Wattam Review – A Charming Little Storybook

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Funomena

Release: 2019

Rating: Rating Pending

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: PC

Designer Keita Takahashi exploded our consciousness in the PlayStation 2 era with the release of Katamari Damacy. He may not be the most prolific creator out there, but his creations are memorable for both their simple aesthetics and strange, almost alien gameplay conceits. Is rolling a giant, sticky ball around enjoyable? Sure! And even if I didn’t ultimately understand the point of Katamary Damacy’s follow up, Noby Noby Boy, stretching my character around its colorful world was fun for a while. Wattam offers more structure than some of his more out-there experiments while still encouraging players to explore and poke around to see what they can discover. 

We start off by meeting the Mayor, a green cube with a mustache and bowler hat. He’s alone in the world following a cataclysmic event, but he soon discovers that all is not lost. By walking around a floating platform and interacting with objects, he makes friends with anthropomorphized creations like rocks, flowers, and toilets. You can swap between any of these new friends at will, though aside from the kick you might get from being able to explore as a golden turd, mouth, acorn, or myriad other characters, there are few reasons to do so.

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Mayor has a neat trick at his disposal: By holding down a button, he lifts his hat, exposing an explosive present beneath. Other characters really, really enjoy being blown into the air, and nobody gets hurt from these detonations. Wattam feels like you’re engaging with an interactive storybook, and explosions are a frequent event in the early moments. Those give way to moments that fully dive into the game’s more surreal impulses.

The simple interactions that trigger these crazy sequences may not be particularly engaging – most of them kick off by asking a newly introduced character “What’s wrong?” – but moments like enlisting a balloon to help retrieve a phone’s handset from the sun kept me smiling through much of the game. Funomena takes what is already a pretty memorable setup and adds even more silly layers, such as the fact that the balloon is afraid of heights, and that his eventual journey upward is accompanied by an uncharacteristically energetic rock soundtrack. There are loads of moments throughout Wattam’s brief duration that pile on similarly strange elements, and most of them are delightful.

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Wattam is at its best when it embraces its toy-like qualities. There are times where it appears to be trying to be more of a traditional game, which is where it falters. Even though your actions are generally limited to clasping hands with your friends, climbing objects (including your friends), and swapping control between multiple characters, there’s a lack of precision that accompanies it all. It’s easy to overlook it when you’re simply exploring the world and experimenting within its toybox, but a regrettable boss encounter highlights that Wattam’s controls aren’t up to more demanding tasks. You can’t die or fail, but it’s tedious and out of place. That fight and an overlong item-fetching sequence near the end are lows in what’s otherwise a simple and joyous time. 

The charming visuals and messages of compassion and cooperation make Wattam a great game to play with younger members of the family, either in co-op or pass-the-controller sessions. Even if it doesn’t inspire any meaningful conversations about the importance of friendship – which it absolutely could – there’s a good chance that you’ll find plenty of silly fun together.

Score: 7.25

Summary: Its charming visuals and messages of compassion and cooperation make Wattam a great game to play with younger members of the family.

Concept: Restore the world from the edge of oblivion through the power of friendship, compassion, and poop

Graphics: Visuals are crisp and bright, with an almost storybook-like quality. Their simplicity makes the odd performance stutters a little baffling

Sound: Jazzy orchestral music shifts and transforms as you swap between characters and move between areas. It’s a treat for your ears

Playability: It’s easy to accidentally swap between characters, and selecting specific ones can be tricky. A poorly implemented boss encounter highlights the overall lack of precision

Entertainment: Keita Takahashi delivers another singular title that’s as much an interactive art piece as it is a game

Replay:

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Shovel Knight Showdown Review – Digging Down

Publisher: Yacht Club Games

Developer: Yacht Club Games

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: Switch

Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, PlayStation 3, PC

Over the course of five years and five campaigns, the Shovel Knight series has introduced players to a vast array of heroes and villains in its mainline platforming releases. Shovel Knight Showdown takes a page out of the Super Smash Bros. playbook, gathering these familiar faces in one spot and letting you duke it out in platforming-based fighting. While simple controls ease the learning curve to provide for good party play, you quickly get the full picture of this package.

Shovel Knight Showdown drops you into a stage full of platforms and tasks you with either depleting the lives of your opponents or collecting a set number of gems that spawn randomly. While most stages are static, some auto-scroll as you battle; these levels deliver the right amount of chaos and capitalize on the Shovel Knight series’ emphasis on platforming. Certain stages also feature hazards, like the Troupple King sending out waves of minions, or a bridge over a pitfall that players can toggle on and off, keeping you on your toes in exciting ways.

