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Picross S5 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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There is nothing to say about Jupiter’s Picross series that I haven’t already said. There’s not much new here that hasn’t been done before, it’s just more brain-wrinkling and relaxing (at the same time, somehow) picross puzzles.

One thing I would like, perhaps, is fewer of the 5×5, 10×10 and even 15×15 puzzles, and more of the 40×30 ones. There are only a handful here, and you only get them if you have save data from previous games in the series, but I’d love to spend an hour on each of these rather than two or three minutes (or two or three seconds, on 5×5 puzzles) on 20 or 30 smaller ones.

Oh, and S5 has both a toilet and toilet paper pictures. Win.

Night in the Woods (PS5): COMPLETED!

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After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.

It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.

Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.

Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.

Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.

As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition (Switch): COMPLETED!

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And that’s it. I’ve officially run out of Xenoblade to play. In about a year and a half I’ve completed the entire series of games in some sort of obsessive newfan flurry of activity. Why did I sleep on this series for so long? It’s bloody great.

Anyway, I’ve said a lot about the three numbered games in the series, and I have to say I was a little worried coming to X because I’d heard it wasn’t quite the same, didn’t exist in the same chronology, and was originally the second game released so might not have the graphics, controls and gameplay improvements the series gained over time. So, how was it?

The first thing to address is how it fits into the series, because despite all the internet fora saying it doesn’t, it bloody does. I mentioned in the writeup of the Xenoblade 3 DLC that X is referenced there quite explicitly, but it’s not hard to see that the event that caused the creation of the worlds of 1, 2 and 3 is (or at least, could be) the same event that causes the mass exodus of humans from Earth, setting up the plot for Xenoblade X. Two alien races are fighting over Earth, which then blows up, and you are one of an ark of survivors (perhaps the only ark that made it) that escaped only to crash on a planet called Mira. A planet which, somehow, has Nopon. Curious. Plus, in chapter 13, the events of Xenoblades 1 and 2 are directly referenced.

The second thing is the gameplay. In terms of basic combat mechanics, Xenoblade X is very similar to Xenoblade 1, with the attack moves laid out across the bottom of the screen, each with cooldowns, and so on. However, it’s vastly more complex, as you can tweak your skills, arts, weapons, armour and (later) your big mech-like “Skell” to the nth degree with items similar to the weapon gems in the original game, only now you can gem up everything. And add more gem slots. I read a while back that the developers wanted to use X1 as a basic for the gameplay here, but make the focus of the game the combat rather than the plot, and it shows.

Because, you see, the plot isn’t fantastic. Well, it’s fantastic in the old sense of the word, but it’s a bit poo compared to X1/2/3. You crash on this planet, your ship has become a small city, and you have to find other parts of the ship that broke off in order to ensure the continued survival of the human race. Only you do very little actual hunting for the parts, and you get the “main” missing part right near the end of the main game without really working too hard for it. No, instead the game consists of more side quests (some of which, although classed as side quests aren’t actually optional) than probably the other three games put together mainly as a way of getting you to level up so you can progress the story. The day to day stuff, these quests, exploration, chats with NPCs and asides with your teammates are great, but the over-arching plot isn’t amazing.

Graphically, it’s bump up from the original Wii U version of the game. In addition to that, I’m playing it on the Switch 2 which although doesn’t do anything specifically to the graphics, it does make the framerate rock solid (something that wasn’t the case with the other games on the Switch 1) and some of the sunrises and sunsets look absolutely incredible, so I do wonder if there’s some upscaling or smoothing or something going on.

The main differences in the game come down to the setting, the addition of Skells, the number of possible characters in your party (something like 16 are possible, with four in your party at any one time), the music (which is more rock, guitar and rap – some of it sounds very Sonic Adventure 2 Pumpkin Hill), and a thing where you put probes into the world map.

This latter feature splits the map of Mira up into hexagons, with some of them suitable places to plant a probe. You obtain different types from quests and loot, and they can mine (miranium, used to make weapons and weapon mods) or generate money, every hour or so. Or, later on, buff your attack, defence, and so on in the region they’re planted. You can swap round your probes (for a small fee) when you want, and you get bonuses for probes of the same type placed next to each other. There are a few side missions that challenge you to arrange them in a way so as to generate large amounts of miranium or money in a single “cycle”. It’s diverting, and reminds me of the business/empire building side stories of the Yakuza games.

