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: Revelations: Persona - Beat (Bad Ending)
Okay, let's get this over with. March possibly started on the worst note any month could start on, with me playing a really bad RPG. I've gone on forever at this point about why Revelations: Persona was a bad experience, I won't bore you with it again, it's truly a wild game that makes you feel bad for developing a free win because its system is so poorly explained that you feel like it was random. It is one of the worst games I've ever done for Game Clearing, at least the ones that I'm willing to talk about. I've played a lot of very bad itch.io shovelware back when game clearing was just any game from my backlog and not my current, more refined way of doing so. It is literally like the 6th worst game I've played since doing this incarnation of game clearing.
I will say, though, that I did not end up removing Persona 5 from my to-play list. I talked about doing that several times in the gaming diary about Revelations: Persona and like, I'm still going to give it a chance. What's funny though is that like, a lot of people have told me "Persona 5 is so much better, even if you didn't like 1 you're likely to enjoy 5 because they're basically entirely different entities". And I'm sure that's correct. But I just, hilariously, have a higher chance of DNF-ing Persona 5 just because it's so unreasonably long. Like, Revelations: Persona is a much worse game but by the time I was like "I shouldn't have played this", I believed I was a few hours from the end. So I can justify playing until the end. Persona 5 can realistically be like "I'm kind of sick of this, I liked it for a while but it's wearing thin" but then have an additional 50 hours left to actually play the game. This is why games shouldn't be 100 hours, exceptionally long games are too easy to drop and then picking them up again means another 50-something hour investment.
Game 2: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Beat
I love the Secret of Monkey Island. The first entry in the beloved Monkey Island adventure series was one of the first games I ever did for game clearing back when I started taking it seriously in 2023, and for a while I was sure that it was going to make my best list for that year. It's genuinely one of the best adventure games of all time, it's well written, the puzzles are clever, it gives the player this real sense of adventure. It's fantastic. It has that exact same vibe that the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie has, albeit with more pop culture references. So the sequel, LeChuck's Revenge, was a long time coming.
LeChuck's Revenge sees our bumbling pirate hero, Guybrush Threepwood, on the pirate island of Scabb. Guybrush has spent the past several months reveling in his defeat of the ghost pirate LeChuck, amassing both wealth and a large ego, which causes his love interest from the first game, Elaine Marley, to break up with him and flee back to her home. He is here on Scabb Island to try and find leads on the legendary treasure of Big Whoop, a treasure that belonged to a famous pirate crew who buried it on a mysterious island and went to their graves holding onto its secret location. He hopes to charter a ship and search the Caribbean over for clues.
However, he immediately runs afoul of Scabb Island's tyrannical pirate lord, Largo LeGrande, who was once the first mate of his archnemesis LeChuck and has put an embargo on the island, ensuring no one can sail in or out of Scabb Island. In his attempts to defeat Largo and get off Scabb, Guybrush accidentally lets it slip that he has LeChuck's beard, a trophy of his previous encounter. Largo swipes the beard and brings it to a voodoo sorcerer, allowing LeChuck to return to life. Guybrush must now race across the Caribbean, finding the treasure of Big Whoop before LeChuck regains his full power and finds him to enact his revenge. Along the way he'll meet new friends, run into familiar faces, and discover the truth about his relationship to the evil pirate who taunts him so.
I'll fully admit, going into this, I didn't expect to like LeChuck's Revenge nearly as much as I enjoyed Secret. I had seen someone play LeChuck's Revenge many years ago and at the time I was kind of put-off by it. I really liked Secret's more light-hearted, wholesome tone, Guybrush was a lovable doofus who wanted to be a pirate in the way a child would. Less raiding ships and long hard days sailing in the sweltering Caribbean heat and more high adventure and finding treasure. LeChuck's Revenge, meanwhile, depicts a meaner, more egotistical Guybrush who has managed to make everyone mad at him. But actually playing it, this Guybrush is way more fun. The fact that he is kind of unlikable now means that the game feels more comfortable having him be the butt of jokes, which allows him to be a more active participant in the comedy. And they're allowed to have more fun with puzzle designs surrounding characters having to participate in them specifically because Guybrush is now allowed to be kind of a bastard. He can manipulate people into doing what he wants.
