting moons and thus unlocking new areas. There are hundreds of moons indiscriminately doled out at the end of every platforming challenge, secret area, and boss battle, so players are free to bypass frustrating bits or game modes that aren’t their cup of tea.

Super Mario Odyssey is probably the best 3D platformer since… Super Mario Galaxy 2. This is a field the Mario people have pretty much locked down. Odyssey does a good job innovating with the hat transformations (or at least borrowing from the underrated Warioland series), while also paying homage to its roots via pipes into 2D sequences. However there are some traditions I wish the franchise would transcend: the perennial pantomime that passes for story, Peach’s role as a passive victim, the emphasis on collecting for the sake of collecting. Odyssey’s gameplay remains as fresh as ever, but the framing premise has grown stale and the lack of deeper meaning can feel empty.

I had a blast opening up the various worlds and hunting down their trickiest treasures, but after defeating Bowser the game rescatters moons across the levels you’ve already played. Ostensibly, Kelley and I were supposed to be excited about the bonus content, but instead we felt exhausted and moved on.

Score: 8.5 / 10

–Brian

The game that made me want to get a Switch was Super Mario Odyssey (and Breath of the Wild, but it was close between them). The idea of being able to play a Mario game all the way through was something I wanted since I was a kid. Needless to say, I was stoked.

The game is a multi-world jaunt in the unending quest to rescue Princess Peach from a matrimony-obsessed Bowser. The gameplay was all of the fun I hoped for. Mario runs, jumps, spirals, climbs, and swims all over in charming fashion. What was not so charming is the eternal-victimhood of Peach who, after 35 years in the Mario universe, is still getting kidnapped and robbed of agency. The only moment where it’s alluded that maybe Peach should be able to do what she wants is after the main game concludes. (She decides to go sightseeing on the worlds that she briefly visited while in captivity.) Gosh, even in the Super Mario Maker 2 (2019) multiplayer mode, you can’t play as Peach. The only female character is Toadette. It’s time for Peach to have her day.

But otherwise, so much fun.

Score: 9 / 10

-Kelley

Nier: Automata (2017)

Nier: Automata for the PS4; Image Credit: Microsoft Store

At first glance Nier: Automata looks like a grab-bag of anime cliches: young heroes piloting giant mechs, impractically huge swords, adorable robots, existential debates, misplaced fanservice. It takes a while for it to cohere, but in the meantime there’s a core dump of gameplay mechanics that need mastering: hack’n’slash, run’n’gun, shoot-em-up… fishing? You’ll explore a bland post-apocalyptic open world, hack enemies via an arcade-style minigame, and customize your character abilities by slotting in chips with varying memory costs. I was on the fence until I stumbled upon a carnival being conducted by robots, and over the next many hours I started to lose myself in the pure weirdness, but also the unexpected depth of Nier: Automata’s world.

Central to Nier: Automata’s cult fandom is that you’ll have to play the game multiple times to fully experience its twisty science-fiction tale. Our heroes are the stoic android 2B and her sympathetic backup 9S. The first two playthroughs cover the same span from their respective perspectives. This is a really cool idea, but since 2B and 9S work together for large portions, you’re required to slog through the overlap. Ultimately this pays off, especially in reaching subsequent runs, but it’s a good example of Nier’s most persistent shortcoming – a lack of discernment in occupying the player’s time.

This takes many forms: a map too big for the content such that you’ll criss-cross empty patches frequently, waves of identical grunts barraging you to the verge of boredom (and, should you choose to loot-grind, beyond), save points scant enough to impel 20 minutes of retracing your steps should you screw up, a lineup of fetch quests and deliveries whenever you step off the main path, etc. This is a great game that hides too much of its grand story and innovative structure behind filler.

Score: 7.5 / 10

–Brian

Gunpoint (2013)

Gunpoint for PC; Image Credit: MobyGames

When Gunpoint works, it works by shrewdly combining ingredients that you wouldn’t expect to gel: gritty noir with peppy humor, platforming action with brainy stealth, retro graphics with futuristic gadgets, and a simple interface with a complex spy thriller plot. Gunpoint is the charmingly anachronistic tale of a detective with a pair of far-flinging “bullfrog hypertrousers” who gets caught up in a web of murder, corporate espionage, and deceit.

Gunpoint’s gimmick is that you can pause the game and switch to a schematic of the building you are burgling to rewire light switches, alarms, sealed doors, elevators, and even guns. By swapping around color-coded connectors you can trick guards into rolling out the red carpet for their formerly impenetrable fortress. It’s a clever mechanic that makes for emergent gameplay. A few breaking-and-enterings in and you’ll be cackling at your own mischievous contraptions and unlikely heists.

However, the same flexibility that allows for multiple solutions also makes for uneven level design, with brute force and recycled tricks too often rewarded. Gunpoint feels like the prologue of a game that’s missing a second and third act, with new abilities and harder obstacles just over the horizon, but which never arrive. At only 2-3 hours of gameplay, Gunpoint is over just as it starts to get interesting, and I have to admit I felt disappointed by the unfulfilled potential.

Score: 5.5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Celeste + Civilization VI + Pokemon Red/Blue

Celeste for the Nintendo Switch; Image Credit: Matt Makes Games

Today Kelley and I both tackle Celeste and finally play well-established series we’ve never previously attempted.

Celeste (2018)

From a distance, Celeste appears to be composed of simple, familiar elements. Heroine Madeline joins Zelda’s Link and Carmen Sandiego‘s gumshoe in the dubious pantheon of protagonists who will be inevitably confused with the title of their debut appearance. You’ll double-jump over spikes and pits to reach the highest point in each area. The highest point of all is the titular mountain Celeste, an actual peak in British Columbia.

What makes Celeste special is the polish every element exhibits. The controls are incredibly tight. Your second jump is both a constraint (cardinal directions, consistent-distance) and a very flexible tool. The level design is demanding, but rarely cruel. Your ability to grab onto walls and even climb short distances adds just the right pause to catch your breath and forgive a near miss. When you die, you restart instantly and without any penalty other than resetting the current screen. The progression introduces new mechanics just as you’ve mastered the previous. The collectable strawberries, unlockable “B-sides,” and hidden crystal hearts allow the player to customize the difficulty on the fly just by skipping anything that feels too frustrating.

