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Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Sadly not the full Metroidvania experience I was expecting (the reason it ended up on my wishlist in the first place, following a review), Momodora still feels like one. Creepy town with a creepy castle, a curse, a map to explore, and pixel graphics? It certainly has the look of one.

What’s missing is all the extra powers that open up new areas. Sure, there are some, but very few. That means it is more a standard explorey platformer, hence my disappointment, but luckily it was still good!

Apart from the ending. I got a bad ending after defeating the final boss, but there was no explanation why it happened and seemingly no exposition as I was playing that it was possible. After that, I returned to the game and found a couple of extra things I’d missed and that allowed me to get the good ending, but it took some extensive exploring without really knowing what I was looking for, or where to look.

Apparently this Momodora is the third game in a series of (currently) four games. The first two are mostly lost to the winds, and the fourth came out fairly recently. I might pick it up if it’s cheap.

River City Girls 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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My daughter and I were big fans of the original River City Girls so the sequel was sat on my wishlist for ages waiting for a bit sale. That came around, and we played it through together.

It’s more of the same, really. A side-scrolling, semi-open-world beat-em-up with RPG elements set in the world of Kunio-kun/River City Ransom and made by Wayforward, just like the first game. It has a great cartoon style, loads of in-jokes (with both River City adjacent links, like Double Dragon and Crash And The Boys, and Wayforward properties like Mighty Switch Force) and satisfying and upgradable combat.

As it’s set in the same city as the first game, many locations are back – like school and shopping centre) although they have been modified so aren’t a complete copy-and-paste. There are plenty of new areas though. Similarly, there are both returning and new characters, although I don’t think most of the new ones are as good as the ones in the original. Also returning is another soundtrack from Megan McDuffee, which is also excellent.

The plot is mostly concerned with revenge on the Girls taking down the bad guy in the last game, although there are a couple of twists.

Gameplay-wise there are a few tweaks to improve stuff from before. Shop purchases work slightly differently, and there’s seemingly a lot more money available with which to buy them. The game seems easier too, meaning less death (which causes both progress and money loss).

It’s not all improvements though, sadly. Loading times are particularly bad, but also there are a number of bugs like items getting stuck out of reach, sound cutting out, and a few full crashes. Nothing major because of frequent save points but annoying nonetheless. Some of the new areas, like the overdone game trope of the “forest maze”, aren’t great either, and I’m sure there’s more backtracking this time round too, hindered by the aforementioned loading times.

That said, the fun, humour and style of the game massively outweigh the issues. It’s maybe not quite as enjoyable as the original, but doesn’t miss it by much.

Metaphor ReFantazio (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I seem to have really gotten back into long RPGs again in the last year or so. Sometimes they can seem daunting to start as you know you’ve 75 or 100 hours ahead to invest, and usually they’re a slow burn getting used to the mechanics. But, Metaphor came highly recommended and once Xenoblade 2 was out of the way I gave it a go.

I wrote a bit about it the other day already, so I don’t have a lot more to add now I’ve finished it except to say it continued to entertain, and there were plenty of plot twists along the way. Also, I was worried that going into the final area would lock off both the remaining time in the game (all events have deadlines, time passes each time you do anything, and you’ve a finite number of days to complete the game) and the ability to grind to level up, but luckily the game deals with that do you need not be concerned.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s a good as Persona 4, but then, very little is. It improves on the mechanics of that game, but as intriguing as the characters and world in Metaphor are, those in Persona 4 just beat it. It’s still amazing though.

Half-Life: the soldiers have left

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I have continued to play through this very slowly, with many, many uses of the quick save function. My hazard suit doesn’t seem to have much of a protective element, especially against soldiers and annoying big aliens with buzzy guns, so I find myself reloading having lost half my health very regularly. There are, thankfully, a large number of dead humans around who weren’t able to use the health pack they were carrying before dying, so as I make my way through the levels I can top up my health regularly. Ammo is more of a concern, especially given my ineptitude with aiming.

