Check out the first entry in this series for additional context on what these are and what the nuances of my Game Clearing is~
Game 1: Risk of Rain - Beat
I think this is the first roguelike I've done for game clearing since I started this blog. Which is crazy to me, actually. I really like roguelikes, Crypt of the Necrodancer has been my "play at bedtime" game for years now and the first Hades is literally my second favorite game of all time. Haven't played the second one yet. And yet, since starting this blog and, moreover, starting my game clearing in general, only a handful of roguelikes have made their way onto my game clearing list. Of those, Dead Cells and Hyperspace Dogfights were the only truly notable ones too. 2025 didn't have ANY roguelikes in it period, in fact. So Risk of Rain is the first one in over a year. Crazy.
Risk of Rain is a roguelike sidescrolling shooter, a "run and gun" as it were. In it, you play as one of 12 classes of space traveler, which you pick from a character select screen at the start of a run. Only one is unlocked from the start and as you make progress in the game, you will unlock the others. Your traveler was driving a freighter through space when it crash-landed on a mysterious, everchanging alien planet, with the traveler being cast deep into the planet as a result of the crash. They must now fight through hordes of hostile alien creatures to find their way through the planet and back to their ship.
Risk of Rain is unique for its difficulty system; the longer you spend in a run, the more difficult it will get. Every roughly 5 minutes, the game will adjust its difficulty to be on another caliber, while hordes will get naturally more powerful as you kill more and more of them. This puts a question to the player: how much are they willing to commit to scouring an area finding helpful upgrades knowing that the more they do, the harder the run will be. Is it better to just try and speedrun to the end of the area and not really explore, knowing you'll get to the endgame with lower difficulty but with a less equipped build.
Adding to this is your limited range of options, every class has four actions that have various different cooldown rates, usually some manner of weak rapid fire attack, stronger attack with cooldown, an attack that has additional traits to it like stun, or a dodge/block. Some pickups also give you items like turrets or traps, but largely you have to work within the confines of your weaponry and their limitations, taking that into account as you decide whether or not to rip the teleporter to the next level as soon as you find it, or go exploring for more possible buffs. It's a very challenging but reward roguelike.
That being said, after I beat it, I kind of lost the drive to continue playing it. I think it is very good, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it more than I believed I would. I'm not a huge fan of "run-and-guns", if you read my best list last year I put multiple Mega Man games on it, but I enjoyed Risk of Rain's chill alien atmosphere and wave based gameplay. But its not a roguelike I want to play forever, I don't want to do a couple runs before bed with this game like I did with Necrodancer or Hades. I like a lot about it and I'm very excited to play Risk of Rain 2 eventually, which is arguably the game I should've played in the first place because that's the one people really got into, it just didn't grab me long term. 8/10
Game 2: Oxenfree - Beat
This is what I consider to be the first truly great game I've played all year. My scale is very different for other people where I have very wide parameters for "good" "fine" "mediocre" and "awful", mostly due to having to abide by a very unnuanced star system that Backloggery uses for my data tracking. But anything that I would say is a 9/10 or above to me is a "great" game. Originally when I was tracking I considering everything 9 or above to be a 5 star game, I've since narrowed that window to be only 9.6 or above because it turned out that 9 or above encapsulated way more games than I wanted it to. I digress, point is Oxenfree is the first game to crack that threshold this year. I kind of became obsessed with it, it's one of my fastest turn arounds for an essay period, this game rules. I need to play the sequel.
I won't be retreading ground with Oxenfree because I did already write about it, I feel like that's redundant. If you're reading this and haven't read that, by the way, and you like Oxenfree, please do. It's one of my favorite things I've written and it kind of flopped, I don't like to talk about my performance on this blog because it's always so low and I do this for me mostly but like. That one did REAL poorly and I think it's really good. At the time of writing this, I still haven't gone back to do other routes and try and find the "true ending", but it's definitely on my list to do that. I really want to explore this game further and create better outcomes. And it only being 4 hours long is definitely appealing to me. I wish that games that were going to have multiple routes were always this short. I liked Fire Emblem Three Houses a whole lot, for a while it was probably my favorite Fire Emblem game, the prospect of going back and doing what I was going to do in it is so exhausting.
Game 3: Runbow - Beat
Runbow technically wasn't a game clearing project. I didn't set out to beat Runbow. I just kind of got addicted to it earlier this year for a couple weeks and binged it while I was working on finishing "We need to talk about Bayonetta 3". You can tell I didn't intend on beating it as a game clearing project because I didn't start from the beginning. Usually I try to start every game I do for game clearing at the beginning point of the game if for no other reason than cleaner data tracking. I like having those dates on my spreadsheet. Runbow I just kind of did until it was done and then went "you know what, throw on the spreadsheet, why not".
