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Garden Story (Switch): COMPLETED!

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This isn’t quite the game I was expecting. I thought it was a Stardew Valley sort of game, only with a bit more story and all the characters are fruit and veg, but it wasn’t exactly that. Graphically, it’s similar, and yes – you can plant crops – but actually, it’s the story which is the thing.

Some bad goop stuff has been taking over the water supply of the world all the flora (and some frogs and fish things) live in, and it’s your job to put it right. Until you do, no more fruit babies can be born (or something) and the various regions are, not exactly “at war”, but certainly not best mates, with each other as the bad goop stuff is making things difficult.

So off you go, helping people by smacking baddies and moving boxes from one place to another and smashing rocks and a seemingly endless supply of massive jam jars that wash up, so you can get resources to improve your tools and provide for each of the villages. You see, each day you’re given a number of (optional) tasks to complete in the village you currently reside, and when you do it ranks up the village unlocking a few more tool improvements and you earn some money.

On top of these daily tasks, there’s the story to follow, which mostly involves similar sorts of tasks but with a dungeon and a boss to beat in each village. None of these dungeons, or the bosses themselves, are very difficult. I actually found some of the enemies on the “overworld” trickier to deal with, especially when they’re in numbers.

Fix all the problems in each village, upgrade your weapon enough, chat to the right people, and you can go and beat the final boss. Which is what I did.

Garden Story is very twee, has a few frustrating control issues (more shortcuts to tools would be nice), is a bit grindy and repetitive (the same tasks come up all the time) and collision detection is on the janky side of not-quite-right, but it’s a cute little thing and on the whole I enjoyed it.

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (Switch): COMPLETED!

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As a fan of the SteamWorld games, I’ve no idea why it took me more than three years to get round to buying this, let alone actually playing it. Maybe because it’s an RPG I though I’d need a run up? Anyway, here we are, late to the party.

My first impression was “Oh no, what have I bought”. You see, I knew SteamWorld Quest was an RPG but I didn’t know it was a card-based RPG. And I don’t like card based RPGs. In fact, every other card based RPG I’ve ever played (Lost Kingdoms and Baten Kaitos come to mind immediately) I’ve given up on because I just couldn’t enjoy the combat. You can imagine my disappointment when I realised this was another one of those.

I stuck with it, hoping that unlike all the others, it would click. That the SteamWorld world was enough to get me past the gameplay. And you know what? It did click! And I really got into it!

Now, I didn’t get very deep into card deck strategy or some of the more complex card types. I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, and as it happens, it mostly wasn’t. The deck I ended up with was much the same deck I started with, albeit with different quantities of some cards, upgraded cards, and a few replaced, but by and large I stuck with the originals. You see, it isn’t actually that difficult a game, and I never lost a single battle. In fact, my characters only died two or three times and I managed to revive them. Furthermore, when I unlocked the two final characters I went back to redo some of the early chapters of the game again, on a harder difficulty level hoping that would level them up quicker, but forgot to change the difficulty back again afterwards. I actually completed most of the game on the hardest setting by accident.

I should probably mention the game itself. The plot is about a wannabe hero, Armilly, who worships Gilgamech, a hero from the past. Today’s heroes, though, are an elitist club who would rather play golf than actually do heroing (and are a bunch of cowards anyway), and won’t let Armilly join their guild. Then, Bad Things happen, all the “heroes” are kidnapped, and Armilly and friends set off to save them. Which kickstarts a larger adventure involving Gilgamech himself, who now thinks his heroic deeds have been forgotten and so he’s decided to resurrect an old evil so he can defeat it again and regain his kudos. And yes, that goes a bit sideways.

Gameplay is a mixture of walking round areas smashing weeds and crates and trying to get a hit in on baddies when you see them, and then a normal RPG battle (with randomly drawn cards) when you do. Some cards require a number of points in order to play them, whereas other cards generate points. Each round you can – points permitting – play up to three cards, with each having varying effects like you’d expect from an RPG, such as healing, physical damage, elemental damage, status effects, and so on. If you manage to play three cards for the same member of your party in one round, then they trigger a special extra (fixed) card. I expected it to be frustrating that the cards I want never came up when I needed them, but actually, if you’re flexible you can work round it and you can discard and re-draw up to two cards each round anyway, so it wasn’t often an issue. Plus, as I said, it’s a pretty easy game so even if you can’t play any cards in a round it’s not the end of the world.

As RPGs go, it’s not a particularly long game. I think I beat the final boss after about 18 hours. I unlocked New Game+, but to be honest I don’t think I’ll be giving it a go. As much as I did enjoy the game despite my dislike for card mechanic role playing games in general, it isn’t something I really want to spend a lot more time with. Not when I’ve got *gestures at pile of shame* anyway.

Oh, but I am VERY excited about SteamWorld Build. I played the demo a while ago and it’s fantastic.

A Castle Full of Cats (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A while back I played A Building Full of Cats, to which this is a follow-up. For the most part, it’s more of the same – find hidden cats in a number of cluttered rooms – only here there’s some curse or something which means that the cats are often bat-cats, mummy-cats, vampire-cats, skeleton-cats, or Cthulu-cats.

There’s also a plot, items besides cats (like keys) that you need to find to open up other areas, secret rooms, and even a boss battle against a very Castlevania inspired Vampire Cat. Cat-stlevania?

As before, it’s not especially challenging, although you do need to be very observant and frequently need to zoom in as much as possible – some cats are tiny! The new features are fun and add a bit more to the proceedings, and it was a nice little time-waster for very little money.

We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’m a bit torn on this game. On the one hand, it’s Katamari so is automatically fantastic and fun and relaxing and nonsensical. But on the other hand, it could have been so much better.

A few years ago, the original Katamari Damacy got a Reroll remake on modern consoles, and with it they fixed some of the niggles of the original, like loading times (and mid-level loading), slowdown, and made it all smoother and higher resolution and prettier. Then they “rerolled” the sequel and you’d expect the same care and polish this time around, right? Well, no. Loading is reduced a bit (but mid-level loads are back), it doesn’t seem to be higher resolution, and the slowdown is awful – although perhaps not as bad as it was on the PS2, granted.

Then they’ve added the “Royal Reverie” extra levels, where you play as the King when he was the Prince, but they’re not really new levels, they’re just five existing levels with alterative goals.

So as I said, I’m torn. I really enjoyed it but it isn’t a patch on the polish shown in Katamari Damacy Reroll, and ends up coming out like a cheap port rather than a improved remake.

Pikmin 4 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Pikmin is, essentially, Nintendo’s take on the real-time strategy format, only you direct little carrot creatures to fetch and carry and multiply and stuff, rather than build tanks and so on. There are different colours of Pikmin which have different strengths and skills, and there are baddies to fight who all want to eat them.

Pikmin 4 doesn’t deviate too much from this, but it is just so much more relaxing than the other games in the series. In the those, there’s a time limit each day and a number of days in which you have to complete the game. In Pikmin 4, the daily limit is there but is never an issue (the whole premise has always been that when night falls, any Pikmin not safely tucked up in bed get eaten by ravenous monsters, but it’s easy to collect and protect them here), and there’s no deadline to complete the game. It’s much more laidback and, actually, fun as a result. There’s even checkpoints you can rewind to if you mess up and your friends/helpers/slaves all become lunch.

There’s a plot. You’re part of a rescue team who has been sent to rescue Olimar from the planet that definitely isn’t Earth where he has crashed, again. Only you crash and the crew are separated. The first part of the game is mainly about recovering your crew, but then you find lots of other people have also crashed on the planet – you’d think they’d put a warning beacon nearby or something – and some of them have been turned into leaflings – sort of half person, half plant creatures.

So you have a number of goals – rescue everyone who is stranded, cure the leaflings, find spaceship parts and fuel so you can reach new areas and eventually escape, and finally find Olimar (the main character from the first game).

There are a number of new features in this outing to differentiate it from the earlier games. First and most obvious, is that you have a dog creature called Oatchi who can help do all sorts of things. Once you’ve trained him (he has a skill tree!) he can carry Pikmin over water, attack baddies, carry heavy stuff, sniff out treasure, break down walls – all sorts. But he can also be split off from your group and act as a sort of second character, so you can do two things at once. The game calls this time management “dandori” and you have to use it a lot – not least in the specific dandori challenges.

These dandori challenges, where you have to collect enough stuff in a time limit, are new I think, and then there are dandori battles where you compete for items against a leafling. There’s a two player vs mode that uses this setup too. They’re quite good, especially if you steal high-value items from your opponent!

The other main new thing is night missions. As I said, when night falls, loose Pikmin all get nommed, so to have missions at night seems horrible. The plot reason for them is that something needed to cure the leaflings of their leafness only appears at night, generated in a dirt mound called a lumiknoll, so you have to protect these lumiknolls from baddies who are drawn to destroy them. So it’s basically a tower defense game. You’re given special glow pikmin who technically don’t die for these missions and although I hated the missions at first they’re actually a nice distraction and you have to play differently. They’re shorter than normal missions and the idea is to either wipe out all the foes or survive until dawn.

The game is huge. I completed it after about 20 hours but there’s another 30 or 40 hours content after that, where you do everything possible, complete side missions (many of the characters you rescue have tasks for you) and get every last treasure, and even unlock a sort of reimagining of the original Pikmin where you play as Olimar – and this mode has a 15 day completion deadline. Which I managed with literally one second to spare on the final day. Because it’s relaxing and mostly stress-free, it’s never a chore despite the length. Loading times are a bit long, and it’s a pain you have to wait for the main “hub” to load when you complete a level, only to have to load the level again when you re-enter it. It would have been nice to have a “Are you returning tomorrow?” option to skip all that.

It’s a minor complaint though, and pretty much everything else is fantastic. It looks incredible, especially some of the detail on the treasures you collect, and it’s cute (the Pikmin sing when riding your dog!) and is full of the usual Nintendo polish. Highly recommended.