Month: October 2020

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

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I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I know, I’m a soulless heathen who hates joy. I almost find it hard to understand how this became one of Nintendo’s highest selling games of all time. I could see a niche appeal for the Animal Crossing franchise, but to me this game was a never-ending cascade of boring and tedious tasks. I can totally understand it being a relaxing escape for many people, and I think the perfect storm of circumstances allowed Animal Crossing: New Horizons to rise to the top of the sales charts.

Animal Crossing games are what are known as life sims. You play as a villager in a town full of wacky animal characters, interacting with them and completing various tasks. Things like chopping wood, fishing, catching bugs, picking up weeds, and decorating with furniture that you collect. It’s not a question that Animal Crossing: New Horizons massively expanded upon the series, adding many new features that I’m sure will become the standard for the franchise.

In previous Animal Crossing titles, the player would move to already existing town, full of buildings and residents. Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes the sim aspect to the extreme, as it places the player on a deserted island with nothing but a tent and a couple of villagers. You take advantage of the resources available by chopping trees and mining rocks. Eventually, you will be able to get some serious infrastructure going. Houses for villagers, a town shop, a museum, a community center, bridges, paths, and a myriad of furniture to decorate your town. You get to place every component, eventually you can even terraform the landscape to fully tailor your island to your liking.

This extreme level of customization is further expanded upon by the new mechanic introduced in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, crafting. This brilliant addition allows players to create furniture as long as they have the know-how and the materials. In previous games, if you wanted a piece of furniture you would need to pray that it would show up in the shop so you could buy it. Being able to craft furniture on the spot is such a massive improvement from the previous formula as it gives you a goal to work towards if you want to make some specific item.

Another new idea is the implementation of “Nook Miles”. These serve as a point system in which you can earn points by completing tasks. Most of the time, these tasks are already things that you are going to be doing anyway like talking to villagers, chopping trees, catching fish, etc. With these points, you can purchase unique items, cloths, or recipes from a terminal. You can even acquire a travel ticket that lets you briefly visit a randomly generated island from which you can gather resources or recruit a new villager.

Probably the most important addition to the series is online play. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can visit your friends’ islands and show off you own. It can be a bit cumbersome to visit a friend, but being able to hangout with your friends is definitely a welcome feature. You can even access their shop and see what items are up for sale. Seeing how other people decorated their island, and taking inspiration to work on your own is the perfect addition to the series.   

Ultimately, Animal Crossing: New Horizons serves as a relaxing way to kill time. There’s no threat, end goal, or rush to do anything. The game actually encourages you to only play a little bit at a time. It gives you daily tasks like talking to your villagers or simply logging on every day. Moreover, many things that happen in the game take real time to come to fruition. Buildings take days to be completed, fruit only grow every few days, fish and bug species are exclusive to certain months and time of day. It’s not meant to be a game that you sit down and grind away at for hours at a time until you “beat” it. There really is no goal. You make of it whatever you want.

Despite all of this, I became mind-numbingly bored of this game long before I could accomplish much of anything. I always “complete” a game before reviewing it, but in a never-ending game like this I at least try to experience most of the content. But for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I gave up after a couple dozen hour spread across a few weeks. I initially was enticed to come back every day by the carrot-on-a-stick that the game waves in front of the player. Come back tomorrow and the museum will be built, the day after that your house will be complete, the day after that a new part of the island opens, the day after that a new villager arrives, etc. This combined with the tempting daily tasks were a clever trick to get players to become invested in the game, but nevertheless I didn’t keep playing for long.

The problem is this: the game is just boring. Every single mechanic in the game is tedium, rather than being engaging gameplay. Walking up to a tree and bonking it three times is simply not enjoyable. Catching fish and bugs is a little better as they require an aspect of timing, but I still wouldn’t classify those activities as fun. The game is a life sim, so interacting with the villagers should be a crucial part of the game, but to me they felt more like decorations than actual residents on your island. They repeat the same dialogue over and over, walking around the island in circles. I just don’t get it. What exactly is there to actually do in this game? And this is coming from a guy who absolutely adores the hiking and pathfinding of Death Stranding.

