The Missing Review: More Hit Than Miss

Memoria is a remote island off the coast of Maine rumored to awaken the memories of everyone who sets foot on its deserted shores. When two young adults named J.J. and Emily set foot on the island for an intimate camping weekend, they inadvertently dredge up repressed emotions that send them into a destructive spiral. The Missing is the latest game from Deadly Premonition director Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro. As Swery fan have come to expect, The Missing features its fair share of bizarre and awkward moments, but it ultimately tells a poignant story using a mechanic that asks players to continually dismember their character.

As J.J. travels across Memoria Island looking for her missing friend, she encounters a series of deadly environmental hazards like electrified pools of water, razor-sharp buzzsaws, and fiery deathtraps. While most would meet a grizzly end in this harsh world, J.J. has the remarkable ability to regenerate her body and recover from any injury. Growing back lost limbs at the push of a button is a lot of fun, but how The Missing incorporates these body horrors into its puzzle is often brilliant. For example, at several points, I had to set J.J.’s body on fire to light up darkened corridors or use her charred flesh to set overgrown brambles ablaze.

One of my favorite ways to injure J.J. was to break her neck, which causes the entire world to flip upside-down. This leads to a series of clever environmental mazes that ask you to continually flip between these two perspectives. Fortunately, The Missing doesn’t belabor its gimmicks. As soon as I got the handle on one puzzle type, White Owls introduced a new element or put a new spin on an old mechanic in a fun way.

The Missing doesn’t hold your broken hands when you get stuck; it encourages trial and error. Fortunately, most of The Missing’s environmental puzzles are easily solved through logical deduction and exploration. On the other hand, The Missing fails to properly explain a few basic mechanics. I got stuck for far too long during one early puzzle because I didn’t realize I could throw objects, since you have to hold down a button to do so. Fortunately, there were only a handful of moments where I could have used a tooltip, and The Missing’s environmental challenges are rewarding enough that I found it easy to quickly move on to the next thing.

A sense of dread and sorrow underlies J.J.’s entire adventure, but the themes of destruction and regeneration tie into the narrative in a clever way. The Missing’s story features its fair share of weirdness, such as a doctor with a moose head or a talking stuffed animal, but, in the end, The Missing told a moving story about J.J.’s personal struggles that caught me off guard more than once. Like its surprisingly heartfelt narrative, this quirky indie side-scroller came out of nowhere, but I’m glad I didn’t miss out on The Missing.

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Astro Bot Rescue Mission Review – A New Experience In A Familiar Genre

The platformer has been a video game staple for decades and for good reason. Understanding the genre’s mechanics are quick and easy, it affords the opportunity to create fascinating worlds worth exploring, and for some reason it is just super fun to make someone (or something) jump at your command. Astro Bot Rescue Mission takes these old traditions and makes them feel novel and fresh thanks to the way it combines mechanics and how it places the player in its world with the aid of virtual reality. The joyful experience is benefited by the necessity of a headset and is an excellent showcase for how virtual reality can improve and change a familiar experience.

In Rescue Mission, you are one of many Astro Bots, distinguished by a cape, who must rescue their brethren from an alien menace who threw all the other Astro Bots to nearby planets while breaking apart their mothership in the process. To do this, you must visit assorted planets that offer platforming challenges and eventually defeat each planet’s boss. You control your caped Astro Bot from the third-person perspective, following them through the stages turning your head or peaking around corners to make sure you’re keeping track. You are meant to be a character in the game and occasionally you must headbutt your way through an obstacle, or dodge a projectile, but the action and challenge is mostly relegated to the Astro Bot you control. You are acting as a spectator to the platforming, and it works exceptionally as a means of placing you in the world to absorb the atmosphere (and fantastic soundtrack) while you play an incredibly polished and charming action game.

Your interaction in the world is occasionally amplified by giving the controller (which appears in-world as a visible object) assorted powers. You may have to use a hose attachment to put out fires and water plants, or fire off a tethering rope to pull down obstacles and create tightropes for your Astro Bot to cross. These portions are a highlight as you genuinely feel like you are working in tandem with your Astro Bot to overcome challenges by interreacting directly with the world. It creates an enthralling sense of teamwork, even though you are in control of everything.

Along with jumping your way through the worlds, you must also rescue hidden Astro Bots. Finding them is a fun puzzle-solving exercise that also takes advantage of the virtual reality platform. Hearing the bots shout for help prompts you to stop, listen, and physically look around the environment to find them. For the most difficult bots, I would sometimes stand up to get a better view of my surroundings to pin them down. I especially liked the bots that hid themselves at the ends of long hallways perpendicular to the main path. These moments were strangely exhilarating as sending your bot so far away feels surprisingly dangerous. You’re a team, you and your caped Astro Bot, and to watch it travel so far away to save a friend made me feel proud. Pride was not something I expected to feel while controlling a cute little robot in a jumping adventure.