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With such a robust collection of characters from across the Shovel Knight universe, the roster of playable fighters adds an additional dash of variety to the experience. Each character has a distinct primary attack, special attack (often a projectile), and parry, and many have unique movement properties, charge attacks, or drop attacks. Experimenting with the fighters is rewarding; I quickly left Shovel Knight’s more generic moveset behind in favor of the nimble Specter Knight’s diagonal movements and wall-jumps, or the tanking Baz’s Belmont-inspired whip attacks. Though the compact arsenals of moves make for an approachable experience, it also limits how creative and deep you can get with each character. While my strategies continued to evolve the more I played, I felt as though I plateaued with characters a lot faster than in other fighting games.

Just like in the mainline platforming series, jumping and attacking feel great. However, Showdown’s limited game types make the experience grow stale; collecting gems as the main objective only stays fun for so long. I vastly prefer the life-depletion ruleset in Showdown, but even then, you can only max out your lives at five. You can experience these matches with up to four players in battle mode, or in a single-player story mode, but it’s the same action with small breaks for text-heavy cutscenes or a target-breaking minigame.

The story culminates with a two-part boss battle that’s the same for every character, but even that begins with a gem-collection section before giving you a more traditional boss-battle experience. Once you get through to the final face-off against a giant sentient mirror, it’s an intense but fun battle where you must dodge projectiles as you climb on moving platforms and slash at the weakpoint. But just like the gem-collection objective, after a few times, it felt like I was just going through the motions.

Despite the option to play single-player, make no mistake: Shovel Knight Showdown is best experienced in multiplayer. Playing through matches with your friends and different settings ups the ante, and is much more exciting than simply battling the predictable A.I.. Choosing from a list of cheats also helps you customize the action how you want; fast run and high jump give you a more intense experience as the fighters fly across the screen, while hurricane adds wind gusts to the matches. These modifiers may remedy the monotony of repetition, but they don’t cure it completely.

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In addition to gems, items like bombs, character-repelling magnets, and energy-replenishing food pop into most matches. While the gems are always the priority, these assists can give you a major leg up on the competition, particularly if you get one of the pestering assist creatures that fly around and harass your opponents. These items are hit or miss on the battlefield, ranging from effective or fun to inconsequential or annoying, but you can thankfully turn off the items individually or all at once.

Though Shovel Knight Showdown doesn’t impress with its list of modes, it does provide you with plenty of opportunities to unlock characters, stages, and skins. While I always loved seeing that I unlocked something new, it wasn’t enough to motivate me to play through the story for the umpteenth time, or once again compete for gems.

Shovel Knight Showdown is great for short sessions with friends, or a couple playthroughs of the story mode, but simple movesets and repetition limit the enjoyment. You can dig into some good Shovel Knight fun here, but don’t expect to strike gold.

Score: 7.5

Summary: Shovel Knight Showdown is a fun game to play with friends in short bursts, but a shallow pool of content causes the fun to diminish at a rapid rate.

Concept: Gather characters from across the various Shovel Knight campaigns for a platforming-based fighting game

Graphics: The distinct pixel-art aesthetic of the mainline adventures carries over to Yacht Club’s new title

Sound: Catchy and intense tunes inspired by game soundtracks of the past flood the stages and menus

Playability: Simple controls make this an easy-to-pick-up experience, but it comes at the cost of depth

Entertainment: Solid controls and a diverse cast of characters provide entertaining matches, but the excitement is short lived

Replay: Moderately low

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Arise: A Simple Story Review – Beauty In Heartbreak

Publisher: Techland

Developer: Piccolo

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, PC

Arise: A Simple Story is an emotionally charged, heartbreaking, and thoughtful game. Across 10 unique levels, players chart the critical moments of a man’s life as he makes the transition between life and death. You explore far-ranging themes like romance, depression, grief, family, and how they all tie together. Clumsy, sometimes-frustrating platforming mars the gameplay, but as a testament to the strength of the surrounding experience, those problems don’t hold me back from a fervent recommendation. The game’s unusual title is simultaneously an aphorism and a subtle sarcasm; even the most uncomplicated life is fraught with emotional complexity, and what seems simple on the surface is anything but when examined from within.

As an old man, you wake from the stillness of your funeral pyre into limbo and must navigate a series of memories that shaped the life you lived. Each memory manifests as a visually distinct landscape inspired by a specific moment, like the first kiss with your partner, or the building of a crib ahead of a child’s birth. The visual design of each level is a particular strength, transforming concepts into a sort of visual language. In a childhood memory, everything looks bigger than it should. When confronting depression, the old man is chased by a crowd of shadowy selves, threatening to pull him down.

