Final Fantasy Theathythm Final Bar Line Published by Square Enix Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: A hefty does of nostalgia, if you’ve got the gil for the whole thing.
It is a fact commonly held among gamers that Final Fantasy has amazing music. The latest release celebrating that musical legacy, Final Fantasy Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, carries over much of the features from the original game on the 3DS, and doesn’t make many improvements, although it does refocus on button presses rather than the original game’s touch screen controls. What it does offer is a huge amount of songs. The base game features classic music from all fifteen mainline entries, along with a host of characters from each game. For the first time includes music from numerous spinoff games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, and even the obscure Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, a long-forgotten side entry originally created to try and boost the image of Japanese-style console RPGs in the west. There’s a lot in the base package, but SquareEnix wouldn’t be selling our nostalgia back to us if they weren’t able to sweeten the pot. The day-one digital deluxe package comes with a number of extra tracks, many of which feel essential, but probably required additional licensing. These include the main themes for some of the games, such as VIII’s “Eyes on Me” and IX’s “Melodies of Life.” A host of DLC tracks are also on offer, themed by additional Squaresoft hits such as the Saga series, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, and the Mana series. The gameplay is easy to pick up but difficult to master. Basic tracks are fairly accessible, while Expert and Ultimate difficulties will prove far more taxing. Rhythm game aficionados will be able to sink their teeth into the harder difficulties, while casual players just looking to relive their gaming memories aren’t stuck with their favorite tracks hidden behind a barrier. There’s also a slow drip of unlocking characters, leveling them up, and completing quests in each song to keep players invested. Theatrhythm is well-designed to give the player what they want, whether that is a quick hit of nostalgia or a crunchy and challenging rhythm experience to lose themselves in. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm Final Bar Line’s visual design isn’t quite as impressive as the audio and gameplay. The somewhat creepy marionette designs of the characters return, and layouts for Field Mode are often recycled, with a few standout unique ones. If you put some time into the game, you’ll see the same field, town, and castle over and over again. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is a great little package for die-hard Final Fantasy fans and rhythm game aficionados. But be prepared to pony up the gil if you want to hear everything the game has to offer.
F-Zero 99Published by NintendoPlayed on Nintendo Switch The Skinny: A drop of water in the Sand Ocean
The original F-Zero was a launch title for the Super Famicom / Super Nintendo, showing off the system’s flashy Mode 7 graphics and faster processing. Over the subsequent console generations a few sequels and media tie-ins followed, but the series always seemed to be in the shadow of Nintendo’s more popular racing franchise, Mario Kart. While series characters and vehicles have made appearances in other games, Nintendo hasn’t released a new F-Zero game in nearly twenty years. Until earlier this month, when Nintendo announced F-Zero 99 as a part of the most recent Nintendo Direct. Like previous titles Tetris 99 and Pacman 99, the game is a reimagining of a retro classic as a multiplayer battle royale. And the chaotic, fast-paced gameplay makes F-Zero a perfect addition to the franchise. Unfortunately, I’m terrible at it.Each race opens with an expanded starting area to accommodate all 99 players. Only the original four vehicles are currently available, but players are able to unlock new color schemes and customize them as they gain rank and complete challenges. Hopefully, they will release more content to add the roster and tracks from later games in the future. Starting a race is lighting fast, possibly due to high interest at launch. All players vote on a track from the original game, and can get racing in seconds. This streamlining is a nice feature, as F-Zero 99 can be absolutely brutal. The game encourages aggressive driving by adding a spin-attack which charges over time, and changing the boost so that it depletes the life meter. These options create an engaging risk and reward mechanic that rewards players not just for using them, but for using them at the correct time. Hitting opponents causes them to drop little golden pellets of energy that charge a separate meter. When filled, it replaces the boost with a second, higher track that allows players to get ahead of the competition and avoid obstacles. In addition to individual races, the game has a Grand Prix mode where players race in predetermined cups requiring tickets, and Splatoon-like team battles. These extra modes are on a timer, and aren’t always available. It’s frustrating when the race you want to do isn’t available, but it also keeps the game balanced and prevents any one player from camping at the top of the leaderboards. While F-Zero 99 is an entertaining curiosity, using slightly updated graphics from the original, It mostly just whets my appetite for a fully-featured F-Zero game, which hasn’t appeared in Nintendo’s catalog since the days of the Game Boy Advance. F-Zero 99 is a fresh take on a classic that Nintendo seems to have all but abandoned since the days of the Game Boy Advance. It’s a tasty little snack, but here’s hoping that it is a hint of a more satisfying entree on the horizon.