Speaking of which, the puzzles in this game are just way more fun and way more clever. There's an extended library puzzle that I really like, having to search the files for various books to trade around the Caribbean but only being able to check out four at a time so you have to return some books before you can find others. There are multiple puzzles with a large amount of moving parts that take a lot of the game to piece together but none of them feel tedious. That's something that I think keeps Monkey Island as a series talked pretty highly despite being a PC Adventure game from the 80s/90s, a genre infamous for just having absurd puzzles. Monkey Island feels approachable, like you can really solve these puzzles without having to jump to crazy moon logic. And LeChuck's Revenge is just better at it than the first game.
This game's structure is also just great. While I enjoy Secret a lot, the fact that the majority of the game takes place on two giant islands causes it to kind of feel iffy as a seafaring pirate adventure. LeChuck's Revenge has you constantly sailing from island to island across the Caribbean, using the knowledge and items you collect between islands to progress. It sells the idea that this is a grand, swashbuckling pirate adventure much better, it's legitimately like everything that was great about Secret is superb in this one and everything that wasn't as great is fixed. LeChuck's Revenge is the best kind of sequel, a sequel that manages to take its established world and characters and then evolve them in ways that completely recontextualizes this familiar cast. I even adore the game's rather controversial (at the time) ending! It's the first game I've played this year that I believes gets the 5/5 rating on my backlog and I adore it to death. 9.6/10
Game 3: Republique - Beat
Republique makes me so sad. I had such high hopes for Republique initially. It had a really cool concept, a unique gameplay style, it seemed like it had a lot to say about propaganda in the internet age. I was ready to call this thing a hidden gem, like, it was super cool. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite bad games of all time, Lifeline, but like. Actually good. Finding a random indie darling out of nowhere and being able to talk about it to where other people find it is one of my favorite things about playing random games. But, unfortunately, it really drops the ball in the last two episodes and it ruins its momentum entirely.
Republique is a stealth action game that takes place within an Orwellian dystopia titled, well, Republique. Republique is an underground city ran by the sinister and charismatic dictator Treglazov, more commonly known as "the Overseer" or "the Headmaster". You follow Hope, or 930-H as she's known in Republique, a teenage girl who has been raised inside of Republique and who begins the game being busted for hoarding contraband which speaks of revolution. Hope has recently been contacted by a mysterious unnamed person, the player, who exists outside of Republique and has hacked into its aggressive security mainframe. The two then form an alliance, looking to guide the young girl out of Republique and out into freedom. You, as the player, play dual roles, using the cameras to plot out a safe course ahead while also playing as Hope, using the information you've gained to walk her through the facility. All the while discovering more about the insidious Treglazov and his relationship with the world outside of Republique.
I really like the way Republique plays. I have a bizarre fascination with games that, instead of putting you in the shoes of a character, put you in the shoes of some sort of entity existing outside of the actual gameplay who is guiding the protagonist through. See, Lifeline, an objectively terrible game that I find endlessly compelling. It's an especially fun take for a stealth action game to have, you get to be the eyes over the facility charting out a course and watching guards patterns so you can then lead Hope to safety. It's very unique and I was really taken in by the gameplay. There were a lot of points in the first half where I was ready to give this game a surprisingly high score.
It also has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of propaganda, and especially in the online space. Propaganda is the overarching theme in the first three episodes of the game, as you make your way through Republique you begin to really see how the Overseer has been manipulating things. Newspapers from his own personal journalist, a woman who has a deep physical and emotional attraction to the man, are scattered throughout and by scanning the newspapers you can find audio files that detail conversations she's had on how to lie about the events she's covering. This is in parallel to finding all the books that the Overseer has banned, having even gone so far as to order the execution of his own personal librarian to keep them out of the hands of the people of Republique. But in the game's third episode it comes to a head where Hope and the player, to remove the final obstacle from Hope's path to freedom, have to become complicit in the propaganda machine by using our always online culture as a means with which to delve into various guards' lives from before they came to Republique. They then must clip sound bites from these lives and swipe out of context images to spin a narrative to have them removed from their post and detained.
