The Cult Classic

Welcome to the first installment of “The Games I Played in ____” where I will, obviously, write a bit about the games that I’ve played in the past month. I plan on this being a recurring series where I write a little bit about each game that I’ve played in the last month and give my ultimate recommendation of it. I also fully reserve the right to skip a month if I choose because, again, the whole purpose of this blog is for me to rediscover my love of writing and the moment this becomes an unfun chore, I will treat it as such.

In addition to serving as a way for me to keep track of what I’ve played, the real purpose of this series is to serve as a place where I can write a bit about all the games that I play that likely won’t get stand-alone pieces of their own. While I will write about some of these games again in the future, there are smaller games that I might love just as much where I just don’t have as much interesting to say about them. I still want to bring attention to those games and gush about why I love them. As for the other games that I likely will revisit, I don’t want those pieces to be reviews or feel like standard criticism of them from a gameplay perspective, so I will instead focus on getting those thoughts out of the way in this series.

Make sense? Cool.

One final thing, while I will not spoil huge story moments or anything like that, do be warned that I do reference a few specific moments, locations, fights and items in Tears of the Kingdom below. If you’re someone wanting to avoid anything that could even remotely be considered a spoiler, maybe tread with caution in both Zelda sections below.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it:

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

Let me pull back the curtain a bit. Of all the games in this piece, this is the one I’m struggling with writing the most. I find Tears of the Kingdom to be an extremely difficult game for me to talk about. Initially, I will gush about all the high points in this game. How the more directed, linear sections like shrines and dungeons feel so, SO much better than their counterparts in Breath of the Wild. How much creativity and player expression Ultrahand and the Zonai devices allow for. How goddamn incredible it feels to dive off a sky island while the sun sets above you. How ominous and creepy it is to plunge into a seemingly bottomless chasm and land in the vast, unexplored and foreboding depths.

…then I remember how it felt to explore those depths. How repetitive, tedious, and unrewarding they ultimately were to explore. How disappointed I was when I saw how few sky islands the game featured and how many of them are repetitive iterations on the same handful of boss encounters and puzzle types. How many side quests ultimately amount to tedious fetch quests for insignificant and unfulfilling rewards. Just how bad this game’s control setup is and how badly my hand cramps after extended play sessions. For a moment I think to myself, do I actually hate this game?

Then I remember the first time I fought a Gleeok. It’s flying over a clearing on a snow-covered mountain that I must cross to rescue Zelda’s horse. I’ve seen these beasts before, but up until this moment I have avoided them. I take a deep breath. I’m ready. I charge in and am met with one of the best boss fights I’ve ever played in a series known for great bosses. I get to the final phase, I’m out of easy ways to fuse fire arrows, I’m in bad shape and I can’t quite figure out how to get to the dragon as it’s now floating above our battlefield summoning a blizzard that’s raining giant icicles down upon me. Then I remember, I have the ability to recall objects! I climb atop an icicle, recall it back up into the air and I rocket up into the sky and into the center of the raging windstorm summoned by the dragon’s flapping wings. I leap off the icicle across the snowy tundra into the vortex and pull out my bow. Time slows. I only have one shot at this. I aim. I fire the final shot as the dragon is preparing to bathe me in a fatal shower of ice breath. The arrow hits. The ice does not. The vortex dissipates. The storm is over. My foe and I tumble through the air, but unlike the dragon, I am still alive. I deploy my glider at the last minute. I land safely as my deceased foe slams down into the frozen wastes which are now pock-marked with the signs of our fight. The music that moments ago was swelling as I made my final attack dies down and I’m greeted with the quiet silence of snow falling upon an icy wasteland. It’s over. I’m victorious.

That was incredible.

I then go and complete the side quest. I am rewarded with yet another horse that will sit in my stable not being used for the rest of the game. Along the way, I grab a few butterflies I need to upgrade yet another piece of armor I’ll never once wear.

I will inevitably write about this game again at some point in the future, but Tears of the Kingdom was, for me, a tale of two games. The first is one of the best in one of my favorite series. It’s a game with incredible highs that few games can match. The second is a tedious and unrewarding open world game that struggled to keep me interested in it. It’s a game with absolutely dismal lows. Tears of the Kingdom reaches highs higher than (almost) anything Breath of the Wild achieved. But there were also HOURS of this game that I found truly unenjoyable. But just when I would think that maybe I did actually hate this game, I’d get to something that would blow my mind and make me feel like a fool for ever feeling that way in the first place.

