#project noba24

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Spark the Electric Jester 3 (Project Noba24)

I guess third time's the charm. And what a charm it is!

I don't mean to talk about yakkocmn twice in 24 hours, but I feel I should mention him again here because he's the one who first told me about this game, in a video he made devoted solely to this game. I, a fool, played the first two games, having learned nothing from Baldur's Gate 3.

This game is Very Good at what it wants to be. Playing the first two games and watching this developer flex his creative muscles better with every installment was an unexpected treat, considering where he started and ending. This game almost* renders Spark the Electric Jester 2 obsolete, and for reasons I'll get into below it kinda actually does. But that's light gameplay spoilers, so it'll be in its own section. Regardless, this game pulled a trick on me, as well: it made me re-evaluate the vision of Spark 2.

I wasn't quite on-board with the combat system. I thought it was fine in the previous game and tedious in the first game, but with the tweaks put in place (and the little extra tutorials to get you on-boarded with what this game's going to be) it turned out to be an engaging system built into the platformer. In fact, while the two controls don't have a great deal of overlap, it turns out there's a lot more use for the platforming controls during combat than I would have expected: the dash and jump surprisingly kept me alive through to the (very fun!) final boss.

The story is also about what you'd expect from these games, but with some unexpected twists. In particular, the final level is a grueling marathon; most levels take 2-5 minutes to beat but this level takes about 30 minutes to get through, but the reward is a story reveal that made my jaw drop. I won't spoil exactly what happens but it's like settling in for a Punch and Judy show only to have your chair spun around and a therapist starts asking you uncomfortably-knowledgeable questions.

This game made me see the developer's vision. There's a clear understanding of both sets of mechanics that makes this game a delight to play and a challenge to master. Any Sonic fans would find themselves seeing what Sonic Adventure 2 is in our memories, and at times it feels like it's pulled from an alternate universe where Sega won the 3D game wars and this is the result. I cannot recommend this game less highly; it's a truly wonderful achievement, and deserves to be experienced.

Time played: 6.6 hours (beat the main game, not going for 100% completion)

Next game: Pizza Tower

Spoilers below.

*There is a post-game mode you can play, which I dabbled with but didn't get into, including a 100-floor arena (charmingly played in an endless fall, so the floors are negative numbers) and all the levels from Spark the Electric Jester 2, so if you like you can take this game's more-polished state and replay the original levels. At the game's price I consider it worth it.

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DNF: Pizza Tower (Project NoBa24)

When I started this project, I knew there would almost certainly be a game I wouldn't finish. Completion I would almost always skip over, but finishing? I thought I'd be able to do that. Alas.

Pizza Tower was released almost two years ago to almost-instantaneous acclaim, or at least it was nowhere on my radar before everyone was talking about it and also making thirst art of Peppino. I heard a lot of claims of Wario Land similarity thrown around, but as I've not played those games I can't say if the comparison is justified; I'm also not likely to check those out at this time.

Like Cuphead this game has a distinctive art style, though using simple high-contrast digital art rather than Fleischer-style cartoons. I was reminded fondly of my days editing sprites on Smackjeeves (before that site went away) and examining the color work was a fun nostalgia trip. But like Cuphead, Pizza Tower is willing to lock all the art behind a difficulty gate, a choice I find artistically commendable but frustrating in this specific context.

There's a lot to love about this game: the plot is absolutely simple (Peppino's restaurant needs money and so he ascends a magical tower to seek its fortune) so that you can focus on the gameplay and sprite work. Peppino is an astonishingly-dynamic and fleshed-out character for a guy who barely speaks, having poses and animations for many specific and varied contexts. He's an anxious mess, giving Luigi a run for his money as the most fearful Italian video game character, but also capable of locking in and getting things done, though no less fearfully than before. There's a sense he's hanging on by a thread but determined enough for that to be all he needs. And as for the gameplay, the moves you can do are incredibly varied, starting with jump and grab and from there to dash, climb, long jump, dive, rush, uppercut and, later, fire a shotgun. There are so many options for you to blitz your way through the levels and arrive at your goal.

