How can a game built out of gleaming, blacklight pixilation feel so verdant and alive? Look at it: neon vines drape across scurrying slimes; lambent waters trickle down sunken walls. Like a dying CRT cab pumped full of ooze. As an exploration focused platformer, Animal Well's approach to progress is both dense and layered. Screens that resemble a glimmering terrarium are knotted with hide-holes and secret shortcuts that run concurrent with more casual traversal. Controlling a ghostly little blob, players work their way around these dripping screens in loops, pressing up on walls and scurrying through any passages that reveal themselves in search of mysterious eggs and save checkpoints that take the form of a rotary telephone. Developed by Billy Basso and published by Bigmode, Animal Well is an instant, high quality calling card for Dunkey's newest video game venture.
Hot on the heels of sinkhole disaster Concord, PlayStation quickly corrected the narrative pertaining to their 30th year in business with Team Asobi's Astro Bot, a love letter to those three decades worth of ups and downs. Whereas Firewalk Studios' game rabidly (or, maybe more accurately, foolheartedly) chased a place in a service gaming landscape already dominated by several long ensconced titans, Asobi's game was content to be a luxuriously worked summation of its home platform. Nintendo-like not only in its ability to constantly introduce new ways to navigate a lush 3D landscape but also in how the game's mood manages to be celebratory without slipping into arrogant self-satisfaction. Perhaps it's that Sony's iconography has been so thoroughly subsumed into Astro Bot's cute droid aesthetic? The cynicism associated with brand maintenance vanquished by the sight of Bloodborne's Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower reimagined as a capsule vending machine toy.
After a couple of minutes with Balatro it becomes clear that the decision made by PEGI (the content rating board for video games released in Europe) to quickly revise their age label classification from a PEGI 3 to a PEGI 18 is, at least partially, a qualitative assessment of this game. LocalThunk's deck-building take on poker is compulsive and hypnotic rather than the cheery, mindless pair-matching seen in dozens of Nintendo party games. Players are presented with deals that can then be held or discarded, before a final submission subjects them to the powers of the juiced-up, leering joker cards that are purchased between rounds. As more and more of these cackling multipliers are gathered, the players chip haul starts to seriously outpace the (early game) completion demands placed upon them. The result is intoxicating, activating a part of the brain that thrives on pure greed and twinkling feedback.
Already sinking beneath sludgy AI imagery and aggressive micro-transactions, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had a great couple of weeks in which online action coalesced around playlists dedicated to the smallest maps the game has to offer. Blessed (or cursed) with a new, multi-directional movement model that seems much more logical when considering the wide open spaces of the Warzone spin-off, rather than the spawn-flipping back-and-forth of the dedicated multiplayer maps, Black Ops 6 does actually shine on the tiniest possible arena. Stakeout takes place inside a series of claustrophobic apartments; staggered rooms with clear paths in and out that cater wonderfully to the instant correction of the shotgun weapon type. Players can hug walls, hovering out of view, waiting to blast unsuspecting visitors or dawdle around, firing from the hip. The close-quarters and point-blank damage scaling mean opponents cannot slide away from your boom stick and the funnelled movement channels ensure that you're unlikely to be sniped from some unconsidered angle of vulnerability yourself.
Never thought I'd feel pangs of nostalgia for the rickety polygonal meshes of the PlayStation 1 era but here we are. Crow Country is a cutesy, Haunted PS1-style spin on survival horror that allows players to do something almost unthinkable: they can rotate the camera around these environments, to really examine the nooks and crannies of these lovingly crafted 3D spaces. Indeed, such was the novelty of this unlocked perspective feature, I didn't even realise you could do it until I'd put a good twenty minutes into the game.
Additional content so completely fantastic that FromSoft could very easily have held it all back for a quick, cash-in sequel. Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree is, at least before you gather some very specific items, almost impenetrably difficult. Arriving in a pocket universe filled with horrors so terrible that the ruling powers of the main world have sealed them away, players are very likely to either be instantly pummelled by one of the wandering, skyscraping bonfires or ambushed by an assassin who stalks the player like a big cat on the way to visit some crypts. Make it inside one of these extra tiny dungeons and you'll be met with a mini-boss who owns a fully automatic crossbow.