Unfortunately it kind of fumbles in two pretty big ways. First of all is just that this was a Kickstarter game and so there are expectations that are put upon it that end up breaking the immersion. For instance, all the non-story important guards in this game that Hope needs to navigate around are represented by Kickstarter backers. A cool bonus, but it's also very weird scanning their information and seeing their screenname be put in the text of their guard id, as well as a little stamp indicating that indicates they are a Kickstarter backer. Especially when the backers in question, rather than sending in photos of themselves, send in drawings. Like literally Tycho Brahe, the Penny Arcade character, is one of the guards. It's very weird. It also, being an indie Kickstarter game from the 2010s, is part of an ecosystem where it's expected and/or welcome to have references to other significant indie games. This takes the form of having the games actually appear as a collectible, with one of Hope's very few allies in her quest to escape having had them confiscated and asking Hope to collect them. It's weird to see games like Shovel Knight and Hotline Miami appear in this Orwellian society and it's extra weird that you get little sales pitches on every game that appears.
The second way this game fumbles is that, in its final two episodes, it kind of just becomes an entirely different story. It changes from an Orwellian dystopia plot to a more heavy science fiction plot about clones and genetic memory. The big reveal is that Treglazov is actually a tech billionaire that has convinced the US government, along with others, to entrust him with their entire data caches. But instead of storing them on servers, he has created clones with the specific purpose of storing all this data as a person, as human DNA has untold storage capacity. It's a disappointing way for this story to go, given how strong its dystopian foundation actually is and it kind of sours the whole experience, in my opinion. Fun gameplay, but the story is just too all over the place and feels like it loses out on its theme right at the finish line. 6.7/10
Game 4: Hack 'n' Slash - DNF
Why do I keep trying to get water from the Double Fine well? I have a tumultuous history with Double Fine. I respect them a whole lot, I think they are a true bastion of creativity. Every game that comes out of Double Fine is incredibly unique, an idea that could only come about from a studio that values creative spark more than anything else. And this commitment to the creative has definitely paid off for me sometimes, Broken Age made my best list last year. On the other hand, I kind of hate them. Outside of a couple highlights like Broken Age and Costume Quest, I have routinely found Double Fine games to be works that have really neat concepts but the gameplay is actively terrible. And nowhere is that more apparent than Hack 'n' Slash.
Hack 'n' Slash is a puzzle-adventure game very similar to the Legend of Zelda. In it you play as a young woman named Alice who has traveled into the mountains to find fortune. After becoming caught in a trap, Alice discovers a sword that breaks almost immediately, revealing a USB drive underneath. Armed with this USB sword, Alice quickly finds out she has control over various aspects of reality, being able to hack into them and change various things about their code, hence the name. It is now up to Alice, alongside her Sprite friend Bob, to hack into the world in an attempt to defeat the wizard who rules over these lands, who himself seems to be a hacker of equal, if not greater power.
Hack 'n' Slash actually starts out super fun, in my opinion. Being able to hack into every aspect of this world allows the player a lot of experimentation and really enables them to do whatever. I first tried to play Hack 'n' Slash many years ago, actually, and crashed my computer by setting an enemy spawner to instantly spawn 28,000 enemies all at once just to see if it would let me do it. Altering variables is actually very intuitive and it's a good system to allow beginners to gain a rough idea on how coding works. The early game is very entertaining and for many years I was sure I was going to love this game just because of how dumb the stuff you can do is.
