Hot and stressful, that's what it's been. With a big heatwave, heavy storms, and a heckin' lot of a work to do, July has not been my favorite month. That's true on the gaming side too, where only one of the 5 games I finished properly impressed me, but man am I excited about the slate in store for the months to come. First though I suppose we should visit the ones just finished, yeah?
(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)
#48 - Thief Gold - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)
Thief has a stellar reputation and I'm happy to report that after playing it I can totally understand why. I'm less happy to report that my personal time with it didn't quite reach the lofty heights of "stellar," though I think that just says more about me and my tastes than about the game itself. Thief is an immersive sim, a genre that a lot of people swear by but that I've never fully clicked with. It's weird looking back and seeing that I gave a 6.5/10 to the first Dishonored, and now here I am playing one of the principal games that inspired the title and giving that a 6.5/10 as well but for totally different reasons.
To put it simply, I didn't have the level of patience Thief asked of me. The bulk of the game revolves around sneaking through levels and avoiding guards, though you can knock them out cold with a single blow from behind if they don't know you're there. You've got a bunch of possible tools that help you in your skullduggery: specialized arrows that can dull sound, extinguish light sources, or create distractions; proximity mines of both lethal and non-lethal varieties; flash bombs to make quick getaways; the list goes (slightly) on. The problem for me was that these tools were always heavily limited such that I felt discouraged from developing a true play style around any of them. I'd love to just put out all the lights and slink around, but there are never enough water arrows, for a single example. So in practice a lot of Thief boiled down to sitting in a shadow to learn a patrol route, tiptoeing out behind the guard, clubbing him in the back, hiding the body, and then doing that a dozen more times every stage. It became tedious, so I eventually pivoted somewhat to the idea of "if a guard sees me, just kill him" and that helped the pacing immensely.
Of course, that mitigation tactic was only possible because I was playing on Normal difficulty, and I got the distinct sense that Thief only really comes into own on Expert, where you've got more interesting objectives to go along with your additional restrictions. But again, if I'm doing a Sonic the Hedgehog style foot tap all the time on Normal, I just can't see me ratcheting that difficulty crank up higher and coming out happy. As it stands, I did love that Thief is a thinking person's action/adventure game. There's precious little handholding to be found. For example, key objective information is at times granted through a brief spoken dialog that you're expected to remember for the duration of the mission rather than a trackable checklist of some sort. I got lost in virtually every stage of Thief, and that's by design too. When every mission intro includes a line like "A contact of mine gave me a map of the place that his six-year-old kid drew in crayon from memory, so I'll have to keep my eyes open," you know you're in for some trial and error.
So it was that I found Thief Gold to be simultaneously liberating and oppressive; engaging and exhausting; delightful and obnoxious. If you're someone for whom the words "immersive sim" spark metaphorical images of shiny gift wrapping concealing wondrous trinkets, then yeah: Thief Gold is an all-time great. If you're just, you know, me? Then it's a game with a blend of both very strong merits and drawbacks, and perhaps sufficient evidence now to conclude that this kind of thing just isn't your kind of thing.
#49 - Ring Fit Adventure - Switch - 6/10 (Decent)
How does one judge a fitness RPG? Which of those two labels is more important? If a fitness RPG wows you with its story and characters and core mechanics but doesn't actually give you anything physically, is it still a worthwhile game? If a fitness RPG is a miserable video game experience but provides you with a killer workout, is it still a worthwhile endeavor? I'm not sure about either of these extremes, but maybe that's because Ring Fit Adventure is neither great nor terrible at either flavor of things it wants to be. As a vehicle for fitness it's generally decent but distinctly worse than most any dedicated workout routine you might find independently. As a role-playing game it's playable and functional but distinctly worse than most any "pure" RPG you might be interested in playing. And so Ring Fit Adventure's selling point is really just the novelty of having these two things mashed together, for whatever that mashup might intrinsically be worth.