And that's where my problems start. Pizza Tower is a different beast than something like Cuphead or Super Mario Bros. Wonder, both games I 100% completed, where you have much reduced controls in what you can do. Cuphead is just shooting, jumping and dashing, and Wonder reduces that to sprinting and jumping. There are further complexities in both, of course, but Pizza Tower starts from a complicated base and expands from there. I'm reminded of Pseudoregalia in a lot of ways, which also boasts a complicated moveset, but Pizza Tower is completely comfortable leaving you in the dark and having to train in the tutorial until you figure something out.

For indeed Pizza Tower is uncompromising in its design. The game is busy and brightly-colored, fast-paced and busy in a way that makes playing exhausting. I had finished the first four floors before I realized that I wasn't having fun playing them, which completely dispelled the illusion that the stress it was giving me was something I enjoyed. I also beat two of the three levels on the final floor, but only stopped at WAR! because I found it too stressful. From there I just watched a playthrough and considered myself content, for even if I had enjoyed the gameplay there was one thing I resolutely didn't enjoy.

I do not enjoy the boss battles in this game. The complicated control scheme is finicky and hard to use in the constrained space of the boss arenas, and the boss battles are memorable and unforgiving. They get more health than you, they can't be hurt except at key moments and they will recover their health for a second wind that annoys the hell out of me even in writing. I didn't enjoy any of the boss battles I beat, and when I looked up the final boss I decided it wasn't something I was going to be invested in beating.

I want to remind anyone reading this that the game is still fantastic. All the mechanics I talked about are definitely someone's cup of tea, and the game is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for a damned good reason. But someone is not everyone, and for every rule there's an exception. I wanted to like this game, and I tried my best to enjoy the experience, but at the end of the day I just have to understand it's not for me. Maybe I'll pick it up in the future, but not today.

Time played: 7.1 hours

Next game: Balatro

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Mouthwashing (Project NoBa24)

Look, I get it: when I got this game I should've checked the tags. Psychological Horror and Horror are right there on the front page. But still: Jesus fucking Christ.

The plot starts simple: a crew working for a space hauling company crashes and, due to desperation, opens their cargo to see if it's useful. They find millions of bottles of mouthwash. Things spiral from there.

The game has an excellent art style, decidedly retro (also tagged on the front page!) with blocky, geometric characters and layouts, that appears simple in coloring but actually hides a lot of technical wizardry unnder the hood. It's also not much of a game; there's a few puzzles and moments here and there that remind you you're using a keyboard or controller, but for the most part the story and gameplay are mostly segmented. I wouldn't say this is a drawback, necessarily, considering the tightly-paced story laid out before you. It's intriguing, dark and sticky, with an ending that feels cathartic and gross.

I was also dealing with food poisoning while I played this game, but due to a loosening in my stomach I can also say this game is pants-shittingly terrifying. Three times my stomach dropped out from under me, and I had to play a game whilst also wishing to be somewhere else. I'm not going back for achievements, I don't care that much.

I am not sure how to review this game; it's terrifying, horrible, and creepy. And when I say creepy, I mean the greater horrors are not the parts that scared me, but the undertones of the story, the little things in the environment that tell you what this place is like. The environmental storytelling surpasses that provided by Bethesda with their Fallout games, and they needed no skeletons to do so.

I can definitely see the quality in this game. The developers put their all into it, and kept track of details I wouldn't even think to look for. It's an astoundingly-strong work of art for the minimal space it takes up. On the other hand: I was unnerved the entire time, and deathly scared at the worst moments. If that sounds like fun to you, have a blast! I'm just gonna take some antacids.

Time played: 4.1 hours

Next game: Spark the Electric Jester 3

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Balatro (Project NoBa24)

I'm not going to be done with this game any time soon, but I'm writing this review because it's gripping me by the throat and forcing me to watch the big number go up.

I'm not the first to describe this poker roguelike, using jokers to modify how many points you get atop other cards. It's fiendishly well-designed, giving just enough for you to overextend into failure, and the visuals and music combine so that you will happily watch time fly by just to reach for that next round.