But for me, what elevates Celeste over its nearest ancestor, Super Meat Boy, is that the heroine and her struggle are relatable and meaningful. That’s actually very rare in this genre. Consider the arbitrariness of characters like Mario or Sonic, and our corresponding lack of emotional investment in their journeys. Their antagonists are cartoon dinosaurs and mad scientists. Madeline figuratively and literally faces a mountain and the part of herself that tells her she can’t climb it. One of the many beautiful lessons of Celeste is that, unlike boss battles, mental health issues are rarely “beaten.” Instead we grow stronger by learning to recognize and live with them.

Score: 9.5 / 10

–Brian

Brian summed up a lot of what I loved about Celeste – the art style, mechanics, and treatment of mental health issues. What I think I liked most was the flow of the game. It starts deceptively simple, but quickly the player learns that they need to improve and possibly change how they play in order to get to the next screen and the one after that.

There’s a delicate line between a game that is constantly challenging the player to keep working, trying, and adapting and one that makes them want to rage quit with a tantrum of epic proportions. Celeste walks it perfectly. I distinctly remember white-knuckling my controller for hours trying to time my jumps and dashes properly to get to a platform or strawberry, but I never got too overwhelmed. Even the constant recording of my many, many deaths didn’t feel judgemental, just matter-of-fact.

Celeste was one of my most highly-anticipated games on the Switch and it did not disappoint.

Score: 9 / 10

–Kelley

Civilization VI

One of the major gaps in my computer game credentials was the Civilization series. Civilization, in all of its various forms and incarnations, always intrigued me, but never enough to sit down and dedicate the time required 1) to play and 2) to play decently. Despite my general awful-ness as turn-based strategy games, I decided to try it out.

The first thing you realize about playing a well-established franchise like Civilization is that there is a heck of a lot going on and the learning curve is steep. They have a dedicated following and history, and assume you know at least the basics of what you’re getting into. That said, Civ VI did have a nice tutorial/learning mode and the inclusion of an overwhelmingly-detailed encyclopedia of game actions and background answered many of my questions.

So far, I have only played one complete scenario of Civ VI. I lost. I lost rather horribly. I tried a strategy where I (Cleopatra) tried to be nice to everyone so I wouldn’t have to spend dwindling resources on a military presence. This failed. I forgot something rather crucial with this – you have to have money, resources, or a small enough footprint in order to be neutral. While I occasionally was able to entice a notable artist, author, military mind, scholar, etc. to visit my land, it was not enough to gain the prestige I needed to attempt a conflict-free victory.

In talking with others who had played Civ games in the past, I apparently didn’t understand that the point of the game is to squash everyone else into submission with technology.

Civ VI is quite challenging. The AI is beefed up for this installment because hardcore players complained about the game being too easy. Well. Thanks, guys.

I going to give it a healthy break, but I expect I’ll play another few games of Civ VI. I feel a bit less like a duck out of water now, so maybe I’ll have the edge I need to not come in dead-last against a bunch of robots.

Score: 8 / 10

–Kelley

Pokemon Red & Blue (1996)

Pokemon Red for the Nintendo Game Boy; Image Credit: The Atlantic

Growing up I just missed the Pokemon craze. I was starting high school and Pokemon Red/Blue seemed like stupid kid’s stuff. For decades after, I secretly regretted not getting in on the ground floor of what became a multi-media empire. A series of hikes with Pokemon Go aficionados kept the franchise on my radar. In 2019 I started working through a list of the most well-regarded games and my Waterloo finally arrived. I spiritedly booted up the ol’ emulator to give this foundational work a go.

Almost immediately I could see the underlying appeal of collecting outlandish critters to duke it out in an intricate spreadsheet of rock-paper-scissors relations. But just as quickly, the game’s flaws undermined the potential for strategy, world-building, exploration, and anything resembling fun. The writing is terrible. I literally cringed almost every time I sat down to force myself onward. The characters are generic and one-dimensional. The graphics were unimaginative and the type of level design that might have redeemed them was MIA.

Worst of all was the gameplay: a tedious, grind-fest full of repetitious random battles, redundant abilities, and opaque stats, which required either hours of trial-and-error or ready access to the internet (or perhaps, circa 1998, a sold-separately guidebook). I finally walked away after a “puzzle” where you mindlessly look into a grid of garbage cans hoping to find two completely randomized switches that allow you to progress. It was the perfect metaphor for my experience of the game as a whole.

Score: 1.5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Eliza + Soma + Moonlighter

Eliza for PC; Image Credit: Zachtronics

Eliza (2019)

In the early 1990s my father brought home a computer with a chatty AI that demoed the sound card. It was called Dr. Sbaitso and it impersonated a psychologist by parroting what you typed or fixating on keywords and asking for details. My siblings and I spent hour trolling Sbaitso with absurd confessions. We eventually lost interest as we learned its rather modest limits, but I still think about that early excitement talking to a machine and wondering whether it understood my feelings. Fast forward to 2019, where the field of AI-assisted healthcare is booming, and the visual novel Eliza has some serious qualms.

You play as Evelyn, a burnt-out Seattle programmer and former core member of the team that designed Eliza, a therapist AI now in the stable of a powerful wellness app company. Without revealing your past connection, you are hired as a proxy, a human surrogate who reads Eliza’s prompts to give the machine a “human touch.” It’s a role both fascinatingly voyeuristic and weirdly dehumanizing. Over the course of several weeks you spend a lot of time listening to clients interact with Eliza and discussing the broader implications, next steps, and your own personal journey. You’ll converse with an ex-coder LGBT musician friend, a young idealistic chief engineer, a mental health colleague with a personal stake, a visionary but narcissistic tech CEO, and a visionary but smarmy psychologist. You hear their opinions and form your own.

I found the writing relatable and emotionally resonant and the subject matter brilliantly topical and multifaceted: our relationship with technology, controversial mental health trends, data privacy issues, startup culture, the difficulty of connecting with others, tough career choices, working with colleagues who are #MeToo scandals waiting to happen, and balancing self-care, ambition, and principles. Although released by Zachtronics, best known for their hardcore puzzle games, this is a pure visual novel, with no player inputs except for selecting dialog choices. Some of your interactions may feel a little bare-bones, but as the story progresses the options become weightier and steer the conclusion. I tried to make every decision as true to myself as possible, and literally paced my room mulling over real world relevant questions I hadn’t thought so hard about before. So perhaps Eliza, under the cover of gaming, accomplished what Dr. Sbatiso never could.

