This week’s five capsule reviews are for Monument Valley, Deep Sky Derelicts, Super Mario Galaxy, Kentucky Route Zero Act II, and the Gathering Storm and Rise & Fall expansions for Civilization VI. Pretty broad spread this week! Let’s get into it:
Monument Valley
This game is bursting with colorful, inventive geometry that makes for curious puzzle boxes that shift and metamorphose. It’s one of those games that really takes advantage of its platform. Every screen is made to be played in the palm of a player’s hand, with animations that make use of the vertical screen to progressively unfold levels and their puzzles. The puzzles themselves are solid, but don’t require too much brain twisting. It’s on the short side, but that fits, too.
Deep Sky Derelicts
The good: cartoon graphics, scuzzy atmosphere, a variety of buffs and status effects to navigate. Combat and exploration gameplay is interesting – when the game allows players the chance to move.
The bad: Poorly balanced. Any game in which your team can be stunlocked to death from the first turn is rough, and DSD tries to make every encounter dangerous. Unfortunately, this means that your forward progress is always subject to a wipe solely on the basis of bad luck. The plot is nonsensical. And the game is full of padding as you can only heal by returning to the main base.
Extra credit: DSD might be the first card battler that I felt actually played like an older school, turn-based, menu-based RPG. Introducing decks and randomness to the formula is fun, and I’ll probably explore more games in this subgenre on the strength of the idea.
Final verdict: if I had not been doing this as part of a backlog challenge, I would have dropped this game halfway through. It’s out of ideas by then, and the ending is hardly any different from the rest of the game. This team stretched a few ideas at least 15 hours too far.
Super Mario Galaxy
Out of the 3D Mario entries, Galaxy is the most inventive. Its designers experiment with space, gravity, objects, and scale. These experiments are inscribed in just about every corner of the game. This is not executed perfectly – sometimes the semi-fixed camera, still in place from Mario 64, gets in the way. Some mechanics are not easy to understand, even after multiple attempts. This is especially true of some boss fights, which can require precision with imprecise movements. That’s a regular flaw with Wii games in general, but it’s never fun to encounter. However, all of these issues are relatively minor in light of how many new ideas Galaxy attempts. It’s rare to see any game throw so much at the wall, and rarer still to have so much stick.
Kentucky Route Zero: Act II
This game is so damn beautiful. Several parts of this chapter manipulate space in interesting ways, playing with expectations of linear paths through geographies and spaces and resisting them. The dialog options can go as expected or can transport the player and character far from the scene. And from start to finish, the locations visited in between the looping Zero and the overworld are fascinating in concept, art, and execution. The final scene of traversal, with Julian, handles flying in a way that calls back to older Final Fantasy games while also offering something new: gazing down at familiar scenes from the sky. This is handled in small snippets of text, but they convey something powerful that other games skip over: a feeling that its characters recognize places in the game’s world, considering their own recent history with them.
Civilization VI Expansions (Gathering Storm and Rise & Fall)
Together, these are very solid expansions that change more of the whole game than I expected. They’re of a piece with other Firaxis DLC, in the X-Com tradition of “more is more.” As such, they’re more additive than anything else, which can be a bit of a drawback as it can extend long games to be even lengthier, adding several other menus to periodically navigate.
Even so, the new systems are well integrated with the existing ones. In particular, I think there’s something very interesting in navigating electrical power as infrastructure, linked with fuel resources, linked with global warming, flooding, and climate change.
As usual with Civ, this doesn’t come as straightforward commentary – it strikes me that the best position for the system is to burn through resources in the earlier eras, reaping the benefits of production, and then decommission polluting plants to secure diplomatic points for the climate accords. In that regard, this is a continuation of Civ’s usual status quo politics, in which exploitative modes of colonial history are presented as bonuses for the purposes of the game. At least this time, that comes with downsides in terms of flooding and more sudden natural disasters that players and computers alike must address.
Previously on the blitz: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Optional Objectives is a contributing editor for Gamers With Glasses. He also writes for a bunch of other online publications and zines, including Unwinnable, Heterotopias, First Person Scholar, Clickbliss, and Haywire Magazine. You can find more on twitter, both @opobjectives and @donaever.
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