This is not a game, it's a trap, a gilded cage of diamonds to store your heart while your productivity is buried with a spade. You'll have fun doing it, I expect; won't you join the club?

Time (for now): 5.5 hours

The next game is ostensibly Citizen Sleeper but we'll see how soon I get to that!

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Children of the Sun (Project NoBa24)

This feels almost like a spiritual antithesis of a previous game, En Garde! Whereas that was focused solely on a swashbuckling sword experience, this one is focused on psychic gun combat. And where En Garde! is charming and lighthearted even in the most dramatic moments, Children of the Sun is decidedly punk and grimy in its aesthetic.

After a cult tracks down and kills a former member, his daughter, one of the cult's successes when it came to awakening psychic powers, will track them down and kill them all with a single bullet at a time. And oh, how glorious this is!

The game feels chiefly like a puzzle, where your implement is a single bullet that must criss-cross the entire level and take out each target. In a way, this game feels a lot like Superhot, but from a colder, more analytical framework. You're not a trapped animal, you are the hunter, and these cultists are nothing more than a problem to solve.

I would also like to praise this game's aesthetics, both visually and musically. Cutscenes are in rough, stylized comic-book-style panels that look like the feeling of getting dirt under your fingernails in all the best ways, and during the levels the game changes colors so there's only your targets and the obstacles in the way. It's such a powerful statement to be able o make something like this - something explicitly designed to facilitate gameplay - into a core design flourish.

And if I may make a tangent here, but I must speak to the gameplay. It is buttery smooth, somehow making it so you can contain all of your controls to a mouse, without any keyboard (I would not recommend using a controller on this one; it's a high-precision game and a controller is both slow and imprecise) inputs to get confused by. This is why I made a favorable comparison to En Garde!: both games are trying to get as little between you and the events on-screen as possible so that you focus almost entirely on the gameplay.

But to return to aesthetics: the music! My God, the music! I'm not yakkocmn (who may have recommended it to me via video; I'm not certain where I discovered this game or why it was on my wishlist) and I suck at dissecting it, but the music is distinctly it's own thing, written by Aiden Baker whose genre is defined on his website as "ambient, experimental and slowcore". All I know is the electric guitars were staggeringly overpowering, where I can respect what the game is doing without necessarily liking it myself.

But it's not all perfect. In particular I take issue with some levels. In particular, these is the minigame maze level and the car level. For spoilers' sake I won't get too into the details, but for the former it comes at a weird moment and doesn't really add anything to the story that I could tell, and for the latter it required such finicky, precise shooting that I found it harder than the final level, which introduced a mechanic!

I certainly enjoyed my experience with this game, all the same. It lays out what it's about at the beginning, tells you how to go about doing cool shit and then lets you do cool shit. It's got a rough exterior that demonstrates its unwillingness to compromise or go half-baked; the developers stuck to their guns (ha) and delivered a short, intense story that gets the drop on you. I would recommend this game to puzzle gamers (there's no combat except in endless mode Nightmare Paralysis, unlocked after beating the game) and people who like to set high scores. Alas, I am not great at this game so I was consistently in place #4000 or greater, but the game has a scoring system that I can see lighting a fire in the heart of anyone who likes to see the number go up.

As for me? Once is enough. I don't think I'll play this game but it's such a singular experience that I want to introduce all my friends to it. And you should too, dammit!

Time spent: 3.8 hours

Next game: Mouthwashing. I've heard things.

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Slay the Princess (Project NoBa24)

Every so often, I am given the task of playing a game completely blind, the surprise of the game being so integral that being spoiled is to never play the game as intended. I have leaned on this method ever since Undertale punched me in the throat with its message, and believed people when they've told me to do so. Slay the Princess was one such game, and I have finished it.

It's... weird.

I believe you should play it blind, so let me just lay out some thoughts without even touching the description of the game. It's a visual novel; there's no gameplay beyond making choices, and every line is voice-acted by Nichole Goodnight and Jonathan Sims, who both do a phenomenal job in a variety of roles. I was very confused but there was a moment where I got it, and a moment where I stopped getting it. The ambiguity is purposefully-built into the game to the point I'm going to scroll its TV Tropes page to try to figure out what the fuck it all means. I may even go back and attempt different paths just to see more of the game, but I will probably also use a guide.