I have continued through waves of soldiers, and have noted over time that they are less concerned with the cleanup operation they were tasked with than they are with just getting out alive. Sure, if they see me they will fight, but in the last few levels of the game they’ve been getting fewer and fewer in number, with most of the evidence of their existence being trip mines and dead bodies. There have been a few sections set outside, including on a cliffside, where the helicopters have been buzzing around, and I’ve taken shelter from them incredibly quickly.

Instead the aliens are back, in greater numbers and variety. I have tackled a large shark-type thing swimming around in green water, using a handy crossbow that was dangling above. I have accidentally set free a big brute who I initially thought was a boss character, but who I have gone on to encounter many more times. I have run away from an even bigger brute, the same as the one I encountered in the rail cart, and then used airstrikes to take him out.

This remains a very pretty game, and its use of colour is top-notch.

Having traversed the outside, I’m now in Lambda Core, trying to get a nuclear power plant to do something. Bits of it have been flooded and I need to clear them out. The platforming is the weakest part of this game, and unfortunately I’m having to do a fair bit of it now. I am dying a lot more as well, and saving is becoming more and more frequent, not just because of me missing platforms but because the enemies are doing so much damage.

In 2007 I said that maybe one day I’ll turn god mode on – I’m not there yet, but very close. It’s taken a long time to play through this so far, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll enjoy it for …

Lonely Mountains Snow Riders: how do you get there?

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On Friday I met John and Kieron online for an evening of gaming.

We have a great many games that we have played through, and even a few we have completed, most notably Human Fall Flat multiple times (since they keep adding new levels, so we have to complete it again). We haven’t completed Borderlands 2, since sometimes the intensity of the shooting just means it feels too much effort. We have completed Overcooked 2 other than one level where we’ve only got two stars (and the score for three stars seems unreachable). We have completed Halos 3, ODST, Reach and 4, but haven’t really started 5 yet. We’ve started Moving Out 2, Star Wars Squadrons, Astroneer, Plate Up!, and Powerwash Simulator, among others. We regularly play Peggle 2, and Golf With Your Friends.

With so many games left hanging, obviously Friday was all about new ones.

We played All You Need is Help for a bit. It is horrendously confusing on how to start a game, particularly since you can’t start with only three players and one of us needed to control two characters. I accidentally discovered this while we were all pressing random things to try to start a game, which meant I spent most of my time getting very confused over which stick was controlling which character.

All You Need is Help: all you need are better instructions on how to start the game

We got a notification that we had completed the first set of levels, but couldn’t work out how to unlock any others. So we didn’t, and we moved on.

The surprise hit of the evening was Lonely Mountains Snow Riders, a follow-up to Lonely Mountains Downhill. The Downhill game saw you getting a bike down dangerously thin and steep paths, avoiding trees and bushes and cliffs and sudden jumps. Snow Riders loses the bike, gives you skis, and adds in online multiplayer which immediately makes the mountains a bit less lonely. It seems to control much better than Downhill, from what I remember, and paths are wider and more forgiving. That’s not to say it’s easy; working out how to hit a jump at the right angle and speed so you can clear a river or gully took multiple deaths in almost all cases. On one of the courses we had all died a minimum of 23 times.

The mode we played was a race, but it wasn’t as easy as just holding the crouch button and steering. Getting down the mountain had multiple paths between each checkpoint, some of which may have been faster but which required skill that I certainly didn’t have. When you die you reset to the last checkpoint passed, meaning that each waypoint down the mountain gave a feeling of relief; there were occasions when one of us crashed just before crossing the checkpoint, at which point the silence on the microphone was noticeable.

Lonely Mountains Snow Riders: I found it far too stressful to play and take screenshots while navigating down the mountain.

I may well go back to Snow Riders by myself at some point, but there’s a lot of content there and I can foresee us trying that game again on a future gaming evening.