Outside of cooldown stretches, everything in Ring Fit Adventure requires the use of at least one (but usually both) included peripherals: a strap so you can attach a joy-con to your leg and the "ring-con" resistance device that has a joy-con rail built in. The leg strap measures your leg angle, speed, and general motion while the ring-con detects its own angle, position, and degree of pushing or pulling resistance on the ring itself. The ring-con is far more reliable at its job than the leg strap is, though for the most part the leg strap does okay too. Functionally though this setup means that most of the exercise Ring Fit provides is resistance training. Now I'm not knocking resistance training, but if that's all you're doing then you're probably not getting everything you need. Specifically I wanted a lot more aerobically than Ring Fit is capable of offering: jogging in place is about the best the game can do, and that it doesn't even do particularly well.
From a design standpoint the game is cleverly engineered to "softly" rotate you through different kinds of exercises targeting different muscle groups by way of drip feeding you progressively stronger "fit skills" (exercise sets used as attacks in battle) and mixing up stages to have focuses on certain types of enemies. For instance you might get a new fit skill for your core muscles that's stronger than the arms one you've been using, while this stage over here is full of enemies weak to leg skills so you don't neglect them along the way. It's a system that works really well until you hit the late game plateau where new skills stop rolling in, at which point you're stuck deciding between working the muscles you need to work vs. the higher battle efficiency of using only the same handful of powerful skills for all eternity. It's an easily foreseeable issue and a real drag that it wasn't addressed or somehow mitigated.
Also a real drag: tutorials. Ring Fit Adventure teaches you how to do each of its exercises, and that's great, but it teaches you every time you do them. At best you'll have a big chunk of screen blocked by the example video, but at worst you'll be explicitly taught how to "do a victory pose" every day for over a year because you can't be trusted to remember how to squat. That there's no setting to adjust this is inexcusable, somehow even more annoying than the fact that most "yoga" skills just don't actually register correctly at all in the first place since the joy-cons can't detect movement at the level of precision the yoga moves require in real life. And of course, the story for Ring Fit is not any kind of revelation, with every stage consisting of "we've got to keep chasing the bad guy" and little else of note.
But credit where credit's due: I first booted up Ring Fit because I had a ton of chronic knee pain and weakness resulting from an old injury that got exacerbated, and it felt like building some strength in the muscles around that knee was the only way out. Now a year and change later my knee is...well, it'll never be right again because of the nature of the issue, but it is fully functional and I can do things like go up and down stairs far better now than I could when I was a five-years-younger man. Could I have done that without Ring Fit Adventure through some other means? Almost certainly! But having the exercise in RPG form – even a somewhat bare bones, middling RPG such as this one – made it much easier to be willing to form a routine and stick to it over a long period of time. I'm still debating whether I want to continue with it from here: I've set up a custom routine that's showing promise and if I want there are what amount to two New Game+ runs I can do in the main mode as well. Either way, though I can't say I'm especially impressed with any particular facet of Ring Fit Adventure, the fact that I can walk without pain is proof enough for me that its mashed up existence has some intrinsic worth after all.
#50 - Alan Wake II - PS5 - 8.5/10 (Excellent)
My first Remedy game was Control back in 2021 and I was blown away by it. The blend of quality action with multimedia storytelling against a sci-fi psychological horror backdrop was unlike anything I'd played before, so of course I decided to jump back in time and try Alan Wake later that same year. I was slightly less taken (heh) with it than Control since the action was repetitive and the controls (heh) felt somewhat unresponsive, but I was thoroughly impressed with the presentation: a game delivered like an episodic TV show with a gripping narrative that keeps you coming back. Terrific stuff. So now here I was coming into Alan Wake II and hoping I could get a marriage of all the things I loved about the previous Remedy games I'd played, now that I'd evidently caught up on them all.
The results were somewhat unexpected. Alan Wake II leans far more into the survival horror direction, keeping the core concept of the original Alan Wake's combat intact (shine the flashlight on an enemy to weaken them and then finish them off with conventional weapons) but borrowing quite liberally from Resident Evil's modern design (more specifically, 2019's Resident Evil 2 remake was the obvious gameplay inspiration here). On the inventory management level this left much to be desired, though on the horror level it worked very well. The atmosphere in Alan Wake II is oppressively dark and foreboding in a good way. There was a moment while I was exploring when I merely saw a generic basement door and decided "Nooooooope" until I was of coursed forced to go down there anyway. The injections of spookiness and dread are both omnipresent and ruthlessly, unfailingly potent, even when you as a player know better.