I suppose the main appeal of the game is to decorate your island however you want. At first, I spent a considerable amount of time just crafting decorations and arranging them how I wanted. I would get a brief moment of satisfaction before realizing that the tiny section of the island I just decorated took me hours of grinding materials just to adorn how I wanted. At that point, I realized that Animal Crossing: New Horizons wasn’t worth my time. Perhaps I just didn’t connect with the game’s core concepts, but I also feel like the problems don’t stop there.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a quality of life and user experience nightmare. There is an overabundance of repetitive and useless textboxes that you can’t skip. Want to donate a creature to the museum? Thirty seconds of the same exact dialogue every time. Want to sell some items? Dialogue. Want to fly to an island? Get ready to click through a minute of text. It doesn’t seem like much, but this time adds up fast. The inventory is pitifully small, and you are going to need to make frequent trips to the shop or storage to clear it out. You can’t craft things in bulk, so if you want to make ten copies of a certain item, be prepared to sit there for 5 minutes mashing the A button. Moreover, tools break fairly often for some bizarre reason. I can’t surmise a game design reason for this inconvenience, it seems like this happens just to frustrate the player and waste their time.

It seems like this might be the perfect family game, if everyone could make their own island and visit each other it would be an amazing experience for any group of people sharing a console. Yet it seems out of sheer greed the designers made it so there could only be one island per console. If you want another island you have to go buy another $300 Nintendo Switch. Well okay, at least every one can share that one island, right? Nope. Only the player who made it can actively make changes or do anything of value. Any other player is merely a spectator. These decisions are nothing but anti-consumer tactics. What could have been a game that entire families can enjoy together will instead lead to arguments over who gets to make the island.

 Perhaps it is out of the scope of a standard review, but I want to touch on why I believe this game rapidly became one of the best-selling games of all time. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20th, 2020, at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were stuck inside, with a lot of time to kill, a lot of stress, and not much human contact. As it turns out, you can easily sink tons of hours into this game, it’s very relaxing and stress free, and it allows you to visit your friend’s islands and hang out. The pandemic created an environment in which Animal Crossing could appeal to the locked down populace. The game would have been successful regardless seeing as it was a long-awaited title that improved upon a popular franchise. But I wonder if the pandemic did play a major role in launching the game’s widespread popularity and made it such a viral sensation.

Overall, I came the conclusion that the Animal Crossing series is just not for me. I prefer games with more concrete goals, or at least some sort of objective. Stardew Valley has a similar vibe to Animal Crossing, yet it does a far better job at having an engaging gameplay loop. Everything in Animal Crossing: New Horizons felt monotonous and anything worthwhile just took too long. It is for these reasons that I give Animal Crossing: New Horizons a 5/10. It obviously clicked better for many others, but to me it was just a boring time sink absent of any payoff. I can see it having a niche appeal for people who just want a relaxing game where you don’t have to worry about anything.

Link’s Awakening (2019)

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Remakes are always tough to review, considering that they can be approached in many different manners. Some remakes are a complete reimagining of the original, others try to fix glaring issues, and some are just a modernization. Link’s Awakening fits into the final category. A few quality of life changes, an updated art style, and a couple new features bring the 1991 Gameboy game into the modern era. The question is: did they do enough? There are some aspects of the game that are too faithful to a nearly 30-year old handheld title that was heavily limited by its hardware.

The remake of this classic title may be a tad too faithful to its origins. To be fair there were some much needed improvements, but I’d say the game is a slightly modernized clone of the original. The biggest, and most important change, was an update to how the inventory works. In the original game, Link could only equip two items at a time, including his sword and shield. Since you virtually always needed your sword equipped, you constantly had to swap around the second slot depending on which item you needed. This was a giant inconvenience that has been mostly eliminated in this remake.