What do I ultimately think about Tears of the Kingdom? I think it’s one of the most ambitious and staggeringly unique games I’ve ever played. But it’s also a game that’s dreadfully bloated with just too much stuff. But there were times when that bloat, the stuff that I was sure that I hated, would align just the right way for me to absolutely get what Nintendo was going for and for it to all click. It’s not my favorite game I’ve ever played. It’s not my favorite Zelda game. It’s also not even my favorite Zelda game that I’ve played this month (more on that in a bit). But man, it really left me with some moments I’ll never forget. And over time, I’m sure those are the moments that I will remember the most. My hatred of trudging through the depths for two hours just to find yet another piece of armor that I’ll never use will fade. And what I’ll be left with is moments like that first fight with a Gleeok.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I’m going to go boot up my save and redo the final showdown with Ganondorf for like the fourth time.

(Not really, I’ve got like six more games to write about)

Recommended (enthusiastically – despite the bloat)

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Street Fighter 6 (PlayStation 5)

Street Fighter 6 is going to be showing up in this series a lot. And I really, truly mean a lot. To put it as succinctly as I can, Street Fighter 6 is currently my favorite game that has come out this year. And there’s a lot of incredible competition for that title. Resident Evil 4 Remake, Dead Space, Tears of the Kingdom, and Dredge are all incredible games in their own rights. Street Fighter 6 bests all of them. Maybe something I haven’t yet played like Final Fantasy XVI or something that hasn’t yet released like Spider-Man 2, Armored Core 6 or Alone in the Dark can take that title away from it, but I seriously doubt it.

As someone who has been playing fighting games since the original arcade boom caused by Street Fighter 2 in the early 90’s, it feels incredible for me to say that Street Fighter 6 may be the single best fighting game I’ve ever played. I cannot yet definitively say that as I haven’t spent decades playing it like I have something like Street Fighter III: Third Strike, but the fact that I’m even thinking that it’s a possibility is impressive. This game is just phenomenal and I have not been able to stop thinking about it going all the way back to the open beta I participated in back in December 2022.

I will absolutely be writing about this game again (both in this series and separately), but the one thing I really want to impress upon you is that if you have ever thought, even for a second, about jumping into fighting games but have been scared off by how complicated they are, this is absolutely the game to finally take that plunge with. There’s a full, 20+ hour single player campaign that feels like a mash-up between Final Fight and the Yakuza series that is both compelling and fun in its own right. But it also does a pretty decent job of teaching you the basics of Street Fighter 6’s gameplay and preparing you to play against other human competitors. More importantly, this game introduces “modern controls” which simplifies the complicated motion inputs and six-button layout of Street Fighter into a more manageable four-button game like the Smash Brothers series. Modern controls don’t break the game balance or give certain players an advantage over others, but they do allow new players to better learn the fundamentals of Street Fighter without having to deal with some of the complicated executional aspects like motion inputs, hit confirms, or complicated buffers in combos and such. This both allows new players to play the game, but also makes sure that the player base is as large as possible and makes online play for everyone that much better.

More to come, but I absolutely love this game. Please, if you are in any way interested in getting into fighting games, do yourself a favor and check this out. I cannot recommend this one more enthusiastically. It’s just an incredible game in nearly every way.

Recommended (if you have any passing interest in fighting games whatsoever)

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Star Wars: Jedi Survivor (PlayStation 5)

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order was a real surprise for me. It’s been decades since I last really fell in love with a Star Wars game (probably X-Wing versus TIE Fighter or Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II which both came out in 1997 – yes, I’m an elderly millennial). Given EA’s track record with the franchise, Fallen Order was never really on my radar up until it released to surprisingly good reviews. As I had not yet burned out on Star Wars back in 2019, I picked it up and was pleasantly surprised. The mash-up between Dark Soul’s combat and Uncharted’s platforming with all the big set piece spectacle that you’d expect from an EA game really worked. And Star Wars was the perfect canvass for that recipe (forgive the mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean). Sure, I had complaints about the game (the mushy feeling combat and just how bad Kal felt to control in general), but overall, I was very pleasantly surprised.

It’s because Fallen Order was such a pleasant surprise, that I am crushed to see how Jedi Survivor has turned out. As it currently exists, Jedi Survivor is a perfect illustration of both why I’ve burnt out on big franchise story-telling AND modern AAA videogame release practices.

From a story-telling perspective, I really appreciated how Fallen Order told a single, cohesive story. Everything you needed to know to understand Fallen Order’s story was told in-game. Sure, it referenced events from the Star Wars prequels, but those events were recapped and shown in-game from the perspective of the characters as they experienced them. It stood on its own as a singular piece of narrative. I didn’t have to watch the prequels, read three different Expanded Universe novels, and then watch two middling television series to enjoy the game. Sadly, that’s not really where Star Wars is as a franchise right now. As I sit here, I currently have not watched the third season of The Mandalorian because I just cannot be bothered to sit through three or so hours of the mediocre Book of Boba Fett to get caught up. This current trend of these vast, interconnected stories told across multiple (often mediocre and unremarkable) television shows and movies is just so tiring. I do not have the time to waste blowing hours on crappy content just to enjoy something that should be able to stand alone on its own. Fallen Order respected my time. I truly appreciated that.