Bad Writer Developed & Published by Riddle Fox Games Available for PC and Nintendo Switch Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: The Waiting Game (abbreviated) Created by one-man studio Riddle Fox Games, Bad Writer is a short game about short stories. This bite-sized pixelated story puts players in the shoes of Emily, an unemployed writer who sets out to follow her dreams of becoming a published author. Players will have a month to guide the character on the path to traditional publication. If she doesn’t get some sales, or becomes too depressed, she’ll go back to her old job and give up on her dreams forever.This simple, charming game only takes about a half an hour from start to finish and is laid out like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. The only stat players will have to manage is Emily’s happiness, which goes up when she talks to her wife or cat, or succeeds in her goals. It goes down when she gets a rejection or doesn’t write. If the gauge reaches zero, it’s game over.While simple and short, Bad Writer is very faithful to the life of a full-time author, and realistic in its depiction of the actual success rate of traditional submissions, even if it fast forwards through the actual writing and editing parts. It’s a wonderful, chill little gem to play if you want to learn what the writing life is like, or just want to procrastinate for an hour from your own writing.
Marvel Snap Developed By Second Dinner Published By Nuverse Played on Android OS
The Skinny: Marvel – The Gathering Marvel Snap is a mobile collectable card game based on the Marvel comics, movies, and TV shows. Players build decks of twelve cards of heroes and villains from across the Marvel Universe, and attempt to hold up to three locations, much like the table-top card game Smash Up. Players use either their cards raw strength or tricky abilities to gain the upper hand at each location. There is a surprising amount of strategy and depth involved. Over six rounds, players gain energy points to play cards, increasing from a base of one. One cost cards are weaker but often more versatile than expensive cards that can only be played later. Cards also have other various abilities, and these are clever and tie into the powers of each of the cards. For example, Colossus, being tough and invulnerable, can’t have his power reduced by enemy cards or from location effects. The assassin Electra can remove a one-cost card from the same location. There is a nice big pool of cards to draw from, each with different kinds of effects. The combat took some time to grow on me, but now that I have gotten the hang of it, matches are fast and addictive. Its the sort of game you can easily stay up too late playing just one more round. Marvel Snap also maintains good card balance and combats ‘rich kid syndrome.’ Because the cards are in sets released as the player upgrade their decks, new players are encouraged to try out different combinations, and receive their rewards randomly. While there is a ‘Premium tier’ that grants certain exclusive cards and does feel a bit heavy-handed, players do not buy cards, just variant illustrations and other cosmetic rewards. And part of the fun is chasing that next card you need to make your deck stronger. And the art is the star of the show. Since this is a online only game, the art is upgraded in ways that only a video game can produce, breaking their card boarders and animating. There’s even a nice 3D effect. Every card has unique animations when played as well. Ant-Man shrinks when you place him on the board and Cyclops is laid down with an accompanying optic blast. As cards are ‘upgraded,’ which is the heart of the advancement mechanic, the central illustrations break the borders of their cards, get small animations, and even upgraded logos. A variety of variant cards exist as well for each character. Some recreate iconic designs or character moments, while others are more whimsical, such as pixelated or ‘chili’ variants. Marvel Snap is an intuitive and addictive battling card game available now on IOS and Android app stores.