Score: 9 / 10

–Brian

Soma (2015)

Soma for PS4; Image Credit: Frictional Games

Many a survival horror game exploits our natural fears of darkness and dying, not to mention fleeing through cramped spaces from mutant-ghost-things, but few do it quite so underwaterly as Soma. In a prologue, you agree to have your brain scanned in the aftermath of a car accident. Next thing you know you wake up in an abandoned laboratory. Flickering lights. Broken glass. Bloodstains smeared down corridors. Yup, something went horribly wrong.

In the course of figuring out what happened, how you got here, and how to survive (all excellent mysteries), you’ll be hustled through a bunch of bathymetric bases that serve to space out existential revelations. What gradually unfolds is a science fiction tale of disaster, desperation, and transhumanism. However, I strongly suggest playing this on “safe mode” which retains most of the scary while excising the clumsy and unfun stealth segments. (The score below reflects my unfortunately decision to ignore this advice.)

The relatively smooth pacing and emphasis on plot and mood made Soma an excellent choice for playing in a group setting, my preference for survival horror. Just hand off the controller when you get too frightened!

Score: 6 / 10

–Brian

Soma looked scary. I don’t do scary.

-Kelley

Moonlighter (2018)

Moonlighter for PC; Image Credit: trueachievements.com

In Moonlighter, you play a young shopkeeper who yearns for adventure and goes dungeon-diving in order to stock up on inventory. As such, there are two main parts to the game: managing your shop during the day and exploring dungeons at night. In the day phase, you put items on shelves, price-adjust them based on customer reactions, stop shoplifters, ring up purchases, and, later in the game, take orders for specific goods. This is the way your character gets money to upgrade your shop and buy specialty wares.

The second part is the dungeon exploration. There are four themed, progressively-more-difficult dungeons in Moonlighter: golem, forest, desert, and technology. The player starts in golem and unlocks the others as they defeat the boss of the previous dungeon. Naturally, harder dungeons = rarer and more expensive items to sell and craft with. Each procedurally-generated dungeon is three floors and chock-full of bad guys. Kill all of the monsters in the room, get a chest of loot. Each floor has a fountain of healing – especially useful as you cannot save in a dungeon and getting KO-ed loses both in-game time and the contents of your backpack.

The best part of Moonlighter was their inventory system. Everyone who has ever played an RPG has cursed the limited number of slots in their trusty backpack. Moonlighter takes that concept and makes it into a punishing puzzle. You have three rows of five inventory slots. Want to pick up the Desert Steel Ingot? It has to go at either the top or bottom of your backpack. That Triple Cell Battery – it must go all the way to the left or right of your bag. Where it really started getting interesting were the items that were cursed, destroying the inventory object in the direction indicated by an arrow, or blessed, sending an object in a particular direction back to the safety of your shop. The pain of debating whether or not it was better to pick up one valuable object at the cost of another because of the inventory system was real. I had never seen anything quite like it in a game and thought it was brilliant, though frustrating.

To me, the dungeons and shop-management of Moonlighter did not live up to expectations. It seemed like my perfect combination: exploration and management simulation in one! I found the dungeons too much of a grind and the shop portion, though initially enjoyable, became a boring necessity.

Score: 5 / 10

-Kelley

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Persona 4 + A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build + Hidden Folk

Persona 4 for PS2. Image credit IGN.com

Persona 4 (2008)

Implicit in almost every RPG, and most video games in general, is the idea that growing as a person is largely about increasing strength and improving skills. Persona tries a bold alternative that I absolutely love: you “level up” by dedicating time and attention to your social links: family, friends, colleagues, and community. You’ll still attack/guard/skill/item foes in turn-based combat, but you’ll divide your time between dungeons themed around suppressed fears and a life-sim based around a rural high school.

Shortly after city-kid Yu Narukami moves in with his uncle, Det. Dojima, and younger cousin, Nanako, strange deaths beset the formerly quiet village of Inaba. Together with an expanding team of classmates, you connect the murders to a “Midnight Channel” urban legend and a parallel “TV World” accessible to a select few. Each TV World dungeon is the private nightmare of an Inaba citizen on the verge of succumbing to their negative emotions and deep-seated insecurities, and rescuing the victim is as much about resolving these internal conflicts as it is about surviving a gauntlet of battles. (Though don’t underestimate the battles; Persona 4 is quite difficult and rather miserly with savepoints.)

The TV World only claims the life of its current prisoner on foggy days after heavy rain, so the weather forecasts can help estimate how long remains to gather clues about who has gone missing and why. In the meantime you’ll build relationships with the people in your life. These social links are central to the game, but have a steep learning curve of their own, not least because it takes good judgement, careful perception, and real maturity to help others deal with problems unique to their life stages, personal histories, and personalities. You’ll also need a crash course in Jungian psychology and occult mysticism along the way. Each bond is represented by a tarot card, which in turn improves the strength of certain persona — figures from world religion, folklore, and mythology — that affect your abilities in the TV World.

Persona 4 has a lot going on. The central mystery is compelling and creative. There are almost too many twists, culminating in not just a secret ending, not just a secret secret ending, but a secret x3 ending. (These are crucial to getting the full story, but are very hard to achieve on a first playthrough, so save often and don’t hesitate to consult a guide.) The cast of characters are among the most well-rounded and relatable in any game with interactions that are down to earth, but complex and weighty. I found the realistic setting, in particular, to be a nice break from high fantasy and space opera backdrops. And although the combat gets too grindy for my taste (this is an early 2000s JRPG), there is much strategic depth in the persona system. Of the 60-odd RPGs I’ve played, this is probably my favorite.

Score: 10 / 10

–Brian

A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build (2015)

A Good Snowman is Hard to Build for PC; Image Credit: macworld.com

A seasonal sokoban-style puzzle game with a Flannery O’Connor pun in the title! Add to cart. This is a calm, almost zen game where you roll and stack snowballs in tiny hedge-bound gardens. The puzzles are never quite trivial, nor too hard, making this ideal as a guilt-free mobile diversion. For the real challenge make sure to stick around after finishing for the secret bonus content.