In the new Link’s Awakening the sword, shield, Power Bracelet, and Pegasus Boots are all permanently equipped once you obtain them. There is much less swapping around items and fiddling around in menus. Still, there could have been more “default” items mapped to buttons. Roc’s Feather for instance was one of my most used items, meaning it had to take up an item slot of most of the game. While the new permanently equipped items are an improvement, it could’ve been taken a step further.

Other than the way items are handled, the only other major change to the game was its visuals. The new art style is a bit odd, and I’m not a huge fan of it. While it does look alright, it makes everything look like a doll or a toy. To me, The Legend of Zelda games embody adventure, and playing as a shiny plastic toy just does not match the vibe of an epic quest. One other thing that was added to the new version of the game was Dampe’s shack. This feature lets the player build their own dungeons using pre-built rooms. It’s not really worth even talking about this feature, as it’s so restrictive and useless that it may as well not exist.

As far as The Legend of Zelda games go, Link’s Awakening is one of the more bizarre entries. There are classic Super Mario enemies like Goombas, there are rarely seen The Legend of Zelda items like Roc’s Feather, and there are plenty of self-aware jokes. It is somewhat jarring to have a The Legend of Zelda game make jokes that reference the fact that is a game. There is an explanation for these strange occurrences, but Link’s Awakening has a distinctly surreal vibe. Link’s Awakening is filled with meta humor, which definitely makes it one of the more unique The Legend of Zelda games.

The most appealing aspect of Link’s Awakening to me was how dense the world is. The map itself is actually pretty tiny, it only takes a couple of minutes to traverse from one end to the other. Despite this, it was designed in such a way that the world has plenty of distinct zones and areas that are jam packed with things to discover. Whenever I acquired a new item, the first thing I would do is search around the map for where I might be able to utilize it to uncover any secrets. Every screen has something hiding in it, and Link’s Awakening does a great job at encouraging the player to keep exploring.

The reason why the game does such a great job at prompting exploration is because it lacksany semblance of handholding. There is a helpful owl who may give the player the idea of where they need to go, but figuring out how to get there is a whole other beast. It really is up to the player to scour the map for any sign of how to progress. For the most part, I enjoyed being left to discover things for myself. That being said, there can be cryptic sections of the game that seem like a relic of the past. The infamous trading quest to acquire the boomerang is one of the best examples of this. You repeatedly trade one item for another in a lengthy sequence, not knowing who wants your current item. It amounts to having to wander around and talk to a bunch of NPCs, praying that they will trade for whatever item you currently have.

Plenty of enemies are designed in a similar manner, in that they require a specific method to defeat them and you must keep guessing until you figure that method out. The worst example of this was the Armos Knight boss. I spent a good chunk of time hitting this boss with all my different items and attacks to figure out how to damage it. As it turns out, you need to hit the boss at a very specific time, in a very specific spot, with a very specific attack. I usually try not to complain about isolated incidents, but this example it felt like something was very wrong. There was really no indication at all of the required timing, weak point, and required weapon.  

An important aspect of almost any The Legend of Zelda game are its dungeons. The dungeon design of Link’s Awakening is pretty basic, which was disappointing to me. None of them were particularly bad or frustrating, just boring. The only dungeon that stood out was the Eagle’s Tower, as that had an interesting theme and central puzzle idea. Every other dungeon just reused the same basic formula of hitting switches and gathering keys. Moreover, the boss design was fairly forgettable as well. This is potentially because the bosses were tremendously easy to defeat.

Overall, I think Link’s Awakening suffers from being a nearly 30-year old Gameboy game. A shocking revelation, I know. But I am somewhat disappointed that the developers did not really take the opportunity to modernize Link’s Awakening. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fun game, but you can definitely tell that is a relic from a bygone era. It is for these reasons that I give Link’s Awakening a 7/10. A respectable piece of The Legend of Zelda history, but it’s not going to impress anybody in the modern day.   

ibb & obb (2013)

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True coop games are hard to come by. Many titles shoehorn in a coop experience, but rarely are games obviously and intentionally designed around having multiple players. ibb & obb is a game that must be played with two players, meaning that everything in the game was designed with that in mind. I thought I was going to play a simple and cutesy puzzle-platformer with my friend, and ibb & obb certainly started out that way.