Then the honeymoon phase ends and the game starts ramping up ideas very quickly. In a matter of about a half an hour, you go from "changing the variable on a spawner from spawning 1 turtle to spawning 8 so you can use them to swim across a channel" to "having to figure out how algorithms work with very little guidance from the game itself". Hack 'n' Slash feels in the early game like a game designed for beginners, that it allows people who have no understanding of coding going into the game to have a baseline from which to understand the basic concepts of coding. And it feels like, by the time you enter the midgame, you now need to have some existing coding knowledge to be able to progress otherwise you are going to get stuck in the algorithm section and either brute force it or look up an answer. But those with existing coding knowledge are almost certainly going to get put off by the game's very simplistic early game and it's just like. I cannot imagine the person for whom Hack 'n' Slash is for, and honestly no one else seems to be able to imagine that person either. Hack 'n' Slash is pretty widely considered Double Fine's worst game online these days and a lot of people remain upset that the game was the choice to go into production during Double Fine's "Amnesia Fortnight" event, an event they try to host once a year where, for a two week period, they stop production on all existing projects and everyone in the company gets a chance to pitch a game. It's real bad, in my opinion, and I wish I had never played it in a more serious capacity, wish that my memories could just be of the 28,000 turtles situation. 2/10
Game 5: Spyro: Year of the Dragon - Beat
The PS1 Spyro trilogy is a truly legendary run of games. I feel like there are very few game series that truly manage to keep up momentum for three games in a row, even some of the most famously great trilogies of all time (NES Mario, Uncharted, Batman Arkham, etc.) I personally either feel have some pretty big lows or just have one game that isn't as good as the others. And especially with trilogies from before the PS3/Xbox era, you rarely have a trilogy that is consistently good because, simply put, trilogies just aren't consistent. Spyro's sister franchise Crash Bandicoot is a perfect example of this, three games, all individually very good, all who share the same basic DNA, all of whom are wildly different at the end of the day. Spyro, meanwhile, is a trilogy of games that is consistent in both game design ideology and in quality, an extreme rarity for any trilogy and especially one from this specific era. And Year of the Dragon is its best entry.
Spyro: Year of the Dragon sees the young Dragon relaxing at his home in the Artisan World when suddenly a mysterious magic user, a rabbit girl named Bianca, arrives and steals all the dragon eggs. He gives chase, as he is the only dragon small enough to fit into the holes she dug to swipe the eggs, and ends up in the ancestral home of the Dragons, now known as the Forgotten Realms. Many centuries ago, the Dragons were run off of these realms by a powerful sorceress, and now she has kidnapped the unhatched dragon eggs in an attempt to create a spell that, she says, will restore magic to their worlds. Spyro must race through the many levels of the Forgotten Realms to rescue the baby dragons, defeat the Sorceress' minions, and gain allies in his battle against this evil mastermind.
It's difficult for me to explain what is truly great about a platformer. Of the game genres, platformers are probably the genre I most enter a "flow state" with. Which in itself is probably enough explanation. In direct contrast to the majority of games I talk about on this blog, games with deeper stories and complex themes to discuss and analyze, platformers are just good, clean fun. Spyro 3 is just fun, a game I don't have to think too hard about, just vibe with. I think that's the thing that makes Spyro feel so consistent, they're just excellent vibe games, they feel so chill and approachable.
But that's not to say I have NOTHING to say about Spyro 3. Something I do really like about it in particular is the inclusion of the other characters, Sheila, Sgt. Byrd, Bently, and Agent 9. A lot of platformers from the era Spyro is from in particular introduce other characters and gameplay ideas with the goal of introducing variety into the game. Good game design in this era was not so much "find what your game is and work on perfecting that", it was "try and be the most game with the most ideas". And these tend to be my least favorite parts of older platformers, I'm thinking very specifically of the Murray races in Sly Cooper 1 right now. But Spyro manages to make all these characters feel super unique and introduce a lot of gameplay variety while still always feeling like Spyro. And I appreciate that a whole lot. I don't feel like I'm playing a different game when I'm playing Sheila's levels, I just feel like I'm playing with a different moveset. And I think, all told, that's the reason why this Spyro is my favorite of the three, it manages to be the most varied and have the most fun ideas for level objectives, without ever losing what makes Spyro great. But again, this trilogy is all very close and I don't think, ultimately, any of them are better or worse than the others. 9.2/10
Game 6: TimeOut - Beat
Another entry in the series of "playing random itch.io games I think look interesting". I should probably just binge more of those, to be honest, as a lot of them are like 1-3 hours long. I could probably get through the entire backlog I've created for myself of itch games this year if I just hard focused on that. Maybe when I get further into clearing out my itch games I can do a post that's like "hidden gems from that big bundle we all bought in 2020". Anyways, TimeOut was, I believe, one of the first games I flagged as being interesting, so it's nice to finally get around to it. And just in time too, because apparently the dev is working on a new game that's set to be a spiritual successor/a more expansive version of this?
TimeOut is a short detective story wherein you are put in the shoes of a noir detective in a world where your lifespan is your currency. He has been contacted by a client to take up a case involving the suspicious death of her husband. Along the way he is stopped by a mysterious man who gives him an incredible offer: a low interest loan of 5 years of additional time where the only payment required of our detective friend is that each time him and this man meet, the detective must give him an hour of time back. Unable to resist such an offer, he accepts, receiving the five years. It is only when he gets to the meeting point with his client that all is revealed: someone has been dealing in "fake time", offering them large amounts of time at low interest rates that rapidly drains from the receiver, killing them within hours. Fake time being what killed her husband in the end. Our detective must now solve the mystery of who has been dealing in fake time before his own illegitimate clock runs out.
I don't want to say much else because like, this is literally a 45 minute game. And I do think if you have that big bundle, it's worth playing, it's just a short, fun noir romp with some clever messaging. The person who made it said that it was inspired by the movie In Time and obviously that's true, it almost seems like a weird alternate universe version of that movie where it's a detective film instead of an action/heist film. But I think this game kind of sells the premise better, having everyone's time be visible with the press of a button. You see people just drop dead out of nowhere and also see how truly destitute everyone is, with very few people that detective passes having more than a couple hours of time. And in shootouts you watch as years turn to months, then to days and then minutes before they succumb to their wounds and die. It's neat. A nice short romp, well worth the play in my opinion. The only real problem is that it does definitely feel like a demo. 6.3/10
Game 7: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling - DNF
I just shouldn't have played this one. I'm sorry for playing Bug Fables. Not because the game is bad but because I should've just been hyper aware that I wasn't going to like it. I mention this in my gaming diary about Bug Fables, but the fact that I didn't like it actually upset me way more than normal. Not only because it's like, I spent a significant amount of time on a game I did not like, but also because it made me feel gross. It made me feel like the kind of content creators that I used to really enjoy and now have lost a lot of respect for, the kind of person who plays things he knows he's not going to like under the pretense of "giving it a fair shake", only to then turn around and have all his beliefs about the subject be confirmed and then he goes and criticizes it on the internet. This is why I don't like Videogamedunkey, regardless of how good his videos are, his numerous videos on JRPGs are a prime example of this phenomenon. People way overstate the value in "giving things a fair shake", and especially in a discourse as charged as the one Bug Fables involved in, the Paper Mario discourse, a lot of people have used that pretense to continue to push their beliefs and incite more vitriol about the modern titles. I'm sorry to everyone who likes this game, I know I didn't approach it in bad faith and I know you know I didn't approach it in bad faith, but the outcome being as I ultimately expected does make me feel like I did, y'know?
Game 8: Pyre - Beat
I fell in love with Pyre on sight. I almost don't want to write about it too much here because I like really want to just put all my other backlogged drafts on hold to write a dedicated review on Pyre. This game is fascinating. Supergiant's oft forgotten third game is by far their most unique, taking their roots in twin stick action games and RPGs and blending it with sports game conventions. It's one of the most fascinatingly unique games I've ever played and I would not be surprised if it is already my game of the year. Supergiant does not miss and so far Pyre is my second favorite of the games they've made.
Pyre is an action-RPG that takes place in the fantastical land of Downside. Downside is a massive prison realm where the enemies of a powerful nation known only as "the Commonwealth" are thrown into to live out their remaining days in a sort of purgatory. It's a harsh wasteland made of deserts, swamps, and mountains, with very few hospitable regions to be found. You play as "the Reader", a character you can name and who has some rough customization features. Reading has been outlawed in the Commonwealth for quite some time, and as such Readers are rare. And to Downside, valuable. The Reader, as such, gets picked up by a trio of wanderers named "the Nightwings". The trio wish to participate in a ritual known as the Liberation Rites, a ritual wherein celestial orbs fall from the sky and two parties battle over it, the victor being able to follow the stars' path to the Mountain that bridges the gap between Downside and the Commonwealth. Whoever wins the most Rites by the end of their cycle shall be liberated, allowed to return to the Commonwealth and given a full pardon.
