Category: Player Number

Landlord Quest

I’ve described a few games on this blog as “love letters to X.” The Plucky Squire, for its joy in the physicality of art. Holocure to all of Hololive. It’s a fairly common idiom I haven’t thought much about until I played Landlord Quest: the first game that I think might be best described as a hate letter.

I don’t mean Landlord Quest is bad. I just mean that if you took a love letter, and kept the passion, but inverted the feelings, this is what you would get. If love letters are sent with roses and chocolate, hate letters are probably sent with a mailbomb.

Landlord Quest is a short adventure game. And when I say short, I mean short. I feel fairly confident I saw the entirety of the game in about 42 minutes, and that was three separate playthroughs. I’ve never actually played an adventure game before, so it may have taken me longer than people who are actually familiar with the genre.

Because it’s so short, I don’t really have much to say on it that isn’t a spoiler for the experience. The art is good. I didn’t have to look up anything, which I’ve been told is some sort of gold standard for adventure games, but there’s also one a single room, and a finite number of things to “Look at.”

This is it. This is the experience.

I guess the one interesting thing I could talk about is that despite the game loathing the Doug character, from his bro-glasses and faux-cybertruck, I’m not sure I do.

There’s a few incredibly brief moments of him ruminating on his relationship with his father. They’re short, and I think the intent is mostly to show that Doug is a useless nepo baby. I’m sure they work if you’re the sort of person who had parents that cared about you and your interests. I imagine if I was that sort of person, I’d be able to look at Doug and laugh, visualizing a chain of shit heads stretching back years eternal.

Unfortunately for the designer, I haven’t spoken to my father in close to 10 years, so the attempt to paint him a shit brat who coasts on his father’s coattails fell flat. Instead, it made me a bit sad for him. Someone cared about him once.

Anyway, I think the credits for Landlord Quest do a better job of speaking to the game’s purpose than I could.

Landlord Quest is a short, and either horrifying or cathartic experience based on how you feel about landlords. It’s six bucks on Steam. It’s very well made for what it is, and it made me feel something.

I’m just not sure how I feel about those feelings yet.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau

I think Tales of Kenzera is a good game. A solid 8/10. I want to put that out there because I have no idea where the rest of this writeup is going, so I’m going to mention that early.

It’s also on sale for $8 until the 11th, which feels like a pretty decent deal if you’re looking for something to play through just to get back into the swing of things.

Why do I have no idea where the rest of this writeup is going? Well, because there are a billion different lenses I could take to look at Tales of Kenzera, but none of them feel like they have enough depth.

For example, the entire reason I bought this game wasn’t because I wanted a mid-range Metroidvania carried more by its combat than its exploration. I bought it because it was pissing of a bunch of racists, and won a few awards. So maybe there’s a culture war thing going on?

No. There really isn’t. There’re no “woke” themes or ideas. There’s just black people. Because the game is set in Africa, and is inspired by Bantu legends. Okay, so maybe there’s an interesting lens there. Can I look at how the game reflects the stories it’s based on?

Well, again, that’s kind of a “No”, because the “Bantu peoples” are made up of 400+ distinct groups, and 350 million people. It’s true that I once read Atlas Shrugged so that could I understand Bioshock better, but I don’t even know where I’d start in this case.

So maybe I’ll just try to talk about the gameplay, and be content with that.

Gameplay

Tales of Kenzera is a light Metroidvania. It’s also a fairly short game. Based on the in-game clock, I 100%’ed the game on challenging (second hardest difficulty) in about 8 hours.

As a Metroidvania, I give it mixed marks on the puzzle platforming. Extra exploration is useful for grabbing upgrades, but never necessary. More importantly, side areas with upgrades or paths are almost never actually locked off. Instead, they tend to be unlocked with whatever power you got in that zone. The platforming itself, even in the challenge zones, is also not particularly hard, and only ever frustrating.

So how about the combat? Well, the combat is great!

Okay, I have a few caveats. Let’s talk about it.

