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Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara (Switch): COMPLETED!

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There’s a whole series of games set in the “Mara” universe, by Chibig, most of which I’ve played and completed and enjoyed. They’re not the same, although most are of the “chop chop, dig dig” genre. A couple of years ago I played Summer in Mara, which was that and also a boating, exploration game with missions and stuff. This game, takes Koa – the main character from Summer in Mara – and puts her in the same world but now it’s a platformer. And a sequel. Sort of.

There’s a plot about pirates setting you challenges, but ultimately it’s a pretty standard 3D jump and run game with a nice setting, some silly characters, and slightly clunky physics in that way that nobody who isn’t Nintendo can make a platformer that feels great like a Nintendo platformer. It doesn’t do anything new or adventurous with the genre, and isn’t outstanding in any way, but that’s OK – it’s all happy fun stuff to the end.

SteamWorld Build (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I do love the SteamWorld series of games. And the world they’re all set in. Of course I was going to get this, although my interest was slightly tempered by the fact it’s the first SteamWorld game not made by the core staff of the previous ones. Would that be OK?

I’m pleased to reveal, that yes. The style, humour and world have all come out unscathed. The references to other events in the series – particularly SteamWorld Dig 2 which this is a sort of side-story to – fit in and you wouldn’t actually know it wasn’t the same team unless you’d been told. Like I just did there.

Build is a two part game. Initially, it’s a city builder. You make houses and shops and facilities, and Steambots move in and populate the place. It’s very much SimCity 2000 only with robots and fewer things to take care of. Soon, you have to get into the second bit of the game, which is mining. Under the city are three layers of mine, each more dangerous than the last, where you send miners, engineers and guards to strip the area of resources and stop the evil creatures that lurk from destroying your robots and machinery.

The mining is further split into two sorts of game. There’s the expansion 4X-lite stuff, digging out more mine and developing new machines to gather different resources (as well as devices to shuttle those back to the surface more efficiently), but then there’s also a number of “hives”, which frequently spew out a stream of baddies and these bits are almost Tower Defence in nature. You have to make sure you’ve plenty of weapons set up to target them, and some engineers to repair the turrets (and your guard bots) if they get a bit eaten.

There’s a lot to juggle, nipping back and forth between the surface (to expand your population and unlock and develop new tools and buildings) and the mine, as well as keeping an eye on the needs of the residents and ensuring your factories don’t run out of the resources they need in order to make such mission-critical things as burgers and casinos.

The aim of the game is to build a spaceship then fill it with fuel. Parts for the ship are buried in the mine, digging them up triggers a wave of attacking baddiebots, and fuel – once you have enough scientists and the right buildings – can be refined from a resource. Complete this, and the ending of Dig 2 happens as you all escape into space.

It’s bloody great. So great, that I immediately started what is essentially New Game +, where I was rewarded with a buff from completing the game on one of the starter maps to use on another playthrough. Which I then also completed. And then, started a New Game ++. Yes, it’s that good.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+ (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Persona! There we go. I was going to try not to mention it at all but I realised that would be impossible so thought I’d just come straight out with it. Yes indeed: Tokyo Xanadu is very Persona. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it so much.

So, stop me when you’ve heard this one before. Some school children who ordinarily wouldn’t mix with each other because one is really shy and one is perceived to be a bully and one is overly peppy and one is a nerd and one is fierce and unapproachable and one is secretly some sort of ninja, are all thrown together when another, evil, world starts to bleed into their own and they go through portals which only they can see to defeat them. All while still trying to live normal lives and go to school and have relationships and do part time jobs and one of them is a famous idol so there’s that going on too. Persona, right?

And I’m perfectly fine with that. It isn’t exactly Persona, with less emphasis on building bonds between characters (although the game does touch on that a bit) and the combat is all real-time and not turn-based, but the format and the feel of the game is just the same. The combat is fast and controls well in terms of pulling off combos and special moves, swapping characters for different elemental attacks. There’s loads of customisation you can delve into for the weapons too, with each having a number of slots to which you can apply effects and upgrade those effects. I didn’t get too deep into that but I’d imagine it’s essential on the harder difficulty settings.

