Happy New Year!

Before we start, I’d like to thank everyone who has continued to read my work over the past year. Even if you were just here to tell me that I was wrong, I appreciate that you took the time to read the things I had to say, share articles with your friends, or write a comment. It meant the world to me.

Okay – now onto the games.

Jump to:

Isles of Sea and Sky

In a bit of a recurring trend for December, I’ve already written about Isles of Sea and Sky. In fact, the whole reason you are reading this today instead of on the first of January is because I wanted to publish my Isles of Sea and Sky review ahead of this article. I was really that opposed to repeating myself by writing the same thing twice.

Having said that, if you’d like to read my thoughts on the, frankly, excellent Sokoban-Metroidvania then please give my review of Isles of Sea and Sky a look. I think the game is fantastic, and hope that more people will give it a shot after learning about it.

Shogun Showdown

I suppose it makes sense to get all of the games that I already wrote about in December out of the way at the beginning of the article, huh?

Either way, I continued playing Shogun Showdown. A lot of it, in fact. I still think it’s an excellent tactics game. Shogun Showdown just has a way of turning its relatively simple turn-based combat mechanics into a fluid dance of martial arts. At least, that’s how it feels as you bob, and weave around enemy attacks while systematically striking them down where they stand.

For a more complete look at the game, please consider reading my Demo Dive on Shogun Showdown. The demo is fundamentally just the first few hours of the full game, and is just as enjoyable as continuing to play while unlocking additional attacks, and characters.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Metaphor is another game that I played the demo for, and promptly purchased. I’ve continued playing it throughout December making slow chunks of progress during my evenings. My opinion on the game hasn’t changed much from everything I already discussed after playing the game’s demo, which you can read here.

The one major difference between the demo, and the full game is having full access to the social links aspect of the game. I’m not actually sure if that’s what it’s called in Metaphor, but I think that’s the name of the companion side stories in Persona. Either way, my various companions are starting to open up, so I’ve been delving more into those extended side stories.

At present, I don’t have much more to say on Metaphor’s writing. There are certainly a lot of different balls in the air, and I think that the subject matter has been handled well so far. The real clincher for me though will be how these stories are resolved. There’s a lot of room for the writing team to get egg on their face, but I’m hoping everything sticks the landing.

Oh – and as a bit of a teaser, I do have another article that I plan to write about Metaphor: ReFantazio. It should be out sometime this month. That’s all I’ll say because it’s just a couple of notes that I’ve jotted down in my notebook at the moment.

Sorry We’re Closed

This is another game that I covered as part of the October Next Fest. I picked it up at the same time as Mind Over Magnet, and The Rise of the Golden Idol. Evidently, that was a very busy week for game releases.

Either way, Sorry We’re Closed is a Horror game that’s primarily played from a third person perspective with a fixed camera, and jumps to first person for combat. In a lot of ways, Sorry We’re Closed tries to evoke the vibe of a PS2 era game, and I think it succeeds in that regard. The look is spot on, and the game feels a little clunky in a nostalgic sort of way. This all helps Sorry We’re Closed build, maintain, and release tension where appropriate throughout its runtime, which, to me, is the mark of a good Horror game.

However, I did find playing Sorry We’re Closed to be a little uneven. The demo that I played in October skips the majority of the opening to get players right to the meat and potatoes of Sorry We’re Closed, which I think was a fantastic choice. The actual opening of this game is a little too slow for my taste if I’m being honest. There’s simply too much time between the start of the game, and when players are finally presented with their first narrative hook. If I didn’t already have foresight into where the game was going thanks to the demo then I probably would have bounced off it before it started to pick up steam.

The final dungeon is also a bit of a sour note. There’s a little too much focus on combat, which puts a very unflattering spotlight on the clunky controls to the point where they’re a lot less endearing.

Having said that, the entire middle section of the game is great. It’s super well paced, and sufficiently creepy. Oh – and the music. My god. The tracks that play during the various boss fights are chef’s kiss. 

It just sucks that the best parts of Sorry We’re Closed are bookended by, what I would call, much weaker portions of the overall experience. I think it’s still worth checking out if you’re into the sort of vibes that Sorry We’re Closed is putting out though.

Portal

Yes – I played Portal in the year of our lord 2024. It wasn’t the first time I’ve played Portal though, so put your Goddamn pitchforks down.