Runbow is a party platformer where you play as a variety of colorful characters in a Mexican-inspired world of ever shifting color. The default is a male and female character model, each being in 8 colors as the game is built for up to 8 players, but you can unlock a lot of costumes, alternate characters and indie guest stars by playing through the game. In the main mode, the Adventure mode, you must race to the end of each level trying to unlock a path on the grid based map to the boss of each world, Satura. Satura is a monochromatic femme fatale who has caused the colors of the world to go wonky through her meddling. The standard way this impacts the game is through the ever changing color background and how it impacts elements on the plane you are platforming through, i.e. if the background is blue, any blue platforms will disappear. This can be done solo, of course, but the real charm of the game comes from you having a party to play it with.
See Runbow's levels are bite sized affairs, the longest levels are still under a minute long and it's exceedingly common to have levels takes less than thirty seconds. This is really effective for its intended audience: small groups who want fast paced, ridiculous platforming gameplay. While I played it solo and thus didn't get the full effect, Runbow is built for a group of friends to try and race each other to the end of these bite-sized levels, trying to get an edge by either speedy and effective play or by sabotaging each other through fighting. It is, in a way, "what if you could bring the friend-ending gameplay of Mario Party to the mainline Mario series".
With that in mind, I will say that I didn't get the full effect of Runbow because I didn't have anyone to play it with. While I did like it quite a bit, I found it to be kind of basic overall. There are certainly some clever and fun levels but on the whole, a lot of the game seemed to be a simple affair. I find this to be the case with a lot of platformers that are focused on multiplayer aspects, like the New Super Mario Bros games for instance, the level design tends to be more simplistic because the fun will be produced by playing the game(s) multiplayer. I know people who had groups to play Runbow with who loved it a lot. I thought it was just good but not great, if I was in a small group of friends I might pull it out and see what ridiculous antics we get up to, but it's just a decent platformer otherwise. 7.1/10
Game 4: Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth - Beat
In 2020 I purchased the "Racial Justice and Equality Bundle" from the game selling platform itch.io. It was a great deal for a good cause and I was more than happy to throw a little money to charity and get an absurd amount of games in return. However, for many years it just sat doing nothing. I didn't game on PC and, outside of an intensive session of updating my backloggery to include every single video game on the bundle, I didn't really pay it any mind. That is until I started my 2023/24 era of game clearing where I would just roll a random game in my collection and play through it. Unsurprisingly the itch games that made up 1/3 of my collection were commonplace.
But in late 2024 and, more importantly, 2025 I changed how game clearing worked. I wanted to focus in on games I was actually interested in playing and less so on any game that was in my collection. This was great for my overall game clearing, I was clearing games I was actually enjoying and wanting to play and not "random itch shovelware that was made for a game jam 6 years ago". I don't think this blog would've sustained in the old way of game clearing because I just wouldn't be playing interesting enough games to talk about on average. But it left my considerable itch library in the aether, as there were very few itch games I really actually knew ahead of time and wanted to play. It was like Night in the Woods, A Short Hike, Pyre, and Hidden Folks. So, I started another project: I would randomly roll itch games from my library, go to the page, see what they were, and if I was interested in them? I'd add them to the list. Finally the fruits of that labor are making their way into rotation, and Warden is the first of them.
Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth is an action-adventure 3D platformer inspired heavily by the Nintendo 64 era of both of those genres. Kind of a blend of Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie. In it, you play as a young knight who was out on a hunt with his father, the emperor of a dominant empire, when they were beset by monsters and separated. Awakening in a mysterious glen, the young knight finds his way to a hearth and finds himself in a dreamy dimension, facing an ancient god. This ancient god tells him that the world is now in flux and that he has been called upon to assume the role of a "Warden", a chosen warrior who arises once in a lifetime to restore the natural order to the world. This ancient god then tasks him with a specific goal: find the other Wardens, delve into the temples across the land, and destroy the crystals that his own ancestor, the original emperor, put upon her.
The land of Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth can be approached in essentially any order the player wishes. Like the Rareware style of Collectathon platformers, there are currency based roadblocks that the player must overcome, the world is, however, nonlinear. There are three major areas and they can be tackled in any order the player wishes, with each area having specific secrets and sidequests that can only be reached by returning with other upgrades. Along the way the young Warden will meet his two companions, the other Wardens who had passed a long time ago and who now share his body. The player can switch between the three of them at any time, with one Warden being able to fire through slingshots to activate switches, one warden being able to grow plants into platforms, and the final warden being able to launch themselves out of cauldrons to temporarily fly.