As you explore these memories, the right analog stick acts as a lever that fasts forwards and rewinds time around these moments of consequence. In practice, that means you might rewind time so you can jump on the back of a lily pad, and then float down the river as it flits through the path of your recollection. The time mechanic is an interesting metaphor for the way we recall important junctures, and the times that precede and follow them, with a clarity that defies easy description. It’s also a fun way to engender some light puzzle-solving and exploration.

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Through the confluence of a particularly striking orchestral score, collectible art images that add definition to the memories, and a deliberate approach to level design, Arise keeps its ambitions small and focused. Because of that, it’s easy to identify with the universality of its emotional ups and downs. The highs are joyful, the lows are crushing, all in ways that feel genuinely wrenching.

I have nothing but praise for the narrative and thematic vibrancy, so it’s especially unfortunate that some of the jumping and other traversal moments are handled poorly. Nothing breaks the immersion of a powerful sequence like tumbling off a cliffside because of a misjudged platforming attempt. With the absence of a manual camera rotation stacked on top of imprecise controls, I was pulled out of the flow more than once, which is a real shame. It’s not a constant problem, but it’s one that crops up enough to hurt an otherwise stirring narrative.

Even with some stumbles, Arise is a game that knows what it wants to communicate, and does so with delicacy and sensitivity. I’ve found individual scenes coming back to mind frequently since I completed the game, most notably the moving sequence that closes the game. Accept the dilemma of a few bad jumping sequences, and push toward the emotional core, as this simple story has a lot of wisdom to share. 

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Score: 8.75

Summary: Even with some iffy platforming, Arise is an emotional tour de force, exploring themes of memory, romance, family, and grief, along with how they all tie together.

Concept: Trace the defining moments of a man’s life as he walks the allegorical path between life and death

Graphics: Exaggerated and surreal imagery captures how memory endures through specific flashbulb images

Sound: A moving classical score accentuates the wordless storytelling and lends emotional resonance

Playability: Navigation is the biggest stumbling block in an otherwise artistic tour-de-force; the frustrating platforming and traversal subtract from the experience

Entertainment: Even with occasionally questionable jumping sequences, this emotionally fraught journey is a potent statement on the nature of love, memory, and loss

Replay: Moderate

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Mosaic Review – The Absurdity Of Life

Publisher: Raw Fury

Developer: Krillbite

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS

Mosaic gives meaning to the meaningless; it’s existential nihilism in digital form. The fact that you actively play through the silent protagonist’s life of crushing drudgery and not just passively experience it is important. Mosaic is nihilistic not simply because the protagonist’s life is a listless mill of work and sleep, but because it has no inherent meaning other than the one you give it by direct action and the creation of interludes that punctuate the grind.

You play through a loop of waking up, going to work, performing your duties, and then going home. You do this by simply walking along corridors and interacting with objects when prompted onscreen. Your actions and options within this cycle are limited to simple things like brushing your teeth and checking the messages on your phone, reinforcing the rigidity and absurd futility of the situation. One of my favorite examples of this is when a prospective date with a co-worker falls through. This cannot be prevented, only accepted in its delicious emptiness.

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Mosaic isn’t a game only of dead ends, however. While traveling through your daily routine, you might come across a reverie in the form of looking out of a window and stealing some sunshine, listening to a street musician, or even controlling a butterfly. During these moments the game transforms. Color warms the screen, and your senses immediately liven. Of course, this is only possible because the game does a good job first encasing you in drab passivity before you letting you break free. While these aren’t necessarily profound moments, I could still feel them.

Mosaic also succeeds because it uses different gameplay perspectives to represent the character’s isolated, hollow existence. You may become a miniature version of yourself or be forced to move the camera to navigate out of a short maze. These sequences surprised me as I went about my day, and they are also appropriately disorienting without throwing players into frustrating gameplay confusion. Instead, it feels like a person confronting the realization that they don’t know or understand how their life became this depressing.

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Even supposedly mundane tasks like the work you perform at your job are fun in and of themselves, despite being cast in the world as boring and unfulfilling. Your job is to apply resources on a hex grid in order to progress via the most efficient route possible to meet goals. This minigame minimally evolves through transporting resources faster and by introducing enemies of inefficiency that you have to quarantine. I look forward to it in Mosaic because it taps that basic task completion/goal achievement area of my gamer lizard brain. Similarly, I like playing Blip Blop, the simple clicker game on my character’s mobile phone, even though it is itself a commentary on our inherent attraction to playing games just because leveling up feels good, no matter how nakedly it’s achieved. In fact, I wish Mosaic brought me deeper down its gameplay and in-world rabbit holes (it’s not a long title) such as my job’s minigame and the dating apps of its dead-end world.