Jedi Survivor does not do that. Jedi Survivor starts years after Fallen Order’s story and things look and feel very different. The rest of the crew of the Mantis are gone. When I found Greez, he was missing an arm. What happened? You would think the game would clue me in. But no, I have no clue because the game did not tell me. Why? Because there’s a companion novel, Star Wars: Jedi Battle Scars that explains what happened. If I want to know, I’ve gotta buy the book and invest a few hours there to get my footing for this game. There’s a way to do a time jump like this and fill in the details later if the story is purposefully built around this being a mystery and slowly revealing it to the player. But from what I’ve seen (and have seen people criticize online – for the sake of full transparency I did not come anywhere close to finishing this game for reasons you will hear), this is not how this story is told. If you want to know and have full context for this game’s story, read the book. And I’m sorry, but no. I have other things that I want to read for more important reasons than wanting to enjoy a videogame.

Then there’s the state of the game itself. It’s rough. It’s real rough. I don’t want this blog to descend into nit-picky technical critiques of a game’s performance as I generally don’t care much unless it really affects a game’s gameplay, but in this case, it does. It really does. Jedi Fallen Order already felt mushy and unresponsive and Jedi Survivor feels even worse. Even in performance mode, the game’s frame rate is all over the place, which for a game with tight parrying and dodge timings, just kills the combat. Even worse, there’s awful screen-tearing all over the place which is nauseating and gave me a headache after like a half hour of playing. And this is not an issue of me playing on underpowered hardware as I’m playing the PS5 console version (to the PC gaming keyboard warrior rushing to leave the snarky comment I know you’re thinking, spare yourself the time). Like many AAA games, this feels rushed and unfinished. There’s no way that releasing this game in this condition was anything other than a business decision, and I feel bad because if I could look aside the performance, there does seem to be a good game sitting within this mess.

Hopefully it gets patched to a state where that good game is fully realized. If it does, you’ll likely see this pop back up here sometime in the future. If not, well, that’s all I have to say about Jedi Survivor.

Not recommended (in its current shape)

Edit: Since writing this, Jedi Survivor did get a performance patch that apparently fixed many of the technical issues I ran into with the game. I am leaving this review up to reflect the state of the game at the time I played it, but keep in mind that if you were to play it now you will not have the same experience I did. A post-patch review may come in the future if I ever get back around to this one.

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The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Nintendo 64)

I’m crawling through the depths in Tears of the Kingdom. After slowly climbing my way out of a seemingly bottomless pit, I find myself underneath an area that I know very well from my time with Breath of the Wild. I’m underneath the coliseum. It’s an area I visited often in Breath of the Wild to collect weapons, but that’s not why I remember it so well. It was the terrifying Lynel that guarded the treasures it held within. The giant lion-centaur beast that killed me dozens of times over my 180 hours with Breath of the Wild. Finally getting strong enough to take down the Lynels is one of my fondest memories from that game, and I think to myself how surprised I’ve been that I have yet to encounter a single Lynel in Tears of the Kingdom.  

It is here, teetered precariously on the edge of a giant chasm, where I find my first Lynel in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s a hard fight. While the muscle memory I developed from fighting dozens of these terrors in Breath of the Wild is still there, this one is different. It’s wearing armor. It’s covered in Gloom, so every hit permanently subtracts my hearts. Eventually I take the beast down, but I’m worse for wear after the fight. I think to myself, if this thing is guarding this coliseum, there has to be something amazing inside.

I survive the fight and heal up. I venture into the coliseum to find a treasure chest glowing with an evil red aura. I’m intrigued. The gate slams shut behind me. Another one opens revealing this treasure’s guardian: another Lynel. Another difficult battle ensues, but this one goes down quicker after my experience from the fight outside. But then, another door opens. There’s a second Lynel. The fight begins anew.

This sequence of events repeats another three times (please see my prior complaints about Tears of the Kingdom being repetitive above).

Nearly an hour later, I stand victorious as the fifth and final Lynel falls to the ground dead. It drops a horn that I will, many hours later, fuse to the Master Sword before my final showdown with Ganondorf. The gate to the coliseum opens. The aura around the chest fades. What is in this thing that it was so heavily guarded? I walk up to the chest. I open it, the anticipation for what lies within is killing me. Link reaches in and slowly pulls it out…

Majora’s Mask

In this moment, one thought rings out in my head. Once I finish this game, I’m finally going to play Majora’s Mask.

