#tumblr now autosuggests the 'vexx' tag for me

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in January 2025

Over quarantine I got used to the release drought, so now even relatively slow months feel like a constant deluge of new games to try. I bought six games on release this month, which is especially dire when I’m trying to catch up on my backlog even a little bit before Monster Hunter dropkicks my free time out a window.

Batman: Arkham Knight – After tearing through the two Arkham games I’d played on PS3 I started the one I’d never got around to and then almost immediately fell off it. Gone is the methodical pacing of the environments and the weighty momentum of Batman’s movement. Gone is the structure that’s equal parts Metroid Prime and Metal Gear Solid. Gone is the feeling like I’m playing as Batman. Instead I’m ‘driving’ the Batmobile around narrow streets and slamming into walls, before going into combat that’s overcomplicated the rock-solid formula of the first two games in favor of something that’s clearly been stretched to fit the other playable characters. I do need to retroactively reward this “worst car in a game about how cool and fun to drive your car is” from the previous title holder, Mad Max 2015.

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story™ - I’m one of the few people who goes to bat for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, so not even League of Legends was going to stop me from getting Airship Syndicate’s next game. However, it was going to make me twiddle my thumbs about playing it for two solid years. The game’s fine. I have no fondness or affinity for any of these characters, the setting is rote, the mechanics are simple, it’s all competent parts and reasonable polish. I still really like the overcharge system of using your basic abilities to build temporary mana and fuel your stronger abilities without leading to attrition. Unfortunately by the endgame I had a setup loop of 3 turns that could then chain indefinitely and kill mindlessly but required more fidelity than was offered by the autofight system.

Picross e8 – I beat Picross 3D: Round 2 and needed something else to hit buttons in during long meetings. It’s picross. I’m glad it has a third option that’s neither blank nor marked, but I really wish there was an undo function for when I accidentally wipe out a row and forget what was in it.

Hyper Light Breaker – Through Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, Heart Machine has earned an immediate purchase from me of anything they choose to release. This game profoundly called that loyalty into question. It is not merely undercooked, though it certainly is an early access action roguelite with limited combat, shallow combat, and atrocious balance. It also carries forward absolutely nothing of what was beautiful about their other games. The randomized environments have none of the quiet majesty of HLD’s labyrinths. The movement has none of the grace or poetry evoked in Solar Ash. I wanted The Pathless with a bit more combat and better map design. I got Risk of Rain 2 circa 2017. At least one of the first patches rebalanced the health packs.

Heroes of Hammerwatch II – I play a lot of co-op games, and ones with more than a few hours of juice or that aren’t leaning overly hard on “fun with friends” vacuous sandboxes are exceedingly rare. Even rarer are games that are robust and interesting in their own right. I got 100 hours out of the first game, putting it into the top 25 non-idle games I’ve played on the platform. I don’t think this one is going to quite hit that mark, but it’s a game I loved with a lot more polish. Sadly some of that polish comes at the expense of letting the roguelite elements really hit critical mass in absurd ways, and the isometric roguelite has come a long way since 2019 (to say nothing of the Survivors subgenre), but honestly this gets two thumbs up from me for having the confidence to actually release completed rather than trudge in early access for eons like all of its cohorts.

The Roottrees Are Dead – Putting this here is somewhat disingenuous because I played the tutorial for 45 minutes and then set the game down. I really don’t want this to be like Obra Dinn where I get partway in then lose my place and never beat it, but in setting it aside for a special occasion to prevent that I might never lock back in at all. At least not until I finish my taxes.

Blade Chimera – I love 6/10 metroidvanias. I love stories about emotionally unstable inhuman companions. I have a begrudging respect for Team Ladybug’s game design experiments despite their sometimes-subpar execution. As a result I snapped this off as soon as I saw it. A metroidvania where you can fast travel to any map tile is certainly a choice, but it was implemented well; rather than the map feeling like a maze to navigate it felt like a jigsaw puzzle. Once you knew what was in a zone you could always return there, so keeping everything top of mind was important for sidequests and hidden secrets. The core combat loop of ghost sword attacks costing mana but restoring health as you built up a combo, and your basic attacks restoring MP as you built up a combo but often requiring positioning that caused you to take damage lead to a really aggressive and self-sustaining system. A lot of the pieces were fairly rote and the map design was overly reliant on long castlevania hallways full of random goons,  but I’m excited to see what they do next.

Slitterhead – I had the mistaken impression that this was Prototype 3. Despite its body-hopping and various grotesqueries of the flesh with weapons of blood and bone, it’s very much not that. It’s mostly wandering around a Japanese city trying to chase down rumors and going through mid-mission conversations as a time-loop story gets denser and denser. I feel like there’s some game in 2004 that’s the progenitor of the myriad games with this stilted kind of mission structure (Drakenguard, Stranger of Paradise, etc), though while I was writing this sentence I looked up if that was Siren. Keiichirō Toyama was director and writer for both, so yeah I’m putting this on him I guess. Here’s to you and your weird-ass opinions about game design. Make Gravity Rush 3 ya bastard.  

Settlemoon – I almost forgot to write about this which I feel terribly about as it’s an extremely charming game. I got it because I love the artist’s pixel art, and while the game is very pretty it’s also exceedingly strange in a way that didn’t click with me. I have little patience for games that are systems-driven and gated by player knowledge of opaque systems, as although I’m the type to fuck about I’m not really the type to formally experiment. I’d be down for a chill little idle game about making a town for bug adventurers but this feels more akin to The Gnorpe Apologue where it’s a puzzle game where you wait a few hours to find out if you fucked up your answer.

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist – Ender Lilies was fine. I appreciated the horseshit I could get up to by using various attack combos to maneuver in the air, and the reliance on summons for offense lead to a unique combat positioning and cadence. Ender Magnolia bafflingly released in early access, so I feel like a lot of its character and texture was lost from excessive feedback. Metroidvanias need friction to be interesting, and this is just kind of a game. No major complaints but no major takeaways either. Parrying was OP, the list of summons was too bottlenecked with most of them coming in the lategame, and the lore was simultaneously esoteric and shallow. I miss Nine Sols I guess.

Mark of the Deep – Unlike many people my age, I didn’t really have a pirate phase. I skewed more towards ninjas in that old turf war. Death’s Door was pretty good though, and a game clearly inspired by it interested me. Unfortunately what Mark of the Deep really does is demonstrate how Tunic rode the razor’s edge between obtuse difficulty and transcendent clarity of vision, and even it fell prey to overly difficult bosses and overly fiddly puzzles. Here I have far less patience for the isometric camera tricks and corridors stuffed to the gills with lethal enemies, as the combat is front and center. Even the grappling hook introduced after a few hours can’t save the game, as it’s slow to launch with no invincibility, and is frustrating to aim. I want to support outsider art particularly for devs outside the US/Japan, but for all its potential this game was just frustrating and poor quality.

Super Roboy – I have oft complained about how the metroidvania genre takes almost everything from Castlevania with only lip service to Metroid. Certainly things like high jump and grapple beam have become standard upgrades, but nothing embraces its treatment of enemies of environmental obstacles with multiple solutions and the centrality of movement as the guiding principle of map design and combat design. Super Roboy is an ambitious solo project and so it doesn’t solve that problem, but it finds a new place to put the seam. There’s ~100 upgrades that range from new weapons to double jump to immunity to individual status effects, but each of them is gated both by a quota of kills for particular enemies/bosses and gemstones of various colors hidden in the environment. The resulting gestalt has both the enemy-based power progression of Castlevania and the boss and puzzle progression of Metroid. I have my minor quibbles with the game overall but I love when a game has a clever system I’ve never seen before.