Some games are power fantasies that revel in the thrilling exercise of control. Mosaic doesn’t render you powerless, but by enveloping you in the futility of the protagonist and making you understand it, the game heightens the effect and meaning of the power you do have. Life may indeed be meaningless, but Mosaic is here for your sheer enjoyment.

Score: 8.75

Summary: Mosaic gives meaning to the meaningless; it’s existential nihilism in digital form. It's lovely.

Concept: Live through the drudgery of modern life and dream of an escape

Graphics: The character models and uses of color effectively convey the mood and gameplay

Sound: The punctuations and eddies of music (electronic and jazz) nicely flow at the right place and time

Playability: At times there are moments when you’re not sure what to do, but the game’s simple controls don’t steer you wrong

Entertainment: From both philosophical and pure gameplay perspectives, I loved playing Mosaic

Replay: Moderately Low

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Life Is Strange 2 Review – Setting A Good Example

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Dontnod Entertainment

Release: September 27, 2018

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, PC

Many of the decisions we make in choice-driven games boil down to selfish outcomes; we want to get the best rewards, or spark romance with our favorite love interests. Having that kind of agency is fun, but Life is Strange 2 takes a different approach. It adds dimension by putting another character’s needs before your own. Sean and Daniel Diaz are two young brothers on the run, and developer Dontnod tells an emotional tale about the connection between them, all while encouraging players (as Sean) to see choices in terms of what they mean for nine-year-old Daniel.

The bond between the Diaz brothers is the most consistently compelling element of Life is Strange 2. Unlike similar dynamics in other narrative games (like Lee and Clementine in The Walking Dead), Sean isn’t just protecting Daniel from danger. You are simultaneously shaping a relationship with him and setting examples for him to follow. This last point is important, because Daniel has mysterious telekinetic powers, and how he uses them – or doesn’t – depends largely on Sean’s guidance. For instance, if you let him use his ability to kill a dangerous animal instead of scaring it off, that may solve an immediate problem – but you have to wonder what it teaches him about how to use his gift in the future. Can he recognize the boundary between killing an animal and a person? Daniel looks up to Sean, and moments like these effectively keep that fact in the forefront of players’ minds. I like how this made me view my choices less in terms of optimizing certain story results, and more in terms of helping Daniel learn right from wrong.

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Your interactions in these situations have interesting consequences, because you aren’t determining Sean’s actions alone. You are also influencing how Daniel might react later. At one point, I told Daniel to be honest with another character about his power, as opposed to keeping it a secret. Because of the guidance I had given him in previous instances, he listened to me and obeyed. But Daniel can also disobey depending on the example you’ve set, so your decision at any fork in the road isn’t a guarantee about how the story will unfold. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this ambiguity, but I did; it makes the behind-the-scenes flowchart of outcomes less apparent, allowing you to focus more on how you think the characters would react.

Life is Strange 2’s gameplay is a simple-but-effective combination of walking around, examining objects, and having conversations with the weirdos you meet along the way. The boys’ ultimate goal is to travel from Seattle to Mexico, but circumstances force them to live off the grid to avoid detection, which puts them in a variety of questionable situations. Over the course of five episodes, Sean and Daniel cross paths with redneck racists, weed farmers, and zealous cultists. I appreciate how these characters represent a variety of perspectives, but some of the encounters feel contrived. Sean and Daniel meet some people at an outdoor market in Oregon, and just happen to reconnect with them riding the rails in California weeks later? The stereotypical depictions of these side characters also stand in contrast to the care taken with Sean and Daniel, though none of them stay in the spotlight long enough to do significant damage to the larger story.

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The writing and performances can feel stilted at times, but even at their worst, Life is Strange 2 retains a core of authenticity that no awkward exchange can erase. Despite imperfect implementation, the game builds a believable rapport between the brothers and made me care about them. I was regularly concerned about their health, whether they got enough to eat, and if they had the freedom to just act like dumb kids sometimes. Forging that connection is crucial for this story to succeed, and the team at Dontnod gets it right.

Episodic games often have gaps of months between installments, but even by those standards, Life is Strange 2 kept fans waiting a long time from one chapter to the next. If you fell off the journey somewhere along the way (or if you were waiting for the tale to conclude, like I was), that is understandable. However, whether you knew it or not, Life is Strange 2 has been quietly weaving a powerful and sincere narrative experience that admirably carries on the series’ legacy.

Score: 8.5

Summary: Over the last year, Life is Strange 2 has been quietly weaving a powerful and sincere narrative experience that admirably carries on the series’ legacy.