In ibb & obb you play as two little blobs, unsurprisingly named ibb and obb. These little guys are pretty unremarkable, the only thing they can do is jump. Each level has a mix of platforming and puzzle challenges blocking the way forward. Some levels make use of new mechanics that change the landscape of the stage. You and your partner must assist and cooperate with each other, one player cannot simple carry the other. There are certain obstacles that require ibb, others that require obb. Moreover, both players need to complete the aforementioned challenges before moving on. Meaning one player completing a trick series of jumps is simply not enough.

The puzzles of ibb & obb generally utilize some augmentation of gravity. Whether it be reversed gravity, or using bouncy pads to store momentum and bounce higher, you are going to have to get used to a variety of new gimmicks that change the way the game plays. Most of these mechanics are welcome additions, as they can add fun little twists to the more traditional platforming puzzles. The game starts remarkably relaxed, there are few enemies, the jumps are forgiving, and the puzzles are simple. But as you progress through this short adventure, the levels build on each other and become increasingly difficult.

My friend and I began the game with the intention of finding all of the collectibles. Since the game was easy enough, we wanted to challenge ourselves by hunting down the shiny little orbs in every level. We quickly gave up on that goal once the levels started to become sadistic. Just beating each stage became challenging enough. What started as a chill and relaxing platformer suddenly became brutally difficult. The puzzles often required finnicky jumps and obtuse maneuvers. Many times, we would ask ourselves if what were doing was even the intended solution because it was so precise and time-consuming to pull off. But the more aggravating part of ibb & obb was when the platforming sections began to ramp up in difficulty.

A key aspect of the game is that when one player dies, you both die. You both need to pull off a platforming challenge simultaneously. This transforms any moderately difficult obstacle into something far more insidious. Using basic probability, let’s say there is a section that you can conquer one in every five attempts. When both partners need to complete that section in the same attempt, now you only have a one in twenty-five chance of success. You become significantly more unlikely to succeed when both players are required to complete the challenge on the same attempt.

This is an issue that is ingrained in the way the game was designed. The whole game is built around the fact that if one player dies, both players die. You rely on each other, so this mechanic cannot be simply stripped away without fundamentally changing the game. If I were to suggest a fix, it would be to keep the level design on the easier side. Difficulty quickly compounds when both players need to succeed at the same time. I think ibb & obb would have served better as a relaxing adventure through and through. Instead, it lures you with some calm and simple stages, then proceeds to ramp up the difficulty exponentially. 

Overall, I’m not sure that I can fully recommend ibb & obb. I enjoy the aesthetic of the game, and can definitely get behind a coop puzzle-platformer. I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of the game, but my friend and I grew frustrated with it quickly. By the time our journey came to an end, we were more than ready to move on, never looking back to collect whatever secrets lay hidden in each stage. Even as a fan of difficult games, I think having to rely on both players to succeed at the same time is a recipe for irritation. We had some fun moments with the ibb & obb, but ultimately it does not join the short list of “great coop experiences”.

Outer Wilds (2019)

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It’s rare that I get to play a game that is like nothing I’ve ever played before. Some games use innovative or unique ideas, but usually follow a previously established formula. Outer Wilds is a game that I can say is genuinely a special experience. It is the best candidate in the argument video games as an art form, and I hope that everybody gets to play and enjoy it as much as I did. Outer Wilds is a sci-fi tale filled with mystery, discovery, existential-dread, and hope. There is no violence or conflict, just a lone alien exploring their solar system. If you want to play this game, and I highly recommend you do, please do not read any further and go play it for yourself. I avoid discussing spoilers, but this truly is a game that should be experienced with no prior knowledge.

The premise of Outer Wilds is similar to that of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the world as you know it is destroyed in some unstoppable cosmic calamity. In Outer Wilds, this equates to a 22-minute loop that resets whenever the player dies. At the end of the loop, the star in center of the solar system collapses and goes supernova. For some mysterious reason, the player character retains all their knowledge of the previous loops, but everyone around them seems blissfully unaware of the impending doom.

