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The Magnificent Trufflepigs (Switch): COMPLETED!

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At first glance, and indeed, at several subsequent glances, The Magnificent Trufflepigs looks and feels very much like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture if it was a series of The Detectorists. It has the same slow, pondering walk through realistic British countryside aesthetic, no combat, and a story which just gets more interesting as you progress. Plus, you have a metal detector and have to dig stuff up.

But the detectoring is just a delivery mechanism for the story, which has you called up by an old friend to help search a local farm for an earring to match one found years earlier. You set off, separately to cover more ground, to discover buried nails, scraps of machinery and bottle caps while discussing how your friend’s life is starting to unravel a bit.

That’s all there is to it – about two hours of digging and chatting in a relaxed, stressless way – until the story reaches the end and there’s a revelation which I have to say I did see coming so wasn’t really surprised. It didn’t matter because it was the journey, the chat and the low-impact gameplay which was excellent and a nice diversion from most other games. And it’s oh so pretty and atmospheric.

Mutant Year Zero – Road to Eden (PS5) – Completed Review

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Mutant Year Zero - Road to Eden is a X-Com style turn-based strategy game. You start the game with two characters Dux & Bormin and more will join later but you can only have a maximum of three in the field. There are various unique skills for each character giving you abilities like mind control & double shot.

If you have played X-Com you will be familiar with the gameplay, there are some changes like you can walk around with the characters and initiate combat when close to an enemy. If you take out these enemies silently then you can go back out of combat and walk around to collect loot & survey the area to plan your next attack.

You can upgrade weapons at the base, unlock perks by collecting artefacts and purchase items from the shop like grenades, scopes and medical kits. The map is split out into different areas as the story progresses and when you level up you can visit side areas for rare loot like a new weapon or armour.  Occasionally you will also encounter a boss fight and these encounters will need careful planning otherwise you will die. The game can be tough in some areas but if you take it slow and pick off enemies in solo encounters with silent weapons & character skills you will quickly master the game.

X-Com 2 was very buggy for me on PS4 & I ended up with a save file that was corrupted after 25 hours. Thankfully I had no such issues with Mutant Year Zero and enjoyed completing the game.

Because I enjoyed playing Yakuza Like A Dragon earlier this year, I was interested in the previous games so next for me is Yakuza 0.

The Room Two (iPad): COMPLETED!

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I quite enjoyed the first game when I picked it up on the Switch cheap a while back, but never saw this sequel (or rather, second half of the story) appear on there. I noticed it was on Apple Arcade and so thought I’d play it there instead what with it being essentially free.

Controlling it on a touch screen was actually more complex than perhaps it should have been, especially the zooming in and out which felt in inverse of pinch-to-zoom controls every other app ever has. Very little of the game is actually speed dependant though, so it wasn’t really a problem – I just preferred the joycon pointer waggle controls on the Switch.

The story continues on exactly from the end of the previous game, so it seems like one game cleaved in two rather than a separate instalment. It’s also more of the same thing – escape room style puzzles, with lots of key-finding and hidden drawers and arranging thing in a particular way. It did seem a bit easier than the first part, but a few parts of that were a little obtuse so maybe that’s intentional.

Axiom Verge 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I do love a good metroidvania, and I’ve played a fair few in the last year or so, and the original Axiom Verge was a great metroidvania. It’ll come a no surprise, then, that I pounced on Axiom Verge 2 the second I was able to get it from the eShop, and here I am telling you I’ve completed it.

And not just completed, but 100%ed – all items, all the map, everything. Which is a sign of a fantastic game in this genre, as far as I’m concerned.

Axiom Verge 2 isn’t really a sequel to the first game, as it’s more of a tangental story that is linked but separate for the most part. It does away with the “glitch” mechanics of the original, but replaces them with a sort of subspace, low res, corruption of the main world that you can slip in and out of in a similar way to how the two worlds work in Link to the Past. This lets you reach areas which would otherwise be blocked, by sort of skipping round them via a fourth dimension.

The plot is complicated, and references worlds that are linked, different civilisations on at least three of these worlds (one of which is Earth), but it’s interesting if difficult to get your head round. I recall the first game had a similar plot complexity and I’m sure recalling that better would shine more light here, but actually, you can mostly ignore it without detriment.

It’s the gameplay that really shines here, and Axiom Verge 2 eschews the normal combat-filled exploration of the game type with the scales tilted far more in favour of exploring than smacking stuff. In fact, you don’t really have much in the way of ranged weapons like before, and every boss in the game (bar one, I think) can be ignored entirely unless you’re after 100% completion. There are even more pacifistic ways of taking down foes too, as you’re able to hack most of them and turn them off, slow them down, or even turn them against each other.

You have to be this spiderbot thing when you’re in the Breach low-res areas.

Exploration is rewarding, both in terms of eureka moments when a puzzle is solved or an obtuse route is discovered, as well as a new power-up or upgrade is collected. I’m one for colouring in all of the map in these games and there’s a great map to fill in here. In fact, unlike other metroidvania games, the map itself is like a very small set of thumbnails of each location, rather than just a blank box.

And the music! Thomas Happ created some bizarre but incredible tracks for the first game and he’s managed the same here. It’s incredibly atmospheric, and the scratchy chiptunes for the “breach” areas are superb too, matching the low resolution aesthetic perfectly.

Someone broke some stuff then.

One of my favourite games this year, for sure.

Doodle God Universe (iPad): COMPLETED!

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I’ve just got myself a new iPad so I’ve been flitting around some Apple Arcade games, and landed on this one. I’m not really sure what to make of it, because it’s a mostly-nothing game, and yet I got a bit sucked in.

The aim is to create everything. Because, you know, you’re God and all. You do this by combining things you’ve already created. Many of these make sense, like fire and sand make glass, but a lot don’t – like life and stone creating egg. Since literally all you do is combine things, it rapidly deteriorates into try-everything-on-everything like one of those terrible illogical point and click adventure games.

It’s very polished, and the voiceover guy who definitely isn’t trying to be Morgan Freeman is great (if a bit repetitive), but there’s not really any game here. You just find (i.e. brute force) all the combinations and then you’re done. So I’m done.