In all, I really did enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles X. There’s nothing really wrong with it but it just didn’t entertain me and push me to reveal the “truth” of the story in the same way the other games did. The combat is satisfying, and generally quicker and more flexible than in 1/2/3, it looks great, sounds great, and is a lot of fun, but there’s just something missing. Maybe it’s the characters, as your main character is generally mute (although you can choose his/her “combat calls” voice from a number of actors, include those from other games in the series) and almost everyone has a boring American accent. No Welsh catgirls or aussie pirates here. Two of the other alien races – the Prone and the Ma-non have horrible pitch-shifted voices too. Maybe it’s missing something else. I can’t quite explain it.

That said, it’s still better than 95% of other games. It’s just the worst Xenoblade, is all.

Now what? There’s no Xenoblade 4 or X2 on the (known) horizon. Boo.

Word Trails (iOS): COMPLETED!

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As I have a Netflix subscription, I get access to a number of games on iOS as a bonus. Most of them are shovelware nonsense. Some are tie-ins with Netflix shows like Squid Game or Queen’s Gambit. Some, are “indie hits” like Kentucky Route Zero. Some fit into more than one of these categories.

Word Trails is probably shovelware. It’s one of $hlmun games which litter the App Store that are effectively identical, and when you see the screenshots you’ll realise you’ve seen a hundred variants of it already, often as an advert in some other shovelware game. So I played it almost daily for two whole years and finally completed it. All 6070 levels.

Some people have asked me, “deKay. You’re a man with an extensive knowledge of games and you know what is good and what is bad in the gaming sphere. You have played many strange and unusual games, often eschewing the popular and mainstream for the niche and unusual. With that in mind, why the hell are you playing some ostensibly IAP-based, albeit with the IAPs removed for Netflix, tosh like this when you yourself frequently say telephone games are not games and don’t deserve your time or eyeballs?”. And to those people I say “Because it’s there”.

Now, readers of my diary will remember when I played many hundreds of levels of a dreadful iOS based, Doctor Who themed hidden object game which falls into a similar category as this and you may wonder why I’d put myself through something like that again. Word Trails at least requires a little bit of intelligence to play, even if it’s just as dull, but it’s just a Boring Boggle Clone.

The idea is to make words using the letters in the “wheel” at the bottom of the screen. Find all the words to fit in the puzzle, and you move on to the next level. That’s it – the whole game. 6070 times. You can, if you like, do a bonus puzzle each day where you do the same thing but have to try and do the words in a specific order. Manage that, and you get points which eventually unlock pictures of and related text about animals or mountains or something. Worst way to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica ever. Sometimes, in the main puzzles, you unlock gold squares or jigsaw pieces which eventually complete some other puzzle or list of items at, say, a beach, but there’s literally no reason to do this. You get some (in-game) currency, which is totally unnecessary because they’ve ripped all the IAPs out.

Quickly, I found that although the “longest word” was rarely the same (although sometimes I did get the same two or three puzzles repeated in a row), the same combinations of letters came up very frequently. For example, if AEMT are in the list, I could immediately tick off MATE, TEAM, TAME, MEAT. When you’ve done this 3035 times out of 6070, the already very samey game becomes even more samey. The game will add “allowed” words that aren’t on the board to a bonus pot for more currency when it fills up.

To make things wonderfully inconsistent and stupid, sometimes there’s a word you’ve never heard of which turns out to be an archaic legal term. Sometimes you can use both the UK and US spellings of words (like COLOR and COLOUR), sometimes you can’t (like it allows MOULD but not MOLD). Sometimes it seems to allow a word but then in a different puzzle it won’t. And, for some reason, it won’t ever allow the word ROTA, but will allow ROTAS. Actually, plurals themselves are irritatingly facile and when I found the long seven letter word is just one of the six letter words with an S on the end a little piece of me died each time.

Oh, and some rude words it allows, but only as bonus words, not as words on the actual puzzle. Some, it won’t allow at all. There also seem to be an unexpected number of religious words – mainly Christian, relating to church objects or processes – that are allowed, but although BIBLE is possible, neither KORAN or QURAN is allowed. Hmm.

So, should you play this game? Absolutely not. But, it did kill some time for a few minutes in my day. For TWO YEARS.

Gradius: The Interstellar Assault (Switch): COMPLETED!

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No, I don’t know why I played this either. It wasn’t that great, with very flickery graphics, was very short, and did nothing much other games (even at the time of original release) hadn’t already done far better.

Probably a miracle it managed as well as it did on the Game Boy hardware, although, I suspect, impossible to see on the original device’s blurry screen – it’s bad enough on the telly – but still average at best.