Cult of the Lamb Developed by Massive Monster Published by Devolver Digital Played on Nintendo Swtich
The Skinny: This is one animal you don’t want to cross.
With the rise in popularity of roguelikes, horror games, and cute animal life sims, it was only a matter of time before a developer combined all three. Much like SNES classic Actraiser, Cult of the Lamb alternates between simulation and action gameplay and does an excellent job of using the two modes to create a satisfying gameplay loop. The player is thrust into the role of The Lamb, sacrificed by The Bishops of the Old Faith, four dark gods who rule over a sinister forest full of adorable cartoon animals, like a theocratic Animal Crossing. But death is only the beginning, as you are chosen by their imprisoned sibling, The One Who Waits, to build a cult, slay the four bishops, and free him. Gameplay consists of two phases. In roguelike action sequences, players attack the lairs of the four bishops fighting enemies, rescuing prisoners, and gaining supplies. The rewards feed into a management sections, in which you grow your cult in order to use their faith to empower your supernatural abilities in combat. Players can also explore the world, completing side quests and playing mini-games. The gameplay loop is challenging and satisfying, as you must balance your follower’ needs and venture out in the dark to find your enemies. If you neglect one, the other will suffer. Players need to go out to gain gold and other supplies, but if you neglect your cult, they will abandon you and you won’t have the required population levels to unlock later areas or the upgrades needed for end-game challenges. The game’s art reminds me of ‘Happy Tree Friends,’ Taking a light, cartoonish style and mixing it with some seriously messed up stuff. The cartoony nature sands the edges off of some of the more despicable actions you are able to take as cult leader. The game gives you a lot of options. Will you sacrifice your followers for a quicker boost in power or nurture them in order to gain more resources? It’s all fun and games until you summon that tentacle from the farthest planes of reality to crush their little bones. Combat is challenging and intuitive and will be familiar to anyone who has played games like Hades or The Binding of Isaac. While both parts of the game are fun and feed into each other well, both feel a little shallower than if the game were more tightly focused. Cult of the Lamb is available for Steam along with major console eShops.
Unpacking Developed by Witchbeam Published by Humble Games Played on PC as a part of Xbox Game Pass
The Skinny – A relaxing game about stressful life events.
Unpacking is a relaxing, low-stress pixel art game about a stressful real-world activity: Moving. Each level consists of a number of boxes to unpack in increasingly large spaces. You start in a child’s bedroom and eventually have to unpack a whole house’s worth of possessions. Almost Tetris-like, the challenge is in finding the right place for every object, and making them fit in a limited space.Each object is a detailed isometric pixel sprite, which lends the game a bright and charming air. But the sound design is where the game really shines. There are unique, realistic sound effects for every individual item in the game. Placing a mug on a counter and opening a drawer sounds incredible in high-def. Which feels odd to say in a game review, but here we are. Sure, you don’t punch aliens or soar through the air on an airship, but did you hear the way that towel sounds when you fold it and put it on a shelf? The sound effect for when you fold up an empty cardboard box is the best dopamine hit I’ve gotten in a while from a game.I guess it’s a sign that I’m growing up. Which is fitting, as this is very much a game about transitioning through life. You follow a woman through multiple moves, from her first bedroom to her first college dorm, and beyond. Each level is framed as a page in a photo album, and completing the level gives you a line of text from the unnamed character as she thinks about that day.The objects are all suitably varied based on the rooms, and while it is a challenge to make them all fit, there isn’t really a score or a timer to beat. Certain combinations or placement of objects reward you with stickers which double as achievements, but there’s not much else other than that. There are some lovely hints of storytelling through the objects themselves, though. We get hints of who this person is, and what their life is like what her hobbies are, and how her life changes from move to move over the years. Crayons give way to fancy pens and to a drawing tablet as she grows up and pursues an art career. A cane and a wrist brace appear among the objects as time goes by. A photograph of two people has a pin placed through the one figure’s face following a breakup.Unpacking is a delightful and relaxing puzzle experience. It is available for PC and major consoles.