Concept: As the eldest of two brothers on the run, your choices and actions shape the personality of the youngest and determine how he uses his telekinetic gift

Graphics: This entry maintains the series’ signature visual style, but the faces and animations can’t always convey emotions the dialogue seems to require

Sound: A contemplative soundtrack heavy on piano and acoustic guitar sets an appropriate, thoughtful mood

Playability: Straightforward controls make exploration and conversation easy to manage

Entertainment: The Diaz brothers are likable heroes with a believable relationship. Their journey is punctuated by big decisions, surprising consequences, and a satisfying conclusion

Replay: Moderate

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Darksiders Genesis Review – Exodus Of Excitement

Publisher: THQ Nordic

Developer: Airship Syndicate

Release: 2019

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch

Darksiders is a shape-shifting franchise. The original game offered a fun mix of combat and puzzle dungeons, like a fusion of God of War and The Legend of Zelda. Darksiders II added Diablo-inspired loot into that equation. When Darksiders III released in 2018, it incorporated elements of From Software's Souls games. Darksiders' experimentation continues with Genesis, a co-op friendly, top-down action game. For this prequel, Developer Airship Syndicate repackages many of Darksiders' signature aspects into a new container just in time for the holidays, but this delivery is filled with more packing peanuts than presents.

From the start, Genesis allows up to two players to control Strife and War (solo players can freely switch between the two). Each character feels impressively unique in combat. War is a slow-moving, close-quarters tank, with many sword combos reminiscent of his abilities from the original Darksiders. In contrast, Strife darts around the battlefield and rains fire from the barrels of his twin pistols. I enjoy the mix of abilities that both horsemen provide, and Genesis generally succeeds at emulating Darksiders' fast-paced action from a new camera perspective.

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The joys of combat quickly turn to anguish as the difficulty escalates. War and Strife level up by equipping creature cores, which boost your horsemens’ strength and health pools. Cores also offer other added bonuses, such as giving your attacks a chance to restore your health. Unfortunately, these enemy cores drop randomly, which means you can fight entire enemy hordes without a guaranteed reward. The problems with this system are exacerbated when you need to grind for cores – and you will need to grind. Each level has a recommended power rank, and those requirements quickly outpaced my horsemens' abilities. This forced me to return to old levels (or a repeatable combat area) to tear through endless fodder in the hopes of finding more cores – an incredibly soul-sucking process.

Genesis offers some respite with a handful of environmental puzzles. In co-op, these puzzles ask War and Strife to work together to throw a series of switches, or use their unique skills to send electrical orbs across the room to power ancient artifacts. In single-player, these puzzles require a little more legwork, since you have to use bombs to trigger multiple timed switches or make use of other environmental tricks to navigate a space. Whether solo or with a friend, Genesis’ puzzles are never mentally taxing, but I was usually thankful for a break in the action.

The biggest shift for Darksiders Genesis is its fixed overhead camera. The view makes it easier for friends to play together, but it also means the action feels distant and less intense. More importantly, large environment objects (like trees and cliffs walls) can come between you and the camera, obscuring your view of the action. The environment itself is also a pain to navigate, since few onscreen markers point you forward, and the map doesn’t display your exact position. At times, I was confused about where to go, and when I turned to the map to gain my bearings, I only felt more lost.

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Genesis’ narrative also left me disoriented. Most of the events of the Darksiders series have revolved around the war between the kingdoms of heaven and hell, which ultimately lay waste to the planet Earth. However, Genesis is set before the events of the previous games and deals primarily with the political affairs between the horsemen and a few demonic figures, which ultimately adds little to the Darksiders universe. This lackluster story feels like a missed opportunity, especially since it’s the first chance fans have had to control the horseman Strife. Unfortunately, Strife’s constantly jokey demeanor is off-putting, and the dialogue between him and the stoic War feels forced.

Overall, Darksiders Genesis fails to take advantage of the series' strengths. Since Darksiders’ inception, fans have imagined what it might be like to team up as the different horsemen. Darksiders Genesis finally offers a co-op experience, but its offbeat design and forgettable story don't deliver on the fantasy.

Score: 6.5

Summary: Darksiders Genesis repackages many of the series' signature aspects into a new container, but this delivery is filled with more packing peanuts than presents.

Concept: A top-down, co-op friendly take on the post-apocalyptic action series

Graphics: Darksider’s stylized anime-inspired characters and environments still look great

Sound: The score is stirring and dark, but the voice performances are cheesy

Playability: Combat is energetic, but the environment sometimes gets in the way of the action

Entertainment: Playing with a friend is more fun than solo, but odd design brings down both experiences

Replay: Moderate

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