These first few hours are uniquely dispiriting then. Your endgame equipment only able to nick and chip these fresh enemies. Dedicate yourself to finding fragments of another of the game's mythical trees though and the difficulty curve begins to level out until rolling progress is, again, within the player's grasp. Although decried for introducing this strained kind of longevity, Erdtree's sap collecting forces players to re-examine both their build and equipment. Sticking to what has worked previously is, very clearly, a form of self-sabotage. FromSoft have filled their adjunct realm with new weapons and armours; fresh spirits and allies to call on; recipes for improvised chemical weapons that can, thankfully, make some dent in the enormous health pools that bar your ascent to a new throne. It'd be rude not to make use of them.
A bloodthirsty take on Konami's run-and-gun shooters, Iron Meat caught my attention by presenting itself like some lost, plugged-in update of a Mega Drive fav. The equivalent of the Mega CD version of The Terminator when judged against some speculative release that combined the exploding perps of RoboCop Versus The Terminator with the more athletic movement of a Contra: Hard Corps. Although not as arresting as either of those classics, Iron Meat is still a lot of fun, particularly a level that sees the player trying to escape a crashing airship infested with writhing, bio-mechanical worms.
If nothing else, Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics clearly illustrates the stark contrast between the kind of HD remasters that are expelled from a parent company to prop up a weak quarter and the reception that can be expected when the porting and packaging of such a property at least attempts to equal the genuine longing that has galvanised multiple online petitions. This Fighting Collection not only allows players easy access to games that were previously subjected to lousy console translations (see X-Men: Children of the Atom and The Punisher) but also offers up a beautifully curated copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes that allows players to tweak and toggle to the degree that even specific, character-related bugs can be switched on or off. Right now, New Age of Heroes is living a second life, energised by fighting game master Justin Wong and his screen-clearing alter ego The Wazzler, as well as an expanding YouTube scene that specifically disregards the ingrained, meta to re-investigate lower tier characters that were instantly deemed useless back in the early 2000s. Finally getting to see Sunburnt Sakura or Iron Body Zangief pulverising Sentinel match-ups has been delightful.
Expectations were underground for Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2. Publishers Konami had long since ran that particular cash cow into the ground, losing source code so re-releases of PS2-era classics are permanently hamstrung or handing off development duties to anybody but whatever remnants of Team Silent remained within their parent company. Even jumping immediately to the second game in the series for this modern re-jig sounded worrying, as if Konami were attempting to stir up the biggest possible pay day for themselves before their audience realised they'd been had. As it turns out though, Bloober have actually overdelivered, subtly rebuilding the second Silent Hill in such a way that this release can function as a companion piece to the original, rather than something designed to overwrite it. As James creeps deeper into this abandoned town, familiar progress, puzzles and encounters are missing. Marked only by an interactive prompt that then simulate some sense of fuzzy recall. Although never stated outright, it seems as if we are experiencing James' dilemma as something cyclical and purgatorial. Another round in an endless punishment that he has trapped himself in. And if that doesn't do it for you, there's some tighter combat controls that allow you to duck and weave around the emaciated horrors attempting to lay themselves on top of your widower.
Developer Coal Supper's Thank Goodness You're Here! is sort of like if you got the Viz cartoonists to devise their own, interactive version of one of Richard Scarry's Busy Busy books. Players control a little gnome who zips about a lurid, postcard drawing of a post-industrial Yorkshire town that sprawls across several interconnected (and sometimes deliberately unconnected) screens. These strange little scenes teem with villagers going about their daily business, from running a dilapidated corner shop to attempting to fish a penny out of a sewer grate. Everything and everybody can be whacked, in fact that's all you can really do. Thankfully, striking your palm across their collective backsides will always result in some sort of reaction, from a shocked titter to a response that might actually cause the day's progress to inch that little bit forward. Comedy is a something of an untapped resource in video games, either reduced to incidental flavour or something excruciating that must then be endured. Thank Goodness is neither, managing to concoct a prevailing sense of daftness that is both genuinely amusing and actually sort of cosy.
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