It’s been a long time since I last played Oblivion, but it’s just as good as I remember. The increased detail, faster loading, and other improvements here no blunt have something to do with that. It still seems to have most of the original bugs intact, mind.
Souldiers (PS5): COMPLETED!
From the name I fully expected this game to be a soulslike so just clicked nope-skip every time I saw it for sale. But then I stumbled across it on a Metroidvania Games You May Have Missed list and I re-evaluated. Then I noticed it was on sale for about three quid on PSN and so bought it.
First thing I have to say about it is that it’s HUGE. I’m used to 2D Metroidvanias for being 8-10 hours long, maybe 15 at the most, but Souldiers took me over 40 to complete. The world is made up of several large areas like a mine and a pyramid and a sky fortress and each one is about as big as a reasonably sized game by itself. In fact, if I’d completed the first area and that was the end, I’d have felt that was plenty of game, but no – it kept on going.
The plot is something about how you are one of a band of soldiers who, in the middle of a war, end up trapped in a cave. A fairy-like being appears to you and offers you an escape, but to another world. With no hope of getting out any other way, you accept and all step through a portal, ending up in what seems to be a sort of limbo that all sorts of races go to after they die.
This world is under threat though, bad thing with all the power is taking over the place, and so you volunteer to help. Which means you mostly have to do it all yourself. Sure, some of your fellow soldier and new friends help out a bit, but you know how it goes.
It’s a vast Metroidvania with each area being very different in terms of style and gimmicks. There are loads of power-ups, upgrades and secrets, some tricky bosses, and a cast of varied characters, as well as a few twists along the way. Definitely recommended to fans of the genre. Like me!
Goat Simulator 3 (PS5): COMPLETED!
Apparently, there’s no Goat Simulator 2 for the sole reason that it will annoy people. Makes sense, when the main purpose of the game itself is to annoy people.
Like the first game, you’re a goat who can lick stuff and headbutt stuff, with janky physics and silly things to do. Although there was a sort of plot to the original, it was pretty sandbox-y and directionless. Goat Simulator 3 is more structured, with events and actions to complete, which essentially give you XP that eventually leads to an end game.
There’s still a lot of messing around, blowing stuff up, knocking people into the sea, ruining birthday parties and (for some reason) stealing cars, but with a checklist of missions and loads of items of clothing and accessories (which can let you glide, shoot, summon ghosts, graffiti and more) to collect. There feels like there’s more purpose than before.
Playing it in co-op is even more ridiculous, as you’d expect, but also lets you tackle two things at once. In a way, it reminded me of playing Lego City Undercover, only with more ungulates.
For all the improvements (direction, graphics, structure), it misses out on some of the more insane things from the original. Perhaps the best thing I ever did in that game is lick the rollercoaster and watch the chaos as my goat was pulled around the track by his tongue, totally breaking the physics and geometry and leaving me in stitches. There’s no moment quite like that, as even though it’s completely hatstand somehow Goat Simulator 3 is more “normal”.
Still, it was a free rental on PS+ and we enjoyed it a lot. Especially the Skyrim opening sequence.
Cocoon (PS5): COMPLETED!
Cocoon is a brain melting turtles-all-the-way-down puzzle game. Imagine your standard buttons to open doors puzzles, where you put an item in a certain place to make a door open or a platform move. Now, make it so that the item you moved is actually a container, which you can enter. Inside, is another world, with it’s own series of puzzles
Complicate that further, by having several of these items, which can be carried inside of each other. And, sometimes, you need to use an interior puzzle as a piece in an exterior puzzle. For example, there’s a bit where a device shoots out a ball over and over. You need to complete an interior puzzle to make the ball exit that puzzle in a certain direction to end up in the exterior world to be part of that puzzle.
Brain melted yet? Well, now make it so there’s a puzzle within that puzzle.
Frankly, I’m amazed I came out of it without goo leaking from my ears. It’s proper four dimensional thinking. At one point I was convinced I’d put the green world inside the orange world and the orange world inside the green world causing some sort of paradox but I was mistaken. Not sure I’d have coped if that were possible!
Oh yeah, and there’s boss fights too, which are also sort of puzzles in their own right. Just in case you needed more puzzles.
Viewfinder (PS5): COMPLETED!
This is one of those puzzle games that makes you feel very clever. Not quite as clever as The Witness, perhaps, or Superliminal, which this feels a bit like.
The premise is that in a future where climate change has broken everything, you’ve been put in a VR machine within which some clever people in the past supposedly found a fix for the planet but it was never put in place. You have to find out what it is. It’s sort of like wandering round a shared Mind Palace or something.
What it actually is, because that’s just the framing gimmick, is a series of first person levels where the aim is to reach a device that lets you move on to the next bit. Only it’s always out of reach or needs power or is behind a wall or has a missing cable or is sound activated but the sound-making-device is too far away.
You solve these puzzles initially by making use of photographs you find. These 2D pictures create a 3D object of the photo when used, so for example, you have to get from one platform to another but there’s a big gap. If you stand in the right place, and hold up the photo of a bridge you found nearby in just the right way that it looks like the bridge fills the gap, then magically it does fill the gap.
Later on, you get a camera with which to make your own photos, and various other things – like batteries, a photocopier, pieces of pictures you have to line up, and walls of a certain colour that can’t be photographed (or “printed over” with a photograph) complicate things.
It’s not especially long, but it has plenty of clever ideas along the way. I also appreciated some of the trophies. They reward for trying to do stupid things. For example, there’s a bit where you need three batteries to power an exit, but you only have one battery. Naturally, you take a photo of the battery and then that photo gives you a second battery. My mind then thought… wait. I’ve more shots left on this camera. Took a photo of both batteries, then all four batteries and so on. Got to 32 or 64 batteries and a trophy popped. Amazing.
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