The Solitaire Conspiracy: A Mike Bithell Short Developed by Bithell Games Published by Ant Workshop Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: A tense, techno-espionage thrill built from a deck of cards. Mike Bithell has some brilliant thoughts on game design and post/transhumanism. He’s also known for his tight, compact game design, compressing his point-of-view into tiny games. He made his mark with indie storytelling platformer Thomas Was Alone and cemented it with the robot detective game Subsurface Circular. His recent project The Solitaire Conspiracy mixes intense spy thriller action with an unlikely gameplay mechanic: a game of solitaire. Players fill the shoes of Spymaster, an analyst candidate tapped to save a shadowy spy network when a supervillain locks them out of their coordination software, C.A.R.D.S. Working with the last remaining analyst, it’s your job to coordinate scattered spy crews and get everything up and running, but in the world of spycraft, nobody can be trusted. As you play through missions and rank up, you gain access to colorful crews of operatives, each with their own suit and special abilities. Face cards represent not only the faction but individual members of the team, and placing active cards uses their team power. This can be things like shuffling a stack or redistributing a suit or moving a card of a specific value or suit around. They are powerful twists on the game, but in fitting the theme, they can hinder you as much as help. The UX is where the game really shines, with the board appearing as a virtual space lit in the slick blacks and scintillating neon of a cyberpunk wonderland. The design made it a bit difficult to read at times, especially playing in handheld mode on the Switch. Fortunately, there is a zoom feature that makes everything a bit bigger and easier to see. The cool sci-fi colors, along with the pounding, synth-filled soundtrack, lends a tension to the game that traditional solitaire lacks. Missions add both flavor and drama to the gameplay. I frequently found myself playing just one more mission to reach the next rank and advance the story, or get the report on a thrilling mission. The Solitaire Conspiracy is a masterclass in design and proves that engaging storytelling and slick aesthetics can spice up even the most mundane gameplay mechanics. Like most Bithell games, there are only a few hours of the main story here, but they’re a thrill ride. The Solitaire Conspiracy is available for download from Steam, the Nintendo eShop, and the Xbox game store.
Eastward Developed by Pixpil Published by Chucklefish Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: An on-rails sci-fi story presented with a gorgeous pixelated aesthetic Eastward is a beautifully rendered action RPG in pixelated graphics that doesn’t quite follow through on what it promises but is still a lot of fun. The game follows John and Sam, two refugees from a post-apocalyptic underground village as they travel by train on a quest to save the world and uncover the secrets of Sam’s burgeoning psychic powers. As they steam along, they fight their way through a series of linear, puzzle-filled dungeons and meet a huge cast of charming and wacky characters, but the chapter-based structure and frantic pace made the game feel a bit cramped and rushed. The game is broken into chapters, with the duo arriving in a new town, meeting the locals, and solving some dungeons before the plot pushes them back aboard their train to a new locale. The towns are probably the game’s best feature, with creatively designed and gorgeously rendered locations like a city built into the side of a dam and a film studio on rails filled with uplifted apes. Each is depicted with HD pixels in loving detail. The world is filled with faded advertisements and overgrown ruins. It is a testament to environmental design. I just wish I got to spend more time in each area before being pushed ahead. Towns are crammed full of mini-games, sidequests, and unique NPCs to talk to, and I always felt like I didn’t get enough time before being pushed ahead. The one mini-game that is always available is Earthborn, an in-world game that is a mix of turn-based RPG and rogue-like presented in a Gameboy aesthetic. It’s charming, and intersects with the story in interesting ways, but is ridiculously difficult. Dungeons are more linear than the sprawling towns and feature a mix of puzzle and combat. John has a variety of weapons that he gains over the adventure, starting with his trusty melee frying pan. Sam wields psychic energy to stun enemies or heal, but she can’t attack directly. Combat involves constantly switching between the two to keep hordes of enemies back in order to stay alive. Combat, which uses a Zelda-like formula, is clever, but fighting doesn’t feel as good as the puzzles. Eastward is a joy to look at and listen to, even if the gameplay isn’t quite as fun as the production. Still, it is well worth your time. You can pick up a digital copy via Steam or the Nintendo Switch eShop.