Participating in these rites are where the Sports aspect comes in. I had always known Pyre was a sports game in some capacity, that Supergiant took a lot of notes from sports and sports games to build the system of Pyre. For some reason though I had always assumed that, as this is an RPG, the sport they took from was baseball. That they adapted baseball's drafting and trading systems for how you select and manage your party. Pyre is basketball. It's a basketball RPG. You select a team of three, called a "triumvirate", and get placed on one side of an arena, guarding a circular pyre. The opponents are placed on the other side, with their own pyre, and the celestial orb spawns in the center. Your goal is to bring the Celestial orb into the opponent's pyre, either by tossing it in there or by slamming one of your characters into it, while also preventing the opponents from getting into your pyre. It's difficult to really explain why it's basketball and not just any sport describing it, but if you see gameplay, it's absolutely basketball.
Again, I think I'm likely to do a full review of Pyre, so I don't want to get TOO into it. But I love basically everything about this game and, moreover, I find it very interesting how clearly it inspired Hades. Pyre is often considered Supergiant's "miss", and that extends internally as well. Supergiant sees Pyre as something of a missed opportunity, and through what they felt were Pyre's shortcomings they created Hades. And I do think I concur with their assessment, their opinions on why Pyre kind of falls short are things I feel about it. Still, this is one of the best games I've ever played, I loved it immediately and I'll probably come back to it periodically to play a "season" or two at various points. It's so good. 9.8/10
Game 9: Shovel Knight: King of Cards - Beat
Words cannot express how happy I am to be done with Shovel Knight. I've talked numerous times on this blog about how I used to be very retro game coded, I was the weird hipster in my friend group who "preferred playing classic NES games to the online multiplayer trash that comes out now". And I used to be way more into retro revivals than I am now, which is presumably why I own Shovel Knight. I forget exactly when I bought it but I probably bought it after watching a let's play of it from a YouTuber I followed at the time. By the time I got around to playing it though, my tastes changed and while I do think Shovel Knight is categorically better than the games that inspired it, I also think that if I didn't already own it at this point I would never truly seek it out. Over the course of the past couple years I've made it through all four Shovel Knight campaigns. I thought Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows were just fine. I really enjoyed Specter of Torment, though, it was the 15th best game I played last year. So how does the fourth and final Shovel Knight campaign stack-up? Well...
King of Cards is the earliest game on the Shovel Knight timeline, taking place before Specter of Torment and, by extension, long before the main campaign itself. In it, you play as the first boss of Shovel Knight, the arrogant and childish dandy King Knight, before he would be a king. King Knight, currently just a mama's boy living in his parents' attic, is traveling across the land to finally accomplish his goal of being king. As luck would have it, a brand new card game is sweeping the nation, Joustus, and the world is holding a massive Joustus tournament. If one could defeat the three kings of this realm "in combat", you will gain the Joustus crown and the title of King. King Knight thus sets off, using a loophole in the rules to physically defeat the three kings and try to become the king of cards, enabled on his quest by various citizens of the realm who wish to partake in the quest of becoming Joustus champion.
I want to preface this by saying that I didn't do like any Joustus. It's fine, but I'm just like "side modes are fun, but I don't want to spend an eternity learning a side mode" with basically any game, even ones I love (hi Blitzball). So I am judging King of Cards entirely on the platforming levels. In that sense, I think King of Cards is actually rather poor? King Knight has the most restrictive movement options of the four playable characters, not even being able to naturally gain that much upward momentum. Instead what he has to do is charge into an enemy, and then from there he enters a spin move where he can bounce on the enemy and gain the necessary vertical movement. This causes King Knight to just simply feel like a worse Shovel Knight, a Shovel Knight without any truly unique stuff in his kit and, instead, he just kinda needs a wind up to every move he does.