Tales of Kenzera’s core gimmick is the ability to switch between a fire and an ice mask. Fire is melee, ice is ranged. Fire gets heavy attacks with knockup and light attacks that chain, while ice gets a ranged attack and one that can deflect projectiles. For the first third of the game, that’s pretty much it.

Except then you get the grappling hook, which changes functionality based on the mask you’re wearing. Fire mask lets you pull yourself to enemies, ice lets you pull enemies to you. This was where everything clicked for me. All of a sudden I could just throw myself into the air at flying enemies, or pull ranged enemies over pits of spikes.

Then you get a charge blast: effectively, a third jump that can be angled, and suddenly combat is a kinetic, joyful brawl. It’s at this point, the game goes from good to great, as you pinball around, launching off enemies, smashing into them, and just generally having a good time.

It’s just a shame that this happens after it seems like most people have stopped playing.

Not all the combat is great. The bosses, while interesting as spectacles, feel quite wonky. The final boss is especially janky, but the first and third are just a ton of fun.

Grab Bag

The credits are a full on 15-ish minutes, of which 57 seconds are the actual dev team for the game. It feels weird. Also, they list the translators last at like 11 minutes, which feels like another kick in the balls for folks who did real work.

There’s a weird tone of EA-ification present as well. Things like too many trademark symbols that feel unnecessary, and tutorials that feel a bit much at times.

The final secret unlock is big head mode? For some reason? Not sure if it’s a cool throwback, or they ran out of time to give a better reward.

Overall

It might sound like I’m a bit harsh on the game, and I kind of am? But the thing is, even after finishing the game, I found myself going back to finish the rest of the optional challenges, and just 100% the whole thing. And for at least of a moment of that, it was because I wanted to fight more enemies. I wanted to play more!

I don’t think there’s a higher recommendation I can give than that.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX

Chico is fine. This is damning with faint praise, but those who have been reading for a while will know that I can damn a whole lot harder than that. It’s just that while playing, I never really found myself delighted or despairing, even if I did get a bit frustrated at times.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is a sort of top-down light puzzle game. It’s also quite a short game. There are 4 worlds and a final world, with each world consisting of two levels and a boss. There’s also some post-game content that I just wasn’t interested in playing.

The primary mechanic is Chico’s giant walnut, which can be bounced into switches to turn them on. It also… hmm. Switches aren’t the only thing the walnut is good for, but it’s the only one I can think of right now. Many of the levels involve finding a way to bring the walnut with you.

The level design is serviceable. It’s using that “introduce, expand, mastery” pattern that anyone who has ever tried to make a decent level in Mario Maker is familiar with. There’s a fair number of level gimmicks, most of which are mildly interesting, and one that completely sucks. At the same time, they also didn’t stick around long enough for me to hate them, except a desert world with graphics that made me feel a bit nauseous.

The bosses are the highlights of the levels, both visually and mechanically, and they present more of a challenge. It’s a shame, then, that they can also feel a bit janky at times. Sometimes they effectively incorporating a the level’s core mechanic, and sometimes (looking at you, giant turtle) they make me want to get out as quickly as possible.

Overall

I was at a classical music concert recently, and listening I found myself sort of bored. Not because the music was bad or uninteresting, but because I sort of associate classical music with the background on NPR, or filler. I have sort of similar feelings about Chico and the Magic Orchards.

It’s perfectly serviceable as a video game, the sort of thing that would earn you an B+ if you turned it in as a class project. It has a solid understanding of how to introduce mechanics, develop and push them. But it just lacks the spark it needs to take off like rocket, or even to turn it into a dumpster-fire. There’s nothing bad enough about it to really make it worth complaining about, but there’s nothing good enough about it either.

In that sense, it’s a bit unfair. One of the worst games I’ve played this year was Age of Darkness, and I still think about it, because of how badly it failed with every part of its core mechanics. But I am thinking about it! Chico did pretty much everything right, but outside of the desert mirage mechanic which made me feel physically ill, never really required me to think about it.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX was $4.99, which feels about right. It costs a fair amount less than the sandwich I had yesterday, and I’d say the two equally contributed to my day.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

Fellowship Demo

Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.

I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.

Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.

Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.

Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.

I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.

So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?

Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.

Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.

There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.