It's definitely a horror game, and definitely a visual novel. I'm not really a fan of both, and even though I can see it firing on all cylinders there's a disconnect between my enjoyment and my appreciation. I would heartily recommend this blind to people who enjoy psychological or cosmic horror, and offer a short description to people who are on the fence.

It's definitely not my favorite game, but it's one I'm going to think about a lot.

Time played: 2.5 hours

Next game: Children of the Sun

EDIT: I ended up playing for three more hours after I made this review, desperate to see just about everything this game had for me. Not like I wanted to, like I needed to; like an itch in my mind I couldn't scratch. I just finished clocking in at 7 hours total, and I've seen everything I wanted to.

I don't think I'll play this game again, but be forewarned it creates an obsessive need in you when you play it. To see everything it has to offer, even if it'll drive you mad.

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Aero GPX (Project NoBa24)

I haven't played any F-Zero games, before you ask, but this racing game is very good*.

I was alerted to its existence by noted F-Zero fan and Normal Adult Man Luke Westaway, who played it on his YouTube channel. I was interested, so I put it on the list. It's in Early Access right now, so only about fifteen of the planned thirty characters are accessible or even playable, but the content available is quite extensive. Notably multiplayer isn't available yet, but has a planned release.

It's a lot of fun. The mechanics are engaging and fast-paced, the controls responsive yet finicky, a battle against the environment, your own machine and the other racers that goes by in a flash. It's helped by the fact that races are around three minutes long, so you can run a race a dozen times before an hour has passed.

It's also not newbie-friendly. I'm not familiar with all the mechanics of F-Zero even if I have seen it played a few times, and their implementation here is only half-explained in the tutorial. I have no grasp of how combat works and I don't understand sliding half the time.

But for all that the game is difficult, it's the kind of difficulty where I want to jump back in even still to improve my times, figure things out and come out ahead. If the game were fully-released I suspect this review would have taken much longer to come out, but as it stands I'm happy with what I got.

If you like racing games, give this one a try. Even if you don't I'd recommend it, just for the novelty of how racing games could work.

And the music...! God, don't get me started on the music. It feels like an expansion on the themes from Sonic Adventure 2 in all the best ways.

Time (on record): 7.5 hours.

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En Garde! (Project NoBa24)

This is a tough one for me.

En Garde! if you can't tell by the artwork and the title, this is a game that's all about that swashbuckling lifestyle. It's the closest thing I can imagine to being Zorro, swinging around a city waving your sword and flashing a grin like the scoundrel you are. It's a game that doesn't take itself too seriously. There are four principle characters, three with names, and one is called the Count-Duke (a title which does actually exist in Spanish history, surprisingly-enough) and he is el villano malo. You must discover what he's up to and defeat him!... or something to that effect. The story isn't important as much as the gameplay.

And what gameplay! The swords are swishing, the swashes are buckling, the gays are gaying and the game is almost laser-focused on giving you the Zorro experience.

It also ramps up the difficulty tremendously in the last quarter of the game.

I can take a hard game, on occasion. I've beaten Cuphead on Expert difficulty, the main game and the DLC. I've beaten Hollow Knight and Jedi Survivor if I may give more of my gaming cred, but I'm variable when it comes to difficulty. If a game gives me something really interesting in exchange for difficulty, I can take it. Otherwise, not so much.

This game's very focused on the central experience, and while the atmosphere of the game doesn't take itself seriously the mechanics certainly do. It gives you everything you need to succeed in a fight where you're outnumbered, but that focus can be to its detriment. I almost wish the game was longer, not because I want more of it (I'm on the fence for that) but because a longer game could raise the difficulty more gradually, more carefully. That's a lot to ask of any studio, especially for one as small as this one, so we must deal with the game as it exists.

