Tag: VideoGamesWeLike

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.

Deltarune – Chapter 3 & 4

Toggle blocks contain spoilers. You have been warned.

I wrote about Deltarune back in 2022, but here we are in 2025 with 2 more chapters that I finished in about 10 hours straight last night.

It’s always hard to know what to say about Deltarune, and by some extension Undertale. As far as games go, I feel like you either enjoy things from a surface level, or go full Pepe Silvia. There is no in-between.

In that sense, then, the points I made three years ago still stand. The music slaps, the writing is great, and the actual mechanics and gameplay have continued to evolve in interesting ways, pushing the mini-game and bullet hell formula even further than before, as has the out of combat traversal.

Absurdity and Sincerity

I’ve been struggling to put my finger on why I feel like other games that imitated Mother and Undertale haven’t quite succeeded. The premier example of this is Knuckle Sandwich, but Athenian Rhapsody runs into some of the same issues.

All of these games trade on absurdity and weirdness as defining aesthetic traits. This can be strange characters, stories, items, or whatever. But at the same time, they’re trying to be heartfelt, sincere, and meaningful. This is a difficult balance to strike. And often the other games fail because in order to do this sort of thing, you need to commit to the bit.

Chapter 3 of Undertale follows the story of a television consumed by fear that it will be thrown away because no one watches it anymore, uses it, or plays games on it. Fear that it’s old and unloved.

Its goal seems to be preventing the player from ever leaving or giving up: from escaping. But it’s a real, human fear given to an inanimate object. Now, in the big picture, it’s complicated why no one is watching the television anymore. But this chapter’s absolutely gonzo section of puzzles, games, and just general weirdness (including fighting a water cooler) is driven by this sincere emotional beat.

And again, we’re talking about a television here.

And I think this is why Deltarune works. Even when its characters aren’t human, their feelings are. The problem with absurdity is that so often it’s used to ignore consequences and responsibility. “LOL random” humor is at some level as disposable as a dream, as transient as a breeze. And that disposability is the opposite of meaning.

For an action to mean something, it must have a consequence. It must have weight. I think this is what Mother and Undertale understand, but that their imitators only grasp for brief moments.

All that said, the other comment I do have is that I think a friend of mine who decided to wait until the full game is out might have made the right choice. Apparently 50% of the game is currently available, and while it’s incredible, it’s also deeply unsatisfying to know I’m going to have to wait at least 6-8 months minimum for more story.

I’m also really hoping the chapter based design of the game doesn’t lead to the final project feeling disconnected and incomplete. Chapter 3 is a massive bit of tonal whiplash, at least in the moment. It’s not a bad thing, I just wouldn’t want 5 more chapters just doing that.

Anyway. Deltarune. Incredible game. Love it. Really hope it finishes development before 2030, the death of democracy, and/or the end of the world.

Skin Deep

I like Skin Deep. I like it more than Quadrilateral Cowboy, the previous title by BLENDO Games. I wouldn’t have mainlined thirteen hours of it over two days the day it released if I didn’t like it. If you like weird indie stuff, and find yourself interested by an immersive sim where you save cats from space pirates, give it a look.

I’m front loading this so that when I spend several paragraphs complaining about the game in just a bit, no one gets the wrong idea here. I’ll say it again: I like Skin Deep. I recommend Skin Deep.

Give me more of this sort of thing please.

I just also happen to have some problems with the game.

Skin Deep is an immersive sim stealth sort of game. You are Nina, an insurance agent. The deal is simple: you get cryogenically frozen on long haul space trips. If the ship gets attacked by space pirates, you get unfrozen, at which point your job is to rescue the crew.

The defrosting is how each of the game’s 13 levels (each their own individual spaceship) starts, with you transforming from popsicle to human and stepping out of your pod. From there, it’s pretty much up to you how you want to approach things. The only thing you have to do is save all the captured crew mates by unlocking them from their little cages with purple key cards.

