After putting down Dragon Quest III yesterday, I fiddled around with a few other graphical throwback titles I’d picked up over the course of the last few Steam sales: SKALD: Against the Black Priory, Celeste, and Before the Green Moon. I didn’t find myself particularly interested in sticking with any of them
SKALD was simply too hard to read for my aging eyesight despite some of my formative experiences being with SSI’s old Gold Box RPGs (sort of amusing, since I imagine folks in my age cohort are some of the primary targets for this one). Perhaps after a new pair of glasses, I can come back to this one, though, I wish they had gone for the form factor of those older RPGs without the slavish devotion to pixel art
Celeste does have some tight platforming, but some of the use of shoulder triggers were hard on my hands, and I couldn’t really let go of the fact that the game does have more going on than its pixel art. I wish the whole game could have been in that style instead. It also frustratingly is labeled as having full DualSense support, but this wasn’t my experience with it at all (which is a particular bugbear of mine)
Before the Green Moon was charming for a little while, but it lacked enough of a hook for me to really dive into it despite the clear love the game has for another formative-to-me game in Harvest Moon 64 / Back to Nature. Much as with the Story of Seasons remake of Friends of Mineral Town, I tinkered around on my little farm for a bit before deciding I was really in the mood for something else
Editing because I remembered that I also tried Transistor for the first time, which is not a throwback title in the slightest, but I got it as a Steam gift over the holidays. I’ve always admired Supergiant’s whole thing and the vibes on this one are great, but I wasn’t particularly feeling the combat. I might come back to Red eventually, though, because my experience with Hades was similar at first
So, overnight, I let a few other games download to try in the days and weeks to come. Today I spent a couple of hours with Darksiders III, which I saw on sale and picked up after remembering that it’s the one Darksiders game where you get to be a girl. I didn’t love the original Darksiders, but I did like it as a twist on a sort of 3D Metroid- or Zelda-like, so I thought I might have some fun with the third installment. And, I did! Not enough to really stick with it, but it was an interesting time capsule through which to think about modern action games. This format of action games, like the original God of War games or Devil May Cry, are such a sliver of the gaming landscape when they used to be ubiquitous. I think we ought to have more of them!
And, I have to admire Gunfire Games’ restraint with this one: despite the highly sexualized protagonist (which I don’t really mind as a lesbian into angry women), when you crouch to go through tunnels with Fury, the camera zooms into first-person mode instead of leering at her ass the entire time
I also downloaded Neva and Stellaris. I’ve talked before about bouncing off of grand strategy games before, so I’ll probably take a look at Neva first since I adored Gris, but I’d really like to find something not so narrative-driven that I can pop in and out of from time to time. So, I’m hoping Stellaris is one of the few 4X games that does work with me (and hopefully for longer than Age of Wonders 4 did)