People who know me probably just gasped at that last sentence. That’s right, I’ve never played Majora’s Mask before this July. As someone who loves The Legend of Zelda, especially the weird corners of the series where it gets really weird and dark, I honestly don’t know how I’ve gone 23 years without playing Majora’s Mask before today. But I finally am. And I’m absolutely loving it.

This game is special. I want to save my full thoughts on it for a standalone piece which will likely kick off my Spooky Season series (foreshadowing!), but in a way, I’m actually glad that I’m playing this for the first time now. I’m not sure if I would have gotten as much out of this game as a child as I do now as an adult entering middle-age. There’s no way that an early-3D era game like this can hit as hard as it does today, for it to bring up as many complicated and deep emotions as it does, without being an absolute masterpiece.

Majora’s Mask is a masterpiece. And I will be talking about it again, very soon.

Recommended (especially for those with an affinity for the weird)

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Save Room: The Merchant (PC)

Save Room: The Merchant is a sequel to one of my favorite under-the-radar cheap puzzle games on Steam, Save Room. The premise of both games is extremely simple. They’re the inventory management mini-game/puzzle from Resident Evil 4 spun off as stand-alone games. Now, if you’re the kind of person whom that appeals to, I’m sure you’ve already booted up Steam and hit the store. If you’re not, there’s likely not much I can do to sell you on that premise and honestly, I don’t think any amount of selling from me would (or should) convince you otherwise. But if you’re that elusive third kind of person who doesn’t know what that sentence means, holy hell, go play Resident Evil 4 or Resident Evil 4 Remake. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Excellent, glad to hear you loved Resident Evil 4. Isn’t Leon just the best? Now you should know whether you’d be interested in this or not.

While the original Save Room was pretty simplistic and could be breezed through in an hour or so, Save Room: The Merchant expands upon the formula quite a bit. By adding a stand-in for RE4’s merchant and treasure system, Save Room: The Merchant is much more complicated. Puzzles will now involve loading your current inventory (which may now include combining treasures amongst a few other new mechanics) into your attaché case before a trip to the Merchant. From there, you’ll need to assess what items are required, what items can be sold, what needs bought, and what needs bought, combined with a pre-existing item, and then sold back. There’s a lot more going on and as a result the puzzles can be much more difficult and, at times, a touch tedious. Some puzzles will require multiple trips back and forth to the Merchant and navigation of the Merchant’s menus can be kind of a slog. That said, if you’re the kind of person who will love this game, this won’t detract much from your enjoyment. Start with the original Save Room and if you want more, grab this too. If this isn’t your thing, you’ll just as easily know that. Skip it and replay Resident Evil 4 instead.

Recommended (if you have the same RE4 brain rot that I do)

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Sneak Previews!

One problem with trying to write about every game I’ve played in the last month is that there are some games that I just don’t feel like I’ve played enough of to fully make an informed recommendation or write about meaningfully. That’s what this section is going to be for. These are games that I will likely play more throughout the upcoming month and will touch upon more next time.

My Friendly Neighborhood (PC)

This has a lot going for it. I am a huge fan of old-school survival horror, and this game is very much inspired by those games, especially the original Resident Evil. My Friendly Neighborhood puts a really unique coat of paint on that old-school survival horror formula, though. Rather than a creepy old mansion filled with zombies, or an abandoned town suffocated with fog filled with monsters, My Friendly Neighborhood takes place in a TV studio. Specifically, the local public access television station that films something very akin to Sesame Street. That’s right, rather than creepy monsters or the undead, the monsters of this game are Muppets. The role of the persistent stalker monster isn’t an unstoppable bio-weapon or an ominous figure dragging a giant knife with a huge red pyramid on it’s head, it’s a stand-in for Big Bird. It’s unique, and I’ve greatly enjoyed the hour or so I’ve played of it. That said, I want to give this some more time before writing more fully about it.

So far though, this one is really promising.

Last Train Outta’ Wormtown (PC)

This one was brought to my attention by a Discord buddy and I was sold immediately from a one sentence description. It’s Tremors, the video game. One player plays a giant, man-eating Graboid worm and the remaining players are Kevin Bacon and crew cowboys looking to escape from a small desert town. The human players are desperately running around the town trying to find items needed to get the last train outta Wormtown (“he said the name of the thing”) up and running for their escape. The worm, which can only see the cowboys through the vibrations they make while running along the sand, is trying to stop them by… well… eating them to death. What else would you expect a sand worm to do?

It’s simple and fun. But it’s also a very early Early Access game, so I’m not sure how much depth there is yet. I’m also not sure how much replayability this one will have yet, nor am I really sure how easily lobbies will fire as this needs eight players per game. Full recommendation to come once I see how I feel about this after more than a handful of games.