The graphics and music lean towards simplicity, but there are lots of pleasant details: you can see the path where you’ve rolled snow, the snowpeople all get names (and unique hats) and you can hug them, butterflies emerge if you solve a puzzle without leaving the area, you can rest on benches, etc. Skip your next coffee/soda and buy this game instead.

Score: 7 / 10

–Brian

Hidden Folks (2017)

Hidden Folks for PC; Image Credit: Adriaan de Jongh and Sylvain Tegroeg

I grew up loving wimmelbilderbuchs. I didn’t know the fancy German word then, but I knew I loved hidden picture books. Many of my childhood favorites fall into this genre: Where’s Waldo, I Spy, and everything by Graeme Base. Basically you get a series of elaborate illustrations full of tiny details that can be poured over for hours while you hunt for particular objects. Hidden Folks is a straight-forward video game version of the concept, featuring hand-drawn landscapes teeming with adorable black and white figures and tiny animations (or at least a silly sound) wherever you click.

Find enough of the requested miniature trinkets or distinctive folks in one environment and you can progress to the next. Hidden Folks does what it does pretty well, but the lack of story, depth, or variation, eventually caused Kelley and I to move on to other games. Maybe, too, there’s something tactile about doing these in a book that can’t quite be captured on a screen.

Score: 4 / 10

–Brian

In Hidden Folks, the illustrations were great, the amount of detail put into the backgrounds was fantastic, the little animations added to the experience, and generally it was quite pleasant. Oddly enough, my biggest problem with the game was that it was too large. Each scene that you are searching is simply huge and the things that you are looking for are so very small. While there are some zoom capabilities, we found it best to be merely feet away from the television screen we were playing on – something that I do not care for. The game was cute, but we only made it through a fraction of the available play areas before giving up.

Researching the game again for the purposes of writing this review, I see that it is available on mobile devices. I think that is the ideal way to play Hidden Folks. You have more control over the zoom and camera, can move at your own pace, and can easily put it away when it becomes overwhelming.

Score: 6 / 10

–Kelley

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Link’s Awakening + English Country Tune + Lost Pig

Link’s Awakening for Nintendo Switch; Image Credit: Nintendo

Today there is a stealth theme for the three reviews that will be revealed at the end. See if you can spot it before then!

Link’s Awakening (2019)

I played two Zelda games in 2019. Breath of the Wild was first – a sprawling open-world exploration adventure where I could lose myself for hours at a time (review to come in a later post). Shortly after my success (and Ganondorf’s defeat), Nintendo announced the Switch re-release of Link’s Awakening with updated graphics. I knew I would buy and play this game.

Link’s Awakening is very different from BotW. Now, this is likely obvious to anyone who had ever played more than one Zelda game, but I was going in with just the one point of reference. Whereas BotW is massive and you can do pretty much whatever you want in whichever order strikes your fancy, Link’s Awakening has you on a linear path. Both styles have their place and purpose and made for good games, but I was struck by how differently two titles from the same series played.

In Link’s Awakening, you control a newly-washed ashore Link who is trapped on an island. Naturally, he has lost his memories. As he works to figure out who he is and how to get off the island, Link fights some monsters and solves a series of dungeons. Though the original game came out in 1993 for the Game Boy Color, I don’t want to give anything away that could be “spoiler-y.”

Link’s Awakening is a nice game. The updated graphics and the re-release on the Switch make it accessible to a new generation of Nintendo gamers. While I greatly preferred the freedom and scope of BotW (again, watch this space for a future post!), I hope that Nintendo continues to update and release classic titles like Link’s Awakening.

Score: 7 / 10

-Kelley

Lost Pig (2007)

Lost Pig for PC; Image Credit: Admiral Jota

Popular history holds that text adventures died in the 1980s, but the secret history of interactive fiction is a saga of dedicated scholars toiling away at lovely gems that rarely see light outside the internet’s murky depths. For those willing to explore these highly-personal parser empires and hyperlink metropolises, so long as you can get over reading as gaming, you are in for something special. During the online IF renaissance Lost Pig emerged as a classic, especially well-suited for newcomers.

Lost Pig will have you grinning right off the bat with its ultra-low stakes: you are Grunk, a well-meaning simple-minded orc tasked with recovering a fugitive pig. A few minutes later you’re stuck in the underground micro-kingdom of an alchemist gnome, who thank god, is infinitely patient with Grunk being completely out of his depth.

The emphasis is definitely on puzzles, but the playful tone is what you’ll remember. The game responds to an impressive range of crazy inputs, provides generally fair environmental clues, includes an optional progressive hint system, and feels like it wants you to have a good time even when stumped. I’d score it higher but it’s over all too soon! I wish there’d been a few more chapters and couple more characters to meet.

Score: 5 / 10

–Brian

Lost Pig is written from Grunk’s point of view and fully captures the innocence with which he views the world. The premise is simple: Grunk accidentally left a gate open and a pig escaped from the farm. He must find the pig and return it.

From the beginning, I was worried that Grunk’s simplistic language and habit of referring to himself in the third person would be off-putting, but it was perfect for the light-hearted tone of the game. In one of my favorite lines, Grunk states “Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget” – something I connect with on so many levels. Seeing the world through Grunk’s eyes in Lost Pig was simply charming.

Though the story is far from grand, the puzzles have a level of refinement you wouldn’t necessarily expect. My biggest complaint is that the game is short and I would have loved to see what other antics Grunk and Pig could have gotten up to.

Score: 6 / 10

–Kelley

English Country Tune (2011)

English Country Tune for PC. Image credit gamerinfo.net

Indie puzzlesmith Stephen Lavelle (of Increpare Games) holds the world record for making the most video games. In case you’re curious, 423 at the time I’m writing this review, many using PuzzleScript, a programming language designed expressly for creating Sokobon variants. His masterpiece is Stephen’s Sausage Roll, which I can safely call the best sausage-themed game in the known universe.

English Country Tune isn’t as perfect at Sausage Roll, but it’s a strong runner-up.

In ECT you control a square tile the can flip from surface-to-surface on structures composed of three dimensional blocks. In the early stages you just need to slap spheres into “incubators.” There’s a twist though: the spheres obey a personal gravity dictated by the ground you were on when you last slapped them. If this sounds complicated and a little hard to visualize, be warned: it’s just the first of several clever, but mentally-taxing mechanics to master.

Lavelle rarely provides instructions or hint systems, so expect a steep learning curve early on. You’ll need to break through the initial levels to see just how much depth there is within, but once you get there you’ll find English Country Tune to be a rewarding collection of expert-level spatial puzzles. Just keep in mind this is a purely mental exercise; don’t expect story, character, or fancy graphics.

Score: 7.5 / 10

–Brian

Stealth theme is… pork sausage links! Sidenote: I originally planned to make every trio have a theme, but dear god that was hard to juggle. Some of them were much worse than this, if you can believe it.

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Hollow Knight + Elder Scrolls: Skyrim + Mirror’s Edge

Hollow Knight for the PS4. Image credit: https://gamingbolt.com/

Hollow Knight (2017)

Side-scrolling metroidvanias are my jam, but Hollow Knight made me feel like I’d shown up to the digital equivalent of American Ninja Warrior naked except for a blindfold. It’s a brilliant game that was so hard I was rarely able to enjoy the craftsmanship. And that’s a shame because so much love has been lavished on this idiosyncratic and ever-so intricate insect kingdom.

The art style is like an adorable cartoon illustrated by a depressed Lovecraftian entomologist. The setting is the Hallownest, once a bug-based civilization of cities and gardens, merchants and soldiers, gods and monarchs. Now it’s a ghost town haunted by empty shells, mindless creatures, and forgotten lore.

The few eccentric loners that speckle this empire of underground ruin are precious to the player: brave, curious Quirrel; scholarly, musical Conifer; brash, selfless Cloth; and even Tiso, who never respected me. Hell, even arrogant pipsqueak Zoe the Mighty and the outlandish Dung Defender. I forgave them their creepy foibles and gradually considered them friends, though perhaps just because they were the only things not trying to kill me. Actually, Dung Defender definitely tried to kill me. Zoe, too. But at least they I didn’t have to run fetch quests for every sentient being I encountered; in fact, to these doomed denizens you are just the insignificant NPC encountered on their own respective quests.

The Hallownest is a joy to explore, as it seems like there are endless hand-drawn biomes to discover, full of sweaty-palmed platforming, nightmare critters, glittering crystals, pulsing fungi, thorny vines, poisonous lakes, and buried secrets. The Hallownest is also a royal pain to explore because save points are rare, maps must be earned, everything is lethal, healing can’t be taken for granted, bosses are brutal, plot points are exceedingly obscure, and dying involves a Dark Souls-inspired mechanic that scratched tiny permanent scars into my psyche: you lose all your money unless you can return and fight your ghost to reclaim it. I’m glad I plunged into the dark loamy borrows of Hollow Knight. But I’m also glad to be back above ground again.

Score: 8.5 / 10

–Brian

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for PC. Image credit https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/

I’d never played an Elder Scrolls game before and I was intimidated going in, especially since Skyrim’s reputation was for quantity over quality. I tend to prefer trim, crafted experiences, but it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with Bethesda’s maximalist approach. A huge world beckons to be explored. A population of diverse NPCs make the cities and races and politics feel alive. There are so many sidequests you will literally lose track.

Many dungeons draw from a limited set of palettes that eventually feel samey and even redundant, but it took a long time before I minded because the skill progression system is so incredibly satisfying. You get no XP for killing monsters or completing quests, instead XP comes from using any of 18 skills (from conjuration and lockpicking to archery and smithing) just in the course of playing. Boost enough skills and your character levels up, allowing you to choose from a vast constellation of perks that lead to different play styles.

The 2011 graphics and the tendency for bugginess (again, polish is not the watchword here) are compensated for by the dedicated modding community, who have improved nearly every aspect of the game: bug fixes, water physics, weather phenomena, high-res textures, improved flora, detailed armor, and the all-important hairstyle packs. A mod Kelley and I were particularly interested in, Skyrim Together, allows you to play co-op, but given its shaky state at the time we started, we instead played separate games while chatting over headsets (more on that in Kelley’s review).

Skyrim does have one flaw that the mod community can’t fix: the main story is kind of blah, with an ending that is famously less climatic then some of the optional sidequests. This is a game that is at its best when you are just romping through the hillsides maybe vaguely planning to clear a distant fortress to tick off a dangling quest when you suddenly get attacked by a bear, or notice a tempting bandit camp, or stumble onto an entire forgotten dwarven city.

Score: 9.5 / 10

–Brian

Brian and I started playing Skyrim independently within a few days of each other. This led to one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year, Skyrim-by-phone. Though we were each playing the game ourselves, there was a sense of friendly competition to see who got the first house (him), who killed the first dragon (okay, also him), and who was the first to explore some far-off land (both of us). We commiserated about quests, shared locations of shops, and discussed how our very different styles of play were working for us. We are both extremely pro-exploration and side-quest, but he was a ranged character who relied heavily on bows and attack magic and I played a dark elf who was very in-your-face with her mace.

The regions of Skyrim felt fresh and different from one another and the story wove between them quite well. I often find dragons to be a crutch in fantasy, but even they worked as a major plot device! Until the ending. I have rarely been so let down by how a game chose to end. After tens of hours of build up on the main quest path, you fight the big bad and the game just is done? Brian happened to be over (having already beaten the game) when I finished the last section of the main plot and witnessed my great disappointment. There was no fanfare, no credits, no banner of congratulations, not even a pat-on-the-back from my longsuffering housecarl Lydia – just a portal back to Skyrim and the ability to do more of the seemingly-endless side-quests.

Skyrim tapped into my love of exploring and did so in a way that let me get truly lost in the game. Despite my issues with how the main plot ended, I will definitely play another Elder Scrolls title in the future.

Score: 10 / 10

–Kelley

Mirror’s Edge (2008)

Mirror’s Edge for PC. Image credit trustedreviews.com

I wanted to like Mirror’s Edge so more than I actually did. It’s an original property with a unique approach: first-person parkour. Our verbs are run, jump, slide, and climb instead of the usual shoot, sneak, or talk. The premise is promising: an authoritarian utopia where people live in technological comfort under an iron heel, and those dedicated to resistance opt to communicate via athletically analog couriers instead of telecommunications. The graphics are simplistic but striking: sterile white steel and glass with highlights in a single saturated hue. Objects that can help you traverse appear red as you approach. And the protagonist, the unfortunately named Faith Connors (hey, at least is isn’t Eve Shepherd), is an Asian woman, which shouldn’t be conspicuous, but was refreshing in the gaming ecosystem of 2008 (and, sigh, still today).

However none of this quite delivers in the finished product. The gameplay is often stiff and the routes confusing. Faith can long jump like a beast and has more upper body strength than an Olympic gymnastics team, but she’ll blissfully waltz off a rooftop and die without batting an eye. Rounding corners is her kryptonite. Modern games like Assassin’s Creed and Spiderman have spoiled me by interpreting my laziest key press as a sequence of triple axels, but Faith won’t pull herself up from a ledge grab while pursued by a chopper unless I explicitly tell her it’s time to get a move on. There were a couple chase scenes where Mirror’s Edge lays off the path obfuscation and I finally achieved the balletic flow you’d expect, but for most sequences you’ll replay again and again until you figure out where you’re supposed to shimmy and wall jump.

The graphics get old quick, as there’s very little environmental variety and we spend far too much time in those ubiquitous ventilation ducts that are only human-sized in video games and Die Hard movies.

The plot is told via graphic novel-esque cut scenes that I found pleasingly bright and angular, but it’s just cliché casserole. And, for reasons that escape me, these aren’t even sci-fi clichés! Instead we get served the warmed-over leftovers from some paint-by-numbers cop movie. The glittering metropolis masks a conspiracy just beneath the surface. Your sister is framed for murder. Corrupt politicians and assassins scurry about. Shady business down at the docks! Will someone close to you betray you? Yawn. Even Faith is a bit of a letdown. Her kick-ass look: face tattoo, edgy hair, and functional sportswear is as deep as her personality goes. But at least we don’t have to put up with a love interest.

Score: 5.5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Ape Out + My Time at Portia + Day of the Tentacle

Ape Out for PC; Image Credit: igf.com

Ape Out (2019)

It usually isn’t a good sign when a two word title (a mere six letters) provides the entire plot of a game. Note, too, that the even more apt Ape Escape was already taken. But what Ape Out lacks in literary merit it makes up for in music, art, and a rapturous sense of flow. From a top-down view you control a righteous orange ape, fleeing down a skyscraper, across a dockyard, through a jungle. The art is bold, minimalist; an attempt to make an interactive Saul Bass credit sequence. Each level, usually only a minute or two in length, is a rat’s nest of guarded routes built around key themes, landmarks, and gates, but procedurally assembled afresh each attempt (think Spelunky) to keep you spontaneous.

Everyone you meet will try to shoot you, but you can grab them for a quick bullet shield or just splash them like a burst of paint across the canvas of your egress. Your actions are always synced to the games frenetic percussive jazz soundtrack, arguably the true star of the game. You won’t get new abilities, just new threats in new environments, but the game is short and satisfying enough during its four albums (each its own world) that I never once got bored. In fact, this was my favorite under-5-hour game of 2019.

Score: 8.5 / 10

–Brian

My Time at Portia (2018)

My Time at Portia for PC; Image Credit: https://www.magzter.com/

Have you ever loved one game so much that you tried to find games that were similar? After 100+ hours in the world of Stardew Valley (probably my favorite game), I wanted to try something new that evoked the same feelings of serenity and happiness. In my research, I found My Time at Portia.

At the core, My Time at Portia is a crafting/simulation game. You play a builder who has been given a piece of land outside the town of Portia by your father. Over time, you get to know the townspeople, the resources available in the area, and capabilities of your workshop. As you progress in the game, you unlock new areas, more complex builds, and specialized machinery.

My Time at Portia is a game that requires you to dabble in a little bit of everything: fetch quests, dungeons, mining, relationship building, and, of course, crafting. While there is a plot – you are working to be the highest rated builder in the town with a few other curveballs – the progression of the game is quest-driven. Most building contracts must be fulfilled within a certain number of days and there are relationship-related consequences if you do not manage to complete them. Because of this, the time management element of the game is crucial.

Much like in real life, building each piece of a larger construct takes time and each machine can only work on one thing until it is complete. This means that a more complex building recipe may require several days of in-game hours and careful queueing to hit a deadline. This could have been painful, but the game was always very clear how long each component would take to build, which resources were needed, and the machines required. I quite enjoyed the puzzle of prioritization that occurred when trying to work on multiple contracts at once!

My Time at Portia lacked a little for me in the relationship building portion of the game. Over time, people you do quests for regard you more favorably. This means they’re more likely to drop by with some free stuff or ask you to “play” or “date.” The playing options tended to be afterthought minigames that involved seesaws, shooting ghosts, or drawing pictures in the sand. Dates were similar, but involved more talking, giving gifts, and eating together. I honestly didn’t see the point. (Sounds about right. –Brian). Sure, it’s good to have a system where you can spend more time with NPCs, but it never really came together for me.

That said, Portia did have a very strong take on a classic minigame. Once a week, you could stop by the guildhall to help judge objects. They would display one perfectly-made item and another with flaws. You could rotate the items in any direction to find all of the flaws (usually three) before a timer ran out. The rotation aspect made this a much more interesting version of spot-the-difference as you could only see some issues from certain angles. It was also a great way to get items and experience to increase your builder rating.

In the end, My Time at Portia was not my “the next Stardew Valley“, but it was a pleasant way to relax with a variant.

Rating: 7/10

-Kelley

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (1993)

Day of the Tentacle Remastered for PC; Image Credit: Steam Community

During the height of the adventure game craze, LucasArts reigned supreme. They built their brand on zany humor, off-kilter logic, and a compassionate freedom from fail-states. Growing up I was a big fan of Grim Fandango, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and even The Dig. So I was excited to put on my retro-hat and give Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle a try, since I’d missed that one in my youth.

DotT stars three misfits: conflict-averse nerd Bernard, heavy-metal groupie Hoagie, and crazy med-student Laverne. They’re stranded in separate time periods of the same mansion while trying to help their mad scientist friend stop a sentient purple tentacle from world domination. Does that sound promising? Would it hold up?

Allowing for the clunky interface and dated pointing-and-clicking, the puzzles are some of the best in the genre. The humor, however, is a mixed bag. I found the villain to be the only successful character, with the rest being one-dimensional and either too cheesy or too gross. The jokes are too indiscriminate and the laughs too insistent. A lot of them don’t land or get in the way of furthering the story and progressing the game. I liked trying to solve DotT’s creative obstacles, but immersing in the game felt like visiting a carnival funhouse that was presumably more fun at a younger age and in a bygone era.

Score: 6 / 10

–Brian

This game was a struggle for me. From the get-go, I found the characters repulsive and the humor immature. Were some of the puzzles amusing? Yes – giving joke teeth to George Washington made me smile slightly. Overall, though, I had a difficult time seeing Laverne, Bernard, and Hoagie as anything more than lame caricatures who got up to some pretty stupid antics. Long Live Purple Tentacle.

Score: 3 / 10

–Kelley

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Mass Effect 2 + Tacoma + The Longest Five Minutes

Mass Effect 2 for PC; Image Credit: hddmag.com

Mass Effect 2 (2010)

The Mass Effect universe has so much lore that it helps to spend some time reading the in-game encyclopedia. Yup, this is the type of game with an in-game encyclopedia! To boil it down: a couple hundred years in the future humanity is one of several races in an alien UN called the Citadel Council, under threat from a machine race. In the first game Commander Shephard delayed an invasion initiated by an AI hive mind, the Geth. A few years have passed and you died, but a privately-funded, ethically-dubious “human supremacist” organization called Cerebus resurrects you to investigate a string of outer colonies going incommunicado.

Mass Effect plays as a third-person cover shooter with a 3-person squad. You control Commander Shepard (who’s gender, appearance, and class are yours to decide) and select any two of your AI-managed crew members to accompany you on missions. As they gain experience you can improve their weapon proficiencies, special abilities, and even psychic powers. Beyond regular health, enemies have several potential defenses (armor, shields, and barriers), encouraging you to cycle through ammunition types in a rock-paper-scissors manner.

The bulk of the story is travelling the galaxy to assemble your crew, many of whom are former friends from the original Mass Effect who moved on after your death. Each has a required mission for recruitment and an optional one that develops backstory and solidifies loyalty. The diverse personalities and alien cultures, strong writing, top-notch voice acting (Martin Sheen, Yvonne Strahovski, Seth Green, Tricia Helfer, and the ubiquitous Jennifer Hale, among others) make Mass Effect’s characters among the best in gaming.

Developer Bioware improved on their previous games. Over the original Mass Effect: exploration is streamlined, combat is more intense, worlds are more artisanal. Over KOTOR: less pausing during combat, simplified inventory, better squad AI, deemphasized stats, greyer morality. The paragon/renegade system feels like a reskin of the Star Wars light-side/dark-side dynamic, but at least in ME2 these aren’t treated as mutually exclusive. There are many positive legacies too: character-driven world-building, epic scope, and player choice.

Do I have any complaints about Mass Effect 2? Very few. Scanning planets for resources is tedious. And while the game offers gender and romantic partner variants (including asexual and lesbian options), they backed out a planned gay male path, a cowardly decision even in 2010.

Score: 9 / 10

–Brian

Tacoma (2017)

Tacoma for PC; Image Credit: New Game Network

Tacoma developer Fullbright is best known for their 2013 surprise hit: Gone Home. This earlier title is the story of a young woman who finds her family strangely absent from home after returning from a gap year in the mid-1990s and must piece together what transpired. The game’s nonlinear approach, minimal interactivity, and LGBT themes helped expand the possibilities of game-based storytelling and widened the target audience for indie games. The question on everyone’s mind pending the release of Tacoma, was whether Fullbright could work the same magic again.

The answer is: not quite. To their credit, Fullbright didn’t just repeat Gone Home. They chose a radically different setting (a distant space station), a larger cast (the crew and ship AI), and a broader scope (a disaster aftermath investigation involving not just personal relationships, but corporate conspiracies). In many ways the core gameplay is similar: an observational mystery in an abandoned enclosed environment. The coolest addition is a new tool: the ability to playback camera-recorded snippets of the previous few days in virtual reality. This allows you to watch slices of what happened while moving about, following holograms of each crew member and even accessing their communications.

Tacoma’s length and pacing make for a short, leisurely jaunt that will likely still appeal to Gone Home fans, without quite scratching the same itch. The framing mystery is too predictable. There’s a nice subversion of some classical AI tropes, but otherwise the story is not very memorable. And though I appreciate the inclusivity of the ensemble, the characters rarely came through as nuanced, living, breathing people. My favorite moments are still untangling the minutiae of their flirtations and frictions, personal lives and career ambitions, but the protagonist’s lack of a personal stake created a certain emotional distance.

I played Tacoma with Kelley and our larger “Gnifty” gaming group. The spaceship is divided into linear bite-sized sections (Administration, Medical, Engineering) that lend themselves to trading off the controller. The emphasis on story and the consistent pacing generally worked for a group experience, but there was less excitement and tension compared to similar events that we’ve hosted.

Bonus points for the cat’s hologram being semi-hidden in many scenes.

Score: 5.5 / 10

–Brian

Tacoma is more like experiencing a story than playing a game. You control Amy, an investigator sent by mega-conglomerate Ventrius to determine what happened to the crew of the Tacoma station. Throughout the course of the game, the fact that you are technically playing a character is secondary. Your role is to fast forward and rewind time to see pivotal conversations between crewmembers or personal moments in their lives. You encounter these moments out of chronological order. As you continue playing, you start to piece together the overall timeline and sequence of events in a way that really ties the story together.

Here’s my big problem with Tacoma – if I’m an investigator who has been sent to figure out what happened on a space station, wouldn’t you think that the company would send me in with a map? Why am I just bumbling around in an environment with limited oxygen without knowing where and what all of the rooms are? It seems like a poor use of resources.

Score: 7 / 10

–Kelley

The Longest Five Minutes (2018)

The Longest Five Minutes for Nintendo Switch; Image Credit: NIS America

The tone of an RPG varies drastically based on whether the game is 1) taking itself seriously or 2) making fun of/paying homage to other RPGs. The Longest Five Minutes falls into the latter category.