Image of a cat locked in a purple box from the video game Skin Deep.

Since this an immersive sim, it would be a bit tricky to cover every interaction available, so I’m going to quickly go over a few key ones.

Every level takes place on a space ship, with both an interior and exterior. The exterior is accessed a variety of ways, and as Nina has a third lung, moving around in a zero-g and zero-oxygen environments poses no problems for her.

Every ship also has a set of four systems available. These are: vents, windows, airlocks, and trash chutes. They function as a traversal tools with added benefits. Vents let you sneak around and hide, windows can be broken to suck enemies into outer space, airlocks let you leave the ship the normal way, and trash chutes let you leave non-normally, at the cost of becoming smelly.

These systems often start off locked. You can unlock them by finding and interacting with their respective fuseboxes to turn them back on. Later on, the systems become locked down even further by enemies.

Image of a Fusebox locked from the video game Skin Deep.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about enemies. There are five types of enemies: 3 types of space pirate, a turret, and a floating knife fish robot. The space pirates make up the bulk of the challenge, with the turret and swordfish being mostly incidental.

The catch is that the space pirates are all wearing Skull Savers(TM) which, upon death, will transport their head to a revival platform, and regenerate their body. Unless—of course—you grab their head before that happens, and stuff it into your inventory.

Image of a Skull Saver from the video game Skin Deep.

Which is as good a time as any to talk about Nina a bit more. You have five inventory slots, so every head you’re carrying takes the space of one useful item. So the best way to deal with pirates in the long term is to chuck their heads into the sweet void of space.

Given that we’re five paragraphs in, hopefully I’ve explained enough that the next set of complaints is going to make sense.

Complaints

The very first level of Skin Deep opens with mini-tutorial that shows you the following message.

And it’s not wrong, but I want to contest it a little bit. It’s true that damaged enemies will find their way to health stations, and request repairs for broken control panels… but that’s all I ever saw them do. As far as immersive sims go, the game felt somewhat underwhelming. Enemies react to sound and smell, but won’t notice missing items, or change up their patrol patterns even after you’ve freed prisoners they’re supposed to be protecting.

This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does prevent the game from ever feeling particularly alive, if that makes sense. It also leads to my bigger problem.

Different Day, Same Ship

By the end of Skin Deep, I found myself frustrated because I was using the same general strategy on every single ship. It went something like this: sneak around unlocking all the doors. Next up, find and unlock all the subsystems. After that, take over control of the ship cameras. Only then would I finally switch over to taking out enemies, or experimenting with whatever that ship’s gimmick was.

And the result was that every level felt samey. Not because they are! But even when each level had its own special gimmick, I tended to never use the gimmick until after I had already dealt with everything else. This leads to my big complaint.

For an immersive sim, I never felt incentivized to change up my primary plan, and adjust for the situation I was in, or to try to improvise. I did the same thing over and over again, because when I died (and I died a lot!) I would lose 10 minutes of progress, and have to start again. And it is very easy to die when enough things start to go wrong.

The last level is probably the peak example of this. Without spoilers, its “gimmick” is that it’s a lot larger than any other ship in the game. It also removes a few of the fallbacks or safeties that are available in other levels. The end result is that it’s much more punishing if you fail.

I don’t know if it’s a Blendo “thing” to make their final levels skill testing like this. I remember Quadrilateral Cowboy doing something similar, but in that game, it was only the final level where you finally got access to all the toys at once.

But Skin Deep didn’t give me more tools or toys to work with. Instead it was just more of a slog.

Bonus Round

So now let’s go over a few other things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. First up, the writing is quite good, and narrative is quite weird. There’s one very clever soft touch done for building character relationships that I quite enjoyed. The setting is interesting, but mostly serves as a backdrop for the gameplay and the rest of the story about a specific set of characters.

Also, there are bonus objectives for each level. I have to wonder if having them show up at the start, instead of after you’ve completed the level, would have made me want to try to use the level gimmicks more?