And for that: I was shocked by the difficulty spike by the end of the game. The first three levels were fun, the last one being the first that gets tough, but beatable casually. It's only for the final level that it ramps up so considerable that I was struck by Gamer Rage™ while attempting the bosses again and again. The second boss in the last level, in particular, really got to me.

But I did manage to beat it, eventually. And when it was done, I didn't have the relief and exaltation that most gamers feel in those moments, I just felt a cold finality. I was so annoyed by the difficulty spike that I almost uninstalled the game right then and there, wrote this review and have done with it.

I wanted to keep playing, however, to see Arena mode. For atop the story mode with its three difficulties (I played on medium; I don't want to see this game on hard!) there's a gauntlet where you have to fight a number of rounds (3, 4, 5 and 6 for each respective raise in difficulty) without dying and then defeat a boss at the end. I was able to clear the first three with the skills I had with this game, but the last proved too difficult for me. I came and wrote this review right here, and I'm trying not to uninstall the game in frustration and judge it on its own merits.

At the end of the day: know what you're getting into. I had no idea the silly Zorro-esque game would become such a THING to beat. That expectation drove me to enjoy the game a fair bit less.

Undeniably, the game is good, well-crafted and loved. It's charming and colorful and fun, and we need more like it. But it's also unpolished and unapologetic, and it's likely to get under your skin like a well-placed barb. You have to be in the right mood for it, and as for me, it left me stressed and unnerved, and I had dreams about that laughing pirate woman. If this strikes your fancy, I can't imagine you won't come away having had a great time.

Total play time: 4.8 hours.

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Viewfinder (Project NoBa24)

I love me a good, weird puzzle game. Ever since I played Portal and it blew my tits clean off I've searched out that mind-bending experience. I've played quite a few games that got close, but didn't quite scratch that itch, even if they were good or even great. And I'm pleased to announce that Viewfinder, also, gets close.

The story goes: you are working on a project to prevent climatological catastrophe. As part of this project, you start digging through an old virtual reality a number of scientists made for a weather-controlling machine, and start digging around to see if you can make heads or tails of what they were working on.

I kinda wish it didn't have a story and focused mostly on the puzzles. What I got was fun and fine, but even the most challenging levels didn't ultimately have a lot to offer me. There's a ton of concepts used throughout on their own, but none of them were combined into those hair-pulling, crazy brain-teasers that make finding a solution satisfying.

The story, also, didn't quite fit the mechanics of the game. I'm almost certain they came up with the mechanics first and then wrote a story. There's a brief message about affecting reality being harder than the virtual reality, but it feels half-assed. I dunno, I didn't really care and wasn't invested.

Do I recommend it? Sure. It's a fun puzzle game with a cute cat. But I don't think I'll be revisiting in the future.

Total play time: 5.3 hours.

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Project NoBa24 (November Backlog 2024)

The concept of a backlog fascinates me. I grew up rather poor and couldn't afford to get a game I wouldn't play all the way through, so I made sure to carefully check ratings before I bought something.

This carefulness has followed me into adulthood, where I find it difficult to buy a game without playing it. I have three games I haven't sorted in my Steam library, two of them I've already played and one I bought for less than $5; the rest have all been played and opinions formed.

But watching Daryl Talks Games inspires me to actually finish things. Not under a time crunch, of course, but to let myself try things out and pass them by if I'm not feeling them.

So: spurred on by having a little money saved up, the Steam sale and getting a gift card, I've made a purchase of 20 games. Short, long, cheap, expensive (the most expensive is $30, don't set your hopes too high) good or my taste, I'm going to try to play all of them. It won't be fast, but I hope to eventually get a take on all 20 as time goes by, especially if a hidden gem takes the cake.

I'm calling it "Project NoBa24", which seems to be a unique string of characters according to Google: November Backlog '24. I'll be writing a brief (maybe not-so-brief?) review here once I've decided to stop or beaten this game. A wide range of genres and YouTubers have influenced the decision, so I'll give some credit to them as well.

Up first: Viewfinder, a recommendation from Second Wind and Yahtzee and the newly-independent Frost. Looks to be my kind of puzzle game.