That does however create something of a psychological energy drain when playing the game. To be sure I always looked forward to my play sessions, but it took about 45 hours for me to get through the game at 100% completion (including all DLCs), and that's a very long time for a horror-focused game. I do think I went longer than most even on the completionist side since I was pretty methodical and deliberate with my exploration, and I stopped to read every little thing I could (including even random background signage). Even still, eschewing Alan Wake's mostly linear level design for a big dose of open ended exploration probably wasn't the right call for this game; what's there is good but there's just a bit too much and the pacing suffers as a result.
Thankfully then there's another edge to that sword: the larger scope of the game supports the metaphorical fire hose of raw creativity that Alan Wake II deluges you with. There's one set piece where they tried to replicate and one-up something from the previous entry and failed miserably, and that was the only time I actively disliked what the game was serving to me. Every other wild idea though? They somehow all work. Rewriting reality on the fly as an actual gameplay mechanic? Brilliant. Entire chapters going in directions you'd never expect? Brilliant. The layers of metafiction piling so deep that even you as a player can no longer separate fact from fiction? Brilliant. The swerves, the nursery rhyme experiments (that to be fair wouldn't exist were the game more linear), the fact that this game apparently ropes another older Remedy title I thought was safe to ignore into the shared universe so now I have to go play Quantum Break too? Ugh. Brilliant.
#51 - Palindrome Syndrome: Escape Room - PC - 5/10 (Mediocre)
This is a virtual escape room game I got for free a while back. And yeah...free is a good price for it. As an escape room experience it's a clear step up from typical browser or mobile fare but a clear step down from similar titles with any kind of budget attached to them. I thought the pacing was effective and the puzzle difficulty was pretty good, somewhat challenging without being frustrating, but the puzzles themselves felt arbitrary within the theme. There's a halfway interesting narrative that halfway explains this, but the whole thing falls apart if you spend more than two seconds thinking about it. Between sluggish movement and a poor UI design the gameplay mechanics themselves don't feel very good either. I don't know that I'd recommend someone pay for this game, but if you're an escape room fan and you get it for free and you're just looking to kill 90 minutes, sure: go for it and you'll get about what you expect.
#52 - Death's Gambit: Afterlife - PC - 4.5/10 (Disappointing)
Stop me if you've heard this before: what if we made a Souls style game but it was a 2D sidescroller with metroidvania style elements? If your mind immediately jumps to games like Salt and Sanctuary or Blasphemous, then congrats: you've spent time with better games! If instead you thought "Hey that sounds like Hollow Knight" then oh man, what a cliff you're about to walk off with Death's Gambit. At least with Blasphemous you could reason that it came a few years later, but Hollow Knight launched a mere two months before this game, and what a brutal ask to follow on those heels. Death's Gambit is probably my least favorite soulslike I've played, so I guess the score being "only" a 4.5 just goes to show how much worse things could still be. Nevertheless, let's start with the positives.
Death's Gambit has an interesting class and ability system that I think served the game well, both in terms of differentiating it a bit from the crowd and from a general "gameplay fun" standpoint. You can unlock abilities by finding them in the world, buying them from vendors, or by simply snagging them from the skill tree when you've got a spare point to spend. You can set three of these abilities (and eventually a fourth should you spec for it) and they all have handy button shortcuts so you can quickly use them in the heat of battle. You can equip two different weapons, each with its own dedicated attack button, and regular attacks with either weapon build your "soul energy" to fund your much more powerful abilities. An early unlockable passive in turn causes a skill use to refund all your base stamina, letting you fire off more regular attacks and/or evasive maneuvers. So combat ends up as a strategic ebb and flow of trying to use your whole arsenal of abilities as intelligently as possible, and I really did appreciate that aspect of things.