The controls are also a bit wonky at times, and I threw multiple guns when I meant to be firing them. As a general note: yes, this is less effective than shooting with them.

Overall

I enjoyed Skin Deep, but I wish I enjoyed it more. I still like it enough to recommend. It was $20, and I mainlined the whole thing over two days.

But I wish I felt like it delivered on the promise of the immersive sim more than it actually did. Or at least forced me out of my comfort zone with the strategies and planning, instead of letting there be an “ideal” strategy to beat most levels.

Still, if you want something interesting and weird, give it a shot. You might even enjoy it more than me.

Here’s a link to the Steam Page.

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.

Dragonsweeper

I like Dragonsweeper. It’s also free. You should go play it in your browser here.

This is perhaps not the most elegant piece of writing I have opened a blog post with, but it’s also all true. Dragonsweeper is a small, clever twist on Minesweeper. It doesn’t cost any money. It won’t eat your entire day. There are no microtransactions, or other bullshit. It’s just good.

To quote the office: “Why use lot word when few word do trick.”

That said, you’re still reading, which means you haven’t been persuaded yet. That’s okay. Maybe you missed the first link. Here, I’ll link to again.

It’s possible that didn’t work either. Unlikely, given the incredible rhetorical barrage I’ve assembled so far, but possible.

It’s important to note though, that since Dragonsweeper is a puzzle game, in order to talk about it, I will be spoiling some of the puzzles. As few as I can! But some. This is your last chance to just back out and play it?

No? Well let’s continue.

Dragonsweeper is a puzzle version of Minesweeper. It uses the general framework of Minesweeper the same way Balatro uses poker: as a structure with so many things grafted onto it that it’s almost unrecognizable. But understanding the general concept or the original will make the initial exposure more tolerable.

Like Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper consists of a grid of tiles. Clicking a tile reveals what’s beneath it. If the tile is empty, just like in Minesweeper, that tile then displays a number of the sum of the surrounding tiles.

Unlike Minesweeper, most tiles on the board are not empty, nor do they contain mines. Instead, they contain monsters. This is a problem for our boy Jorge.

As Jorge spawns with only 5 health, clicking on a Minotaur early is an easy way to game over.

When you click on a monster, Jorge loses health equal to its power. If Jorge goes below zero health, it’s game over. Fortunately, defeating monsters also gives experience, and after collecting enough EXP, Jorge levels up, refilling their health bar.

But after the first few levels, the amount of EXP needed to level up is higher than the Jorge’s total health, and just defeating monsters isn’t enough. Instead, it’s necessary to crack open treasure chests, use healing scrolls, or find some other sources of EXP.

If you’re just starting the game, you will almost certainly die.

And then the real game begins.

This is your Last Chance to Back Out Before I Start Spoiling The Puzzles I Mean It This Time

In the corner of the screen is a little tiny purple book. When you click on the book, it tells you which monsters have which values, and how many remain. It also includes this little bit of text.

This right here is the heart of Dragonsweeper. See, Dragonsweeper isn’t truly random. It’s randomized, but after a few death screens, you might notice that the 10 value monster, the Mine King, is always in one of the corners.

Or you might instead pick up on the fact that the Slime Wizard is always guarded by six 8-value purple slimes, and always on the edge of the map.

You might spot that the 4 value gargoyles will always be facing another Gargoyle in a cardinal direction.

There are at least another five or so little patterns and rules like this. There are some I haven’t even found, and there are several that I didn’t spot until I had beaten the game, and was showing it to a friend.

For me, spotting these, and figuring out how to use them is what makes Dragonsweeper so brilliant. It’s very clever puzzle design where learning about how the board can be laid out, and how some things interact is the progression.

Again. Dragonsweeper is really good, and you should play it, and it’s free.

And a request for the developer: please make a full game. I have given you money and I will give you more.