In the game, you play a hero called… wait for it… Flash Back, who is locked in a final boss battle with an evil Demon King. Something has happened and you have lost all of your memories. You can’t remember your hometown, your special super-awesome fighting moves, or even the names of your party members! The entire game is set in the final five minutes of this battle, with you slowly gaining more knowledge about who you are and why you are in a fight for your life. You gain this understanding through, you guessed it, flashing back to key moments where you learned something important about yourself or others.

The Longest Five Minutes does an excellent job giving a wink-and-a-nod to the RPGs that came before it, while trying to take a different angle. Unfortunately, the humor didn’t really work for me and I thought the game play was quickly repetitive. Though some of the jokes were amusing, I didn’t find the kernel of well-rounded uniqueness I was looking for in this game with such an intriguing premise.

Score: 4 / 10

–Kelley

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

Baba Is You + Batman: Arkham Asylum + Three Fourths Home

Baba is You for PC; Image Credit: Pocket Gamer

Baba Is You (2019)

Kelley’s go-to phrase for Baba Is You is “brain-melty,” usually after multi-hour battles of wit with the titular sheep left us mentally exhausted. We’ve tried to explain the game to several people, and I never quite do it justice: initially Baba has to push around rocks to get to a flag. So far, so good. The twist is that the words defining the rules (e.g. “Rock Is Push,” “Flag Is Win,” and of course “Baba Is You”) can also be pushed around and thus rearranged into new rules. Early puzzles require you to make “Rock Is Win” or even “Flag Is You.” As you play, the vocabulary expands, the possibilities explode, and the difficulty skyrockets. You start to rewire your thinking in a way that is confounding, exhilarating, and sometimes… brain-melty. The intellectual thrill when the penny finally drops is perpetually rewarding.

The level quality is defined by precision, creativity, and elegance. The level quantity is astoundingly generous, yet without getting repetitive or lazy. Finnish creator Hempuli is brilliant at switching between introducing new ideas, letting you explore variants, and then flipping your world upside down again. There’s also secrets within secrets, so you’ll want to revisit areas.

The art style, conversely, looks like a child’s refrigerator drawing. That isn’t a knock. It’s cute and clean; no unnecessary complexity (there is plenty already).

Puzzle games are my favorite genre and I play a lot of them so take heed when I say this might be the best!

Score: 10 / 10

–Brian

Brain-melting, but amazing. The best puzzle game I’ve played.

Score: 10 / 10

–Kelley

Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009)

Arkham Asylum for PC; Image Credit: MobyGames

As alluded to in my Spider-Man review, I have been a fan of superheroes for as long as I can remember. Near the top of my list of favorites is that surly, but somehow still lovable, Caped Crusader.

I missed the boat on playing any of the Arkham games when they were released, so I decided to begin with the first in the series – Asylum. I had started the game two years ago before getting stuck at a challenging stealth/bad-guy-takedown section. I didn’t remember any of the story or the controls, so I overwrote my old file. Turns out, I had gotten about three-quarters of the way through in my partial playthrough, so my decision to start over ended up being particularly painful and definitely colored my overall rating.

You are Batman. You are at Arkham Asylum to see that Joker is properly incarcerated after his latest escapade. You suspect that he allowed himself to be captured and your spidey-sense (*ahem* bat-sense) is tingling. Rightfully so! Joker has come up with a dastardly scheme that frees the prisoners of Arkham Asylum and those from Blackgate Prison who are temporarily being held there. You are trapped, with only your wits, your cool bat-toys, and your flurry of punches to see you through to safety. Oh, and Jim Gordon is also in trouble, because of course.

Being Batman is fun. While there are things about the game that I found repetitive and annoying, I enjoyed running around and confronting the villains I remember from watching cartoons as a kid. I felt a sense of accomplishment defeating Bane – not because Bane was particularly difficult, but because he was Bane.

To me, the combat system of chaining hits to get bigger bonuses became tedious and a bit button-mash-y. I found the reliance of the game on fighting token henchmen, in skirmishes, or even big-name baddies to be repetitive. Some difficulty and strategy did change when the bad guys got guns or cattle prods, but it was a lot of the same over and over again.

While I generally didn’t mind the stealth sections, there was one that got me closer to throwing my controller than I ever have before. In this area, you have to take out a bunch of armed henchmen one-by-one without using explosive-rigged gargoyles for cover. I spent hours in a cycle of trying to figure out the right strategy, dying, and getting taunted by Joker on the reload screen. (Shout out to Mark Hamil for getting under my skin with his amazing vocal performance.) Incidentally, it was this exact section that made me quit the game the first time around so I was not going to let it defeat me again. I felt a great sense of relief when I finally got past this area and into new parts of the game. I began to remember that being Batman is fun.

Score: 7 / 10

–Kelley

Three Fourths Home (2015)

Three Fourths Home for PC; Image credit: Original developer

The lightning flashes and illuminates a ghostly phalanx of corn stalks. The windshield wipers flick back and forth. You still have a lot of driving left. Three Fourths Home feels like a 2-hour black-and-white slice-of-life film, and I mean that in a good way.

You play as Kelly (no relation to Kelley), a 20-something returning home to Nebraska after a series of disappointments. You are driving through a Midwestern-style thunderstorm and talking on the phone with your family. You unfold, and to some extent control, your backstory through this conversation. Whichever answers you give, a few deft lines of dialog later and you feel like you know her mother, father, and brother. They inquire, but don’t push. They want to comfort, but don’t know how. They worry about you. In arguably the climax, your younger brother, an intelligent but difficult kid somewhere on the autistic spectrum, tells you a long story he wrote. And post-game, there is an epilogue which fills in a few gaps and provides closure.

As a piece of writing and even as a series of minimalist visual scenes, Three Fourths Homes is pretty good. As interactive fiction, I’m on the fence. The driving mechanic involves holding down a single key for about two hours. This is, I suppose, a way to communicate the tedium and discomfort of a long drive. I’d have preferred either no driving mechanic or something more fully-fledged. Contending with traffic might not be in the right spirit, but perhaps the occasional curve or a few stops (a gas station, a flat tire, a diner, etc.).

Score: 5 / 10

–Brian

For more in this series see 2019 Trios.

2019 Trios: Reviews

The following are sets of three reviews for games Kelley and I played in 2019 (the original release dates vary):