Unfortunately the combat itself also just feels painfully sluggish. Movement speed is unhurried with no means of sprinting/speeding up. Dodge rolling has generous iframes but plods like a classic Dark Souls heavy roll, which means it feels bad even though it's actually not. I played as the Wizard class so my abilities were spell casts, and these were so slow both to ready and to fire that in the midst of combat I often felt like I couldn't use my good stuff at all (though in fairness my good stuff was really good and so that may have been wise from a balance standpoint). Most of the bosses are basic and straightforward fights, though that doesn't make them all easy per se...which is a problem when you consider that Death's Gambit features some pretty rough runbacks. Most of these can be skipped if you choose a specific class at the outset, as that class has a perk to get additional checkpoints, but like, why is that a class perk? You have to sacrifice a real perk just to get rid of bad runbacks that shouldn't be there in the first place? Weak. Finally, the UI is legitimately horrible. You've got a map but no map button. Your grid-based icon-only inventory is paginated into small pages and everything you find gets tossed willy nilly into the same clutter heap. You can't use consumables without first equipping them to a quick slot, which may then require that you unequip something else. The equipment upgrade screens don't sort gear according to any rhyme or reason and don't show you in advance what you're doing. This game just hates you trying to interact with any of its menus.
And so when I got to the final boss ahead of perceived schedule and an NPC told me to go re-fight some early bosses so I could presumably get to a better ending and maybe more content, I went "Nah," killed the boss, and latched onto my bad ending like it was the last escape pod bound for Tattooine. It's enough that I'm punting on further soulslikes for a while because I just need to get this taste out of my mouth. Death's Gambit is not even close to the worst game I've ever played, but it had enough big problems that it's sadly soured me on the genre for a while.
Coming in August:
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I get why you didn't like Thief, it's not for everyone. But you definitely should've played it on Hard at least. Medium has too little objectives to make use of the level. My favorite part of thief was skulking around levels and finding hidden rooms in which items that are normally win conditions for Hard mode are hidden.
Immersive sims really are hit or miss. I tried Deus Ex once and just got bored waiting for guards to walk past.
The Ringfit "tutorial" is the gyro recalibration.
The Ringfit "tutorial" is the gyro recalibration.
This is only sometimes true. When you're setting up at a game gym or to do something like a thigh press, absolutely yeah. But anything happening on a course (like ring pull rails, squat holds, victory poses, etc.) aren't doing that recalibration work. Think about how the first time you do a victory pose in a day you've got to do the tutorial bit, and you go, "OK, maybe that's just recalibrating." Then you do another course right after in the same session, and where's the tutorial? Gone! Take a day off though and there's the tutorial again. So it really is just the game assuming you can't remember anything between sessions, and that's mildly exhausting.
The one notable issue I found is how useless the healing exercises are...in a fitness game it encourages the player to relegate a rather large set of real world exercises to the bin.
Gosh, absolutely yes. The shoulder press is the best example of this, I think. It's functionally the only bicep-focused move in the game's arsenal and it's stuck on a heal slot. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I used a healing move during the full campaign out of need, and most of those were before I even unlocked shoulder press as an option. So this means the game's only exercise targeting a muscle group just never got used. At one point midway through the game I noticed how toned my triceps were becoming because the game's got plenty of useful exercises (until late game) for working those. But those biceps never came because they never could. Worked shoulder press into my custom routine, at least, but yeah this was a source of angst for me as well.
There's one set piece where they tried to replicate and one-up something from the previous entry and failed miserably
Glad you are enjoying Remedy games but I am confused what you're referring to. ||The Old Gods fight? Because the big musical piece of the game is We Sing and Dark Ocean Summoning is more like a bonus.||
I assume he does mean Old Gods, since it's much more similar to the set piece in AW1. I never saw it as them trying to one up that set piece however, quite a curious take.
6.5 for Thief gold? Lol, stopped reading after that. 🤡
That sounds like a brutal combo of heat, work, and games that didn't click. How do you usually power through months like that without burning out?