You play as a young alien, destined to explore the planets of the solar system. You fly a rinky-dink spacecraft around the void of space, examining and gathering knowledge of an ancient alien race that once inhabited the solar system. Perhaps, by piecing together any clues and text that you find, you may be able to uncover the secrets of the solar system. This is no ordinary solar system after all. It’s filled with incredibly interesting planets and other… things. The Hourglass Twins for instance are two tiny planets that orbit around each other. The gravity between the two shifts sand back and forth, revealing structures as time passes. Brittle Hollow on the other hand is a shell of a planet held together by a black hole in its core. Every location in the game has some intriguing feature about it, which all become essential to unveiling the cosmic mystery ahead of you.

As I mentioned previously, there is no combat or violence in Outer Wilds. You simply travel around the solar system, gathering information left by the alien race which came before you. The scale of the game is tiny, making it easy to get around quickly within the 22-minute time limit. Knowledge is progress. There are no levels or experience or any tangible form of progression. Instead, the knowledge gained is used to unlock and explore new areas. It is almost a sort of puzzle game in this sense. The alien texts that you read will give you hints and subtly guide you on where to go next. It’s reminiscent of a treasure hunt where one clue leads to the next.

Part of the brilliance of Outer Wilds lies in how smooth this treasure hunt of knowledge was. You could start on any planet, gather some information, and that would lead you to another planet or location. Combining some clues may lead to another important site. Luckily the game keeps track of all the information you find in the ship log. It outlines everything you find in a concise manner, and links together certain components. It even lets you know if you have missed information in an area that you explored. I never got the feeling of not knowing where to go, there was always something obvious to explore and discover.

The idea of cosmic horror is poorly represented in most media. It is the existential anxiety that accompanies the knowledge that life itself is exceedingly fragile when faced with the uncontrollable, unknowable, and unfathomable dangers of the universe. We don’t know what’s out in space. We barely even know what’s on our own planet. I am far more terrified when learning about false vacuums, gamma ray bursts, or black holes then I am of traditional horror monsters. Humanity doesn’t know much about these phenomena, but we know enough that space is ruthless and there is nothing we can do about it. Humanity could blink out of existence in an instant, and we wouldn’t know it was coming and there would be no way to prevent it. No piece of media captures this feeling better than Outer Wilds.

I was genuinely terrified when facing down the blackhole in the center of Brittle Hollow. What would happen if I fell in? Equally as anxiety inducing was the hopelessness when I crashed my ship and was launched into the void of space. The feeling of vulnerability and powerlessness pervades Outer Wilds. No matter what you do, the star explodes every 22 minutes, but you continue on anyway. Hoping to somehow defeat inevitability. Despite Outer Wilds triggering my existential dread, I came away from the game uplifted and hopeful. I won’t spoil the ending, but I was satisfied by the conclusion. All the secrets and knowledge you learn throughout the game culminates in one final loop, in which the fate of the universe becomes apparent. It may be melancholic, but it was equally peaceful and reassuring.

My solitary issue with Outer Wilds was with its controls. Getting used to the controls, flying the spacecraft in particular, has a bit of a learning curve. There were countless times that I flung myself into the star while trying to land on the innermost planets. Not to mention that the various celestial bodies have their own gravitational pull. Getting used to different gravity on each planet can be jarring. Luckily Outer Wilds is not a platformer, so it’s not like you need to make precise jumps or maneuvers very often. Nevertheless, there were a few instances where I was mildly irritated by how difficult it was to safely land my spacecraft.

Outer Wilds has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time. Exploration is underutilized in most games, and this game does it better than anything I’ve played before. This is a game like no other, and it captures feelings that are rarely explored in media. I wish I could hop back into my tiny wooden spaceship and experience Outer Wilds for the first time again. It is for these reasons that I give Outer Wilds a 10/10. It may not be like any game that you’ve played before, but Outer Wilds is a quintessential work of science-fiction and gaming.