After finishing Mind Over Magnet, I felt compelled to play 1 of the games that I know helped to inspire its creation. Ergo, I downloaded, and played through the classic puzzler, and first-person shooter hybrid Portal.

I feel like everyone knows what Portal is already, but for the 1 person reading this who doesn’t: Portal is a game where you shoot a gun that creates rifts in space. You’re then able to travel between these rifts to solve a variety of puzzles. For example: there might be a switch that you need to press located across the level. If you flip the switch, it opens the door to the level’s exit, but the door closes too quickly for you to walk back to the door. So, you create a portal beside the door, and another beside the switch, flip the switch, walk through the portal, and exit the level.

Not all of the puzzles are that straightforward, but many of them feel that way. Portal has this way of making all of its puzzles feel effortless to solve without any of them ever feeling thoughtless. It’s an exceptionally rare quality in a puzzle game, and is likely a large part of Portal’s enduring appeal as one of the best puzzle games ever created.

I also really appreciate how the back half of the game doesn’t feel as intentionally video game-y as most puzzle games do. It feels a lot more like you’re trying to escape the Aperture Testing Lab, and the puzzle solving is a natural consequence of how you’re going about your escape. In actuality the entire thing is an authored gameplay experience, but I’ve always thought it’s neat how it doesn’t really feel like one.

Anyway, Portal is great. You should play it if you haven’t already.

Nine Sols

Finally, we reach the last game that I played in December: Nine Sols. And I’m not really sure what I want to actually say about it.

I’d heard a lot about this one prior to playing it. A lot of good things. I don’t want to immediately dismiss that, nor the fans who deeply love Nine Sols, but I am very torn on my time with it.

On one hand, I think Nine Sols is a totally unremarkable Metroidvania. It does very little to actually justify the use of that gameplay structure, and progression system. You get almost all of your upgrades as soon as you enter the relevant area where you need said upgrade. Honestly, the game could have been a linear sequence of platforming challenges where players have no ability to backtrack, and almost nothing from my playthrough would have changed. I was able to clear out an area during my first sweep through it, and wasn’t provided with a reason to return. Never mind that you’re only allowed into new areas when the game wants you to be there, which, in my mind, completely defeats the point of using a Metroidvania progression system in the first place.

Make no mistake, I don’t think any of these things make Nine Sols a bad game. There are a ton of other Metroidvanias on the market that do exactly the same thing. Other people seem to really like this, but I will continue to feel like it completely misses the point of structuring a game in this way.

Now, having said all of that – Nine Sols’ combat absolutely slaps. However, I was very hot and cold about the combat at first. You are expected to pick up on parrying almost immediately. The game is merciless about this. You’re either going to learn to parry, or you’re going to repeatedly die an unceremonious death.

However, once you get used to parrying, specifically the timing for it, Nine Sols starts to really open up. There’s a couple of flavors of parry that you unlock throughout the game, and they each correspond to parrying specific types of attacks. This allows the game to naturally ramp up the complexity of its different enemy encounters in a way that keeps the game from becoming stagnant. It also prevents Nine Sols from devolving into simply making everything attack faster to artificially increase the difficulty of late-game encounters. As such, outside of the initial learning curve, there are very few times where Nine Sols feels totally unfair. It’s hard, but I got the sense while playing that the developers wanted me to succeed. It was just a matter of figuring out the proper rhythm to every fight.

Nowhere is this more apparent than during the boss fights, which is where Nine Sols shines brightest. That’s where you really get to experience all of the different elements that make up Nine Sols coming together for this beautiful dance between you, and whatever you’re fighting. I can’t even begin to describe exactly how compelling it feels when you’re able to properly parry every single thing that a boss throws at you before going in for the killing blow. It’s so cool, and leads to the kind of flow state that I normally only get to experience while playing Monster Hunter.

For what it’s worth, this is why so many people have (correctly) compared Nine Sols to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Both games come from the same school of thought, and Nine Sols evokes a lot of the same feelings within players as Sekiro did back in 2019.

Nine Sols is a really cool game. However, I think people within the game’s Steam reviews that fixate on the Metroidvania aspects of Nine Sols have totally missed why this game is so awesome. It’s the rhythmic combat, and the beautiful dances that players get to experience with each of the game’s bosses that make Nine Sols so damn compelling. Don’t play this game if you’re waiting for Silksong. Play it if you think games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice are the bee’s knees.

Alrighty. That’s it for December. Thank you for reading, and stay safe out there.

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