I really enjoyed a lot of the worldbuilding and atmosphere of Warden. I felt like it does a good job of creating a world the player wants to explore and a history they want to be involved in. It's like the skeleton of a really good fantasy work. Unfortunately the actual gameplay lets it down. Our Wardens don't feel like they have any real weight to them, platforming feels very arbitrary and unsatisfying and even moving about the world feels weird as the Wardens feel a little slippery. Combat is potentially interesting, taking the core Ocarina of Time ideology of "playing defensively until you see an opening" and putting it in a more fast paced setting. However I feel like the more free form combat system they go for, where you're allowed to move about fully in space even when you're locked on, you're not locked to your opponent in any way, contradicts what they are going for. And while I like the worldbuilding, the main character is kind of insufferably dumb, being told basic concepts like "your father is responsible for a system that greedily takes from the Earth endlessly and doesn't care about giving back" only for him to essentially go "nuh uh" everytime. There's something here, this game could be great. For now it's just exceptionally mediocre. 5.5/10
Game 5: Reel Fishing: Road Trip Adventure - Complete
This has been one of my favorite game clears since I've started doing this. Reel Fishing: Road Trip Adventure does not rank among my favorite games of all time, but it is insanely important to me. Much of my modern friend group was built on the back of this weird fishing RPG and getting to experience it for myself was delightful. So many memories in this stupid fishing game, Sean, Alice, and Neil may all be disasters but they're my disasters. Someday I'll play the sequel for this blog but I promise you it will not be nearly as interesting. Like the gameplay of this game doesn't even matter really. It's not a good fishing game even remotely, I rated it a 9/10 and the experience is definitely a 9/10, but if it wasn't as dramatic as it was, this would be bottom of the list. For real though, if you haven't, which you probably have if you're reading this blog, check out the RTA post, it's an experience. Just a truly bonkers game from start to finish, love it.
Game 6: The Land of Glass - DNF
The second game in my quest to delve into the itchio bundle I bought and pull out whatever I find interesting, Land of Glass is immediately eyecatching. Like if you look at the Steam or itch pages to see what this game is, it's not hard to see why I immediately latched onto it. The entire dreamy stained glass aesthetic is very difficult not to become enamored with. Its very clever use of simple voxels to make the entire world have that kind of stained glass art quality is difficult not to love, it manages to do a whole lot with very little. And also if you look at the Steam page you will see that reviews are super mixed. We'll get to that shortly.
The Land of Glass is a deckbuilding RPG featuring unique real time grid based combat. The goal of this combat is to play cards as rapid fire as you can, trying to break through your opponent's defenses while repairing yours in real time. The end goal of this is to, after bursting through your opponent's defenses and creating a weak point. After which you push on that weak point until you knock your opponent(s) off the battlefield, gaining a reward of either new equipment or new cards each time. You do this across four stories, each with a lot of lore to learn and a lot of unique character relationships with which to explore.
Indeed the narrative(s) in Land of Glass are the game's main focus. I only did one of the narratives, I got about 75% through the frog wizard story before I stopped, but the storytelling was indeed interesting. It's a story about a young frog who wants his people to no longer be looked down upon by the other races in the land. The often reclusive frogs are typically seen as lower class by the other residents of the realm, in no small part due to their lack of magic and, more importantly, their outright refusal of it. This young frog wizard has been studying tomes he has found, trying to prove that frogs can use magic and be on the same level as the other races in the land. But he quickly gets in over his head and unleashes a plague of corruption upon the realm on accident. The story is about the frog, and his warrior friend who tags along, trying to right the wrongs he has done while also trying to accept that, while this is his fault, he isn't to blame in full. That a system that tried to push down his intelligence and creativity because "we don't do things that way" failed him. As his friend says "there are old monsters and new monsters. The new monsters may be corrupted, but the old monsters have always been here." While it is presented through pretty small dialog sequences, it's clear the artists had a lot they wanted to say in the Land of Glass.
Unfortunately, I feel like the gameplay lets it down. I admire the creators for trying something new, trying this idea of a real time strategy CCG. I don't think it works. The often frantic gameplay makes it difficult to justify a lot of the cards, in my opinion, at least for very casual play. A friend of mine likes to say this about Chain of Memories/Re: Chain of Memories, the card based Kingdom Hearts game, that when you dig in deep into the systems it becomes very fun. I would argue that the incentive to do that is low, and that an average player is going to rightfully surmise that trying to get fancy with their deckbuilding is pointless because you can very easily lose ground in a battle if you are working with a strategy you haven't really learned; and that the average player is more likely to panic doing fancy strategies than get them off. Games should not be judged based on what they are like when you master them.
Anyways, this is a very similar problem to what The Land of Glass has. There are loads of interesting things you could be doing with your deckbuilding, unfortunately a lot of them cause you to lose ground very quickly as the game increases in difficulty and scope. You have to have a constant stream of attack and defense cards always coming in to both break your opponents' grid and restore yours, if a weak point is every carved out in your own defenses, it's a pretty immediate round loss. So it very quickly becomes clear that the strategy to win most efficiently is "load your deck with attack and defense cards, ignore all spells besides magic cards, and try to brute force combat". It's an unfortunate outcome for a game that has such an interesting combat system, and I'm sure if you really delve in deep you can find a lot of fun strategies but for a very casual playthrough the gameplay just doesn't really come together, in my opinion. I tried for like 6 hours and I just had to tap out. 3.9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment