Report #17: August 2021
Let’s just get the obvious out of the way. I am terrible at platformers and always end up spending a lot more time on them than I should. Something about my lack of timing and fine motor skills, perhaps. One day soon, I will learn from my struggles and realize that platformers are just not my jam, but until then, fellow assassins, expect more failed experiments and litanies of complaints. They just look so nice and shiny…
With that preamble, you can surmise that I was happy to finally beat Yooka-Laylee the other day. It’s a collectathon game in a cartoony style over six different worlds. In order to progress through the worlds and to the end, you have to collect certain numbers of a particular collectible, which are obtained by performing different challenges. These challenges vary in difficulty, which I appreciated since you don’t need to collect them all to beat the game. You can without much fuss skip the more frustrating challenges. Another collectible can in sufficient numbers be traded for new skills that will help with the challenges. The art style is fun and childish in the best sense of the word, which was what brought me in. The writing, on the other hand, is decidedly blah. For instance, each world has its own boss, but you don’t see or hear about the boss until you actually get there, so there’s no buildup, and the fights seem disjointed and without purpose. Sadly, this game also has one of my pet peeves in game design: unskippable repeated cut scenes when retrying certain fights or challenges. Yuck.
The other game I beat this month was Broken Sword, which will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its release next month! Wanted to finally get started on this franchise, since they are all five in the backlog. Playing it made me realize why point-and-click became such a potent genre - a good story, good writing, a few appropriately challenging puzzles and problems (but thankfully almost no whimsical inventory puzzles). Yes, it’s pretty dated in the sound and graphics departments, as is its group of antagonists. (I guess in the mid-1990s, Tom Hanks was still busy bringing spaceships back to earth and hadn’t gotten around to blowing up the Knights Templar organization yet.)
In all, a fairly successful month as far as reducing the backlog, although I might have enjoyed other games more. It seems my new approach of chipping away at a few titles side-by-side is worthwhile, even though most of the time spent this month went to Yooka-Laylee. I’ll keep going that way for the foreseeable future, at least.
Beaten
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Broken Sword 1 - Shadow of the Templars: Director's Cut
13.5 hours playtime
no achievements
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Yooka-Laylee
When I Could Spare a Moment
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GRID
6.0 hours playtime
no achievements
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PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS
See you in September
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Planet Coaster
I haven’t played a lot of platformers, but this describes my experience with them perfectly. They look so cool and nice…until I play them and suck :D
Unskippable cut-scenes before big fights are really annoying though, that’s one pet-peeve I can get behind. How can someone think that’s a good idea?
Good luck with your gaming next month!
There are two platformers that have blown me away and that I would recommend - The Mark of the Ninja and Ori & the Blind Forest. They both have the right balance of difficulty and reward for, at least for a crappy player like me! Cheers
Thanks for the recommendations! I own Ori and played it for a bit, but there some point where I wasn’t able to progress and I gave up. Definitely a great game though and I’ll come back to it eventually :)