Wordle Created by Josh Wardle https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
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The Skinny: You probably already played it today.
By this point, Wordle is a game that needs no introduction. But I am still coming across friends and relations puzzled by the towers of green and yellow blocks on their feeds. So I will make a brief introduction. Wordle began in 2019 as a sort of gift by Josh Wardle for his partner. Wardle, the designer of The Button and Place for Reddit, is known for his parasocial games. But Wordle is almost paradoxically enticing in its simplicity. There are no loot boxes to grind for. Nothing to subscribe to, no gatcha mechanic. Just a new five-letter word every day, and six guesses. The game didn’t even allow sharing until the feature was implemented towards the end of last year. But perhaps it is its simplicity that draws attention in 2022. It’s an echo of a simpler electronic age when the idea of meeting people in faraway places through a screen seemed like magic. In its way, Wordle is punk rock. It doesn’t need to be downloaded from an app store (although certainly, clones have popped up on all of them in the past few weeks.) It doesn’t have microtransactions and ads for the game don’t play 24/7 on YouTube. It’s just a quick little word game you can play every day and share your results. Wordle is a shared experience, and I think that’s key to its success. Having only one word a day, and knowing that everybody else posting their score had the same word, creates a feeling of connection, communication, and competition. That word took you six tries? You had that many correct letters on the first guess? The content is sharable and gets people talking. I like to look at people’s posted patterns and try and guess what words they use. Other users place a great value in getting the word in as few guesses as possible. Wordle is as much a game of deduction as wordplay. With the New York Times’ Announcement that they have purchased Wordle in a seven-figure deal, the future of this little-game-that-could is uncertain. For now, the game is still hosted at the same site and is still free to play. But only time will tell if the paper’s acquisition will mark an end to the fad or elevate Wordle to the same level of cultural cachet as the crossword.
The Skinny: A delightful little adventure about photography and community Toem is a little gem of an indie adventure game about photography and perspective. This comforting little puzzle box is full of puzzles to solve, characters to help, and tiny locations to visit. Created by Swedish indie studio Something We Made, Toem only takes a few hours to play but is all about relaxation and comfort. Designed to be played in short bursts, it is the perfect game to wind down with at the end of the day or de-stress to over a coffee break as you take missions tracking down singing goats and finding the perfect spot to photograph a forest hotel. The game sets you in the shoes of a young photographer on an adventure to find the Toem, with no further explanation given. The tools at your disposal are your trusty camera and a very unusual public transit system that rewards public service with free rides. The game is divided into five zones, and at the start of each one, you’re given a public service card. As you explore a forest, a city, a seaside resort, and a mountain, you are given puzzles to solve in the form of requests of each area’s inhabitants. These can range from the simple, such as taking a photo of a requested subject, to the obtuse, such as recovering lost items or even restoring a power plant. After each puzzle, you are rewarded with a stamp on your card. Collect the requisite number of stamps, and you’re free to move along to the next area. But completionists will still have plenty of challenges to complete, animals to photograph, and hidden secrets to uncover beyond the game’s forgiving requirements. With one notable exception, Toem is presented in a charming black and white art style, and the small, isometric levels have a diorama-like quality. The characters are quirky, and a few of the puzzles are fiendishly clever, but I never felt stuck. Toem is a short and cozy experience that is perfect for unwinding by a roaring fire or relaxing with a hot cup of cocoa. If you’re looking for something to chill with at the end of the year, give this game a shot. Toem is available on PC from Steam and Epic, Nintendo Switch, and PS5.
Hugh J. O'Donnell 