 

You can compare Rescue Mission to Mario titles like 3D World and 3D Land, and the correlation is more than a cursory way to say the three games are all platformers. Nintendo excels at using Mario to create unique experiences in the genre he helped establish, while also highlighting its hardware in interesting ways, and it is always done with an impressive level of polish. Rescue Bots ticks all those boxes, and also nails the difficult to quantify sensation of just being damn fun. Nearly every level introduces new mechanics, or uses the previously established mechanics in surprising ways, and nothing overstays its welcome. The moment you start to tire of something, you are off to an entirely different environment with a whole new set of fun challenges. All of that culminates in a final boss that uses everything you learned up to that point for a thrilling and exciting challenge.

Astro Bot Rescue Mission feels like it came out of nowhere to quietly prove that familiar genres can feel like new experiences with the aid of virtual reality. While the medium is capable of creating entirely new interactive experiences, Rescue Mission serves as a great reminder that the styles of games we already like can be translated to VR, and when it is done as well as it has been here, you get a chance to experience something that feels genuinely new and exciting.

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Super Mario Party Review – Same Party, New Decorations

The Mario Party franchise has always been about the convergence of board games and minigames with Nintendo characters thrown into the mix. Recent entries deviated from the tried and true formula to unpopular results, but Super Mario Party returns the series to its roots. While the return to the standard board-game format is a welcome adjustment, Super Mario Party supplements the flagship approach with fun peripheral modes to create a mostly enjoyable party game anyone can pick up and play.

The mainstay board-game mode delivers the classic Mario Party experience of four players moving independently through different boards to collect the most stars before you reach the turn limit. While I’m glad this mode has returned, I’m disappointed by the board options. You can only play on four boards, and they all feel small, uninspired, and cramped. Progress through them is mostly linear, with only a few branching paths that eventually converge. While the linearity is alleviated in the free-roam Partner Party mode, the boards are largely forgettable.

One of the more frustrating elements of the Mario Party franchise persists with random dice rolls and arbitrary chance elements still ultimately determining the victor. This remains evident in how you collect stars, which are bought from Toadette if you encounter her on the board. After each star, Toadette relocates randomly across the board, further drilling in the luck element; if you get a star, there’s a small chance that Toadette will relocate just a few spaces down, essentially gifting you another star on your next turn.

As with all Mario Party games, the minigames that break up the board-game action are the real centerpieces. Competing in bite-sized competitions to earn coins is often exciting, and the stable of 80 new minigames features more hits than misses. My favorite minigames, like slapping your opponents at the right time for it to be captured on camera, create hilarious situations that stick with me after I turn the game off. Others, like blasting rivals away with high-powered water guns, deliver good action with simple-yet-solid gameplay. The highlights shine bright enough that when the occasional dud pops up, I don’t mind.

With such a strong stable of minigames, Super Mario Party also includes ways to enjoy them without moving across a board. River Survival puts all four players in a raft as they paddle down a treacherous river by moving the Joy-Cons like oars. Rowing down the river as one while steering clear of rocks and enemies makes for plenty of amusing moments, and I like how you can aim for balloons along the way to pause the rafting action and play a cooperative minigame to earn extra time to reach the goal. But with only 10 distinct 4-player co-op minigames, you get repeats often. This small catalogue also limits the replay value of the mode, as you can only play them so many times before they become routine for your group.

Sound Stage amps up the motion controls as it sends the characters on stage to compete in rhythm-based games. The presentation of this mode is exciting; the crowd cheers along as you progress through a handful of competitions, and I love how the music accompanying the minigames is tied into one song with a remix of the original Super Mario Bros. Underworld theme serving as a bridge. However, this mode runs into the same problem with variety, with only has 10 rhythm-based games to pull from. Despite this, I love playing through the energetic mode as an intermission between other activities.

 

Toad’s Rec Room is the most unique new mode, giving you the ability to combine two Switch screens to make your own battlefields or add additional puzzles. However, it serves as little more than a diversion. The other modes deliver more substantial experiences centered on the solid library of minigames.

If you want to party by yourself, the new Challenge Road puts you through all 80 minigames organized in a hub world. While some challenges simply have you beating the A.I. rivals, many of them add an extra layer of difficulty, like collecting a certain number of coins or not hitting any obstacles. These extra layers add additional excitement to the games, though since Challenge Road is single-player only, it’s frustrating when you get teamed up with an incompetent A.I. character. Thankfully, those moments are few enough that Challenge Road is a worthwhile solo mode that highlights the best part of Super Mario Party and acts as a solid side to the multiplayer meat of the experience.

Despite lackluster board design and side modes that can become repetitive, Super Mario Party is a fun group game that showcases a diverse collection of minigames. With so many different modes, it’s easy for you and your friends to consume the entertaining minigames Super Mario Party delivers.

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