King of Cards also has a different overworld structure to the other games. King Knight doesn't face full levels like the other Knights do, instead his world map is filled to the brim with chunks of levels. Little microlevels that have only a single checkpoint in them, more akin to the size you would see out of a classic Mario game than you'd expect with a Shovel Knight. The goal is optimization, the game wants you to find the fastest path to the end by doing these small level chunks. I, however, find this too to be a downside, as it encouraged Yacht Club to now theme entire levels around the worst parts of their existing levels. Like one of the levels that would eventually become Mole Knight's is an extended version of that part where you're bouncing off the back of the giant beetle and have to clear a path forward for Shovel Knight while not losing the beetle, except now the beetle fakes out by running forward and backward all the time. I didn't like King of Cards really and I'm mostly just happy to be done with Shovel Knight. 5.9/10
Game 10: NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits - Beat
When the original Wii Shop Channel was closing, I scrambled to find basically any game that people said was worth playing. And by people, I of course mean "Nintendo Power". I was a regular Nintendo Power subscriber during the Wii era and I really quickly thumbed through years of magazines to look at WiiWare reviews and find which games were worth buying. Thankfully, I got a bunch of important ones, like LIT and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth. Unfortunately I did not grab all of the games I wanted before it shut down, however, some, not all, of the games I wanted to get would go on to get rereleases on Steam. Actually rereleases too, not like the hack job that was done on LIT. And the final game for March 2026 is one of them, the platformer/point and click hybrid based on Greek mythology known as NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits.
NyxQuest is a Greek mythology inspired adventure platformer set after a major catastrophe. In the games' opening, we find out the backstory of this game, centering around the character of Icarus. Icarus, the classical Greek figure, in this reality flew on his wax wings not during the day, but during the night, wherein he would fly up all the way past the clouds and into the realm of the goddess Nyx, queen of the night. The two would become quite close, but of course, Nyx would always have to go when the night turned to day. But the two would always continue meeting, developing a deeper and deeper bond. Until one day, Nyx looked down upon the world and found it barren and destroyed. The mighty Titan Helios, the sun himself, had awoken and judged humanity, destroying their world and slaughtering their gods. Icarus' belief in Nyx spared her this destruction, but now she is lost on the now barren world. Lost to find her dear friend and rescue him from Helios' wrath.
Nyx, having descended to Earth, and thus being separated from the night, has to do this while being mortal. Her powers are severely depleted in this state and she, essentially, is flying on wax wings herself. She can only really flap her wings a total of 5 times before her ability to fly is exhausted and she must land on the Earth to replenish her abilities. Furthermore, she is robbed of any divine abilities until her brethren, the few gods who hang onto life, grant her their strength, giving her the ability to move things with her mind, control the flow of wind, and eventually to zap her opponents with Zeus' lightning. She must use these tools to find her way past Helios' obstacles and to the fallen Icarus.
I feel like NyxQuest is a game I would've enjoyed much more if I had played it while I was still in the Wii mindset. I don't know if other people feel this, but sometimes I feel like Wii games are the hardest games to go back to just because you haven't played Wii games in so long that you're no longer as open and receptive to how touch and go motion controls are. Granted I'm playing NyxQuest on a mouse and a keyboard instead, but the same premise applies. The way NyxQuest is played is so distinctly Wii. You control Nyx's movement with a pretty standard movement system, on mouse and keyboard it was WASD but I imagine on Wii it was with the Nunchuck control stick. I can also imagine her other options like jumping/flying and gliding were mapped to C and Z, which I imagine was rather comfortable. The reason I can imagine this being the case is that NyxQuest uses pointer controls excessively. Nyx herself doesn't actually interact with the world very much, instead the player, using pointer controls or mouse controls in my case, points and clicks to move boxes, move flames, reroute wind, etc.
And it's a thing that I don't think is necessarily bad, I think that if I was playing this back in like 2010 when all I had was a Wii and I was playing it all the time, I would be all over this. I think this would be a hidden gem on the WiiWare. The Kid Icarus game we were all clamoring for after Brawl before a real Kid Icarus came out. Like it's fun, it's fine, I think the problem is me. I've moved on and this kind of game feels gimmicky to me now. I like it, but I don't like it as much as I would've back when I was a Wii fanboy. If you do miss that Wii era though, the time when people had this toy to play with and so tried to come up with whatever idea they could using it, please do get it, I think you'll get a lot out of it, and it's on Steam for like $3. It's just not my thing anymore. 6.2/10
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