One downside is that the bits of platforming in some of the “dungeons” is clunky in that way that Japanese games which aren’t platformers but have platforming sections tend to be. Imprecise and wonky. Thankfully, there’s not a lot of it although one of the final dungeons uses it a lot. You don’t die by falling off, but you do waste so much time doing it over and over.

Speaking of final dungeons, Tokyo Xanado eX+ (perhaps specifically the eX+ release, as it has more content) has multiple endings, just like Persona. There’s the normal ending, but there’s the true ending after that, and then the real_true_final_ending_(2)_FINAL_use this one.docx ending. The road to the proper real good final one actually adds about 5-6 hours to the story, which was a sizable 65-70 hours already. It’s a big game! Like Persona.

Is it as good as Persona (4 Golden specifically), though? Well, in some ways. It’s faster paced, and has better graphics. It doesn’t have the incredibly stylish UI though, and the characters in Persona 4, perhaps because you get to know them more intimately, are mostly much more memorable. There’s less of a fear that by doing the wrong thing or by missing some conversation that you’re going to lock off the best ending in Tokyo Xanadu, although I suspect that’s possible, it just seems harder to miss if you just follow everything rather than try to do specific things at specific times like in Persona.

No, that didn’t answer the question, did it. I enjoyed both games a lot. I’ll bung Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE into the mix as well, as that was my first Persona (even though it wasn’t really Persona but sort of was a spin off of a different branch of the same series as Persona). They’re all great, and they’re all similar, but the differences don’t make any one notably better than the others. Buy them all, eh? Why not.

Sketch, Share, Solve: COMPLETED! (Playdate)

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What is this? A Playdate game? That I purchased? With actual money? Is that even legal? It seems so!

Sketch, Share, Solve is a Picross game, and a $3 Picross game at that. It also has mostly the same (correct) controls as the Jupiter-written 3DS and Switch Picross games, which is good as that’s the only way to play them as far as I’m concerned.

As it’s on the Playdate, it’s all in black and white and the size of each puzzle is a bit restrictive because of the resolution. That said, every puzzle is 15×10, so although it doesn’t reach the 30×20 (or bigger) of the Jupiter ones, there aren’t any 5×5 or 10×10 which often only take 10 seconds to solve. There’s 250 of them too, so definitely $3 worth.

Also unlike Jupiter’s titles, the images you create are 1-bit pixel art representing exactly what you see. By that, I mean it isn’t a representation of a more complex image which is “filled in” with colour and detail when complete like the Jupiter puzzles are. That doesn’t make them any better or worse to solve, it’s just an observation.

What does make them worse to solve, however, is the fact that a handful of the puzzles require either leaps of faith because the logic suggests more than one possible location for filled squares, or they rely on the puzzle’s symmetry to solve. Neither of these are good practice in Picross titles, and although not many suffer from this it is a shame. Mind you, again, $3.

The only other negative I have isn’t the game itself but the Playdate. It’s quite obvious that the screen is Not Great when not in the right light. Natural light, at an angle, seems to give an incredible picture, but artificial light is nowhere near as good and since it’s November, the only real option. It’s the main reason mine has been a bit unloved of late.

Trolley Delayma (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Delayma because it’s like “dilemma”, you see. And autokerwrongt keeps changing it to that.

Trolley Delayma was an entry in a Ludum Dare game jam, where the theme was “delay”. They’ve used that, combined with the philosophical “trolley problem” to make a game which looks somewhat like, but plays very differently to, Baba Is You. “Trolley” is American for tram, in case you were confused why this isn’t set in Asda, and the associated problem is whether to run down one important person or several less important people.

The delay bit comes in to try and not run anyone over at all, as you cause the tram (or trams) to get stuck in a loop of track. Some levels are puzzles, as you try to flip bits of track correctly, and some are a race against time as you have to do them quickly enough – all while avoiding the tram yourself.

It’s a clever premise, which ends up being sort of the reverse of those slide-puzzle type train track games where you craft a route to the end before it crashes. Oh, and it’s also free.