Developed/Published by: Apparition Games / indie.io
Released: 02/10/2024
Completed: 01/04/2025
Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been having a lot of luck picking recent games largely on a whim, so after I polished off Children Of The Sun my interest was piqued by the idea of a “pinballvania” and more or less started this immediately. And it’s… eh… fine? I guess?

It’s always a bit awkward to write about a game that you don’t have any strong feelings about–something you can’t be very effusive about, but can’t really stick the boot in either. So I’ll just try and be constructive.

Pinball Spire is an attempt to take the play of pinball–you interact with the game’s main character by hitting them with flippers or launchers with the aim of hitting targets–and merge that with an action adventure, so rather than just playing on a single playfield to get a high score, your actions are intended to help you progress further through the game.

Generally, that’s as simple as hitting targets to open the door to the next playfield, but the game intends to fit the aforementioned idea of a “pinballvania” so you’re also unlocking abilities that should, in theory, be allowing you to navigate the playfields in different ways and open up new directions to travel.

The thing is though… that’s not really what happens. Pinball Spire’s design is extremely linear, and while metroidvanias are usually more about the illusion of freedom for the average player, Pinball Spire doesn’t have you re-navigate playfields until the end, and it (very oddly) doesn’t include anything in those earlier playfields that your new abilities unlock!

At best, a couple of times the game plans for you to travel onto a screen, realise you can’t beat it, return to the previous screen, go in the other direction, and quickly unlock one of the abilities that will help you progress. The game does have a strict gating with some doors that can’t be opened unless you have enough currency, but in every case by the time I got to them I had enough currency. In fact, you’d only not have enough currency if you were like, super good at pinball.

So the game lacks literally any of the “oh, I’ll come back here later” that makes for a good metroidvania, and indeed the only time you do significant backtracking is at the end of the game to get to the end of the game, and it’s extremely annoying when it happens!

The funny thing is though: Pinball Spire is a decent enough pinball game if you take it as one. The goals are all pretty clear, and while the physics can be as annoying as in any pinball game, the special abilities do a lot to help you (there’s a slowdown ability for aiming that’s a lifesaver). The main issues you’ll have are when you’re out of mana and can’t use them (which can often be a frustrating trek backwards to a save point for a refresh) or when you’re trying to get off the bloody playfield you’re on as you’ve opened the gate to the next–certain playfields make it insanely annoying (there’s one otherwise quite interesting one with an orrey theme that I found a nightmare to get off.)

Also: there’s no way to game over. In a weird way this is good, but it’s also bad. It’s good because if this game was like… a pinball roguelike-like and you had to start it over from the beginning again or whatever, people would be snapping their Steam Decks in half. It’s bad because there’s none of the thrill of pinball, really–you know that feeling when you’re trying to stop the ball from falling between the flippers? Here you either feel nothing,  because it’s just going to come back on screen, or boredom, because you know the playfield it’s going to fall back onto is going to be a complete slog to get back off. Some peril–even if it’s just restarting from the playfield you’re on–feels like it would be justified.

So Pinball Spire isn’t great, which I put down to a failure of imagination in the macro level design rather than in the individual playfield design (well apart from that orrey, which can fuck off.) But it’s close. Maybe they’ll get it with a sequel.

Will I ever play it again? No thanks! I didn’t get all of the collectibles or anything, but I’m not that great at pinball so I probably played this longer than needed.

Final Thought: This isn’t the only twist on pinball out there–Rollers of the Realm was out years ago and I’ve never tried it, and I’ll admit I’m intrigued by the more peggle-like Peglin (though that’s a roguelike-like, so I’m definitely concerned about the potential for Steam Deck snappage.)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo
Released: 27/08/1983
Completed: 29/03/2025
Completion: I can do basic arithmetic! I mean I could do it before. But I still can, so I didn’t get any worse at least.

After playing Gomoku Narabe Renju I had a choice: re-learn how to play mahjong so I could play the fifth ever game released on the Famicom or jump over to Donkey Kong Jr. Math because I hadn’t looked at that yet either.

I suppose there were other choices I could have made, but I got fixated on the fact I couldn’t find my copy of Clubhouse Games which I was pretty sure would teach me how to play mahjong again, so I decided what with me already knowing basic arithmetic, I should just look at one of Nintendo’s early attempts at edutainment (the other, “Popeye’s English Play” would only be released in Japan for obvious reason.)

Now, as we all know there’s “good” edutainment that we’re all fond of–your Oregon Trails and Carmen Sandiego’s–and there’s “bad” edutainment, things like Basic Math for the Atari 2600 (which I wrote about in exp. 2600). I think you can tell which one Donkey Kong Jr. Math is going to be.

It’s not just that it’s a maths game. It’s that like so many educational games, they somehow think that the action of doing something educational–in this case, a calculation–is enough to make it a game. Sure, in Donkey Kong Jr. Math you interact with the maths in the same way you’d play Donkey Kong Jr.–control Jr. and make him climb vines–but in every case you’re doing this to collect a number or operator to complete a calculation!

This is, obviously, very boring!

To be completely fair to Donkey Kong Jr. Math, I’m sure almost everyone played it single player, but it’s obvious that the game’s main mode, “Calculate” is meant to be played in two-player, competing to use the numbers hanging on vines and operators to calculate the number Donkey Kong is holding up before your opponent does. It’s entirely possible that the gang at Nintendo led by Toshihiko Nakago had great fun competing at this, and I suppose if you had an NES in a classroom this might be an entertaining way to do an arithmetic competition. 

But I’m absolutely grasping at straws, because absolutely no one did this and anyone who had this cart at home absolutely had Super Mario Bros. or literally any other cart that they’d rather play. Like if you had a friend round, they’d absolutely rather sit and watch you play Mario hoping you’d give them a go than do maths. No one wants to do maths!

Will I ever play it again? If I get hit very hard on the head and forget basic arithmetic… sure.

Final Thought: I’m sure that much like Gomoku Narabe Renju and Mahjong were Nintendo’s attempt to make the system suit adults, this was an attempt to offer a thin veil of respectability to the console as more than just a game system along with Popeye’s English Play, and was supposed to be followed by “Donkey Kong’s Music Play” which–in its Famicom rendition at least–was absurdly planned to feature the ability to sing karaoke via the second controller’s microphone! It seems not to have happened for a few possible reasons: that it wasn’t fun, that there were copyright issues with included songs, or that it was just too hard to fit a music game on an early Famicom cartridge.

Something I have to consider, actually is that above I said “anyone who had this cart at home absolutely had … literally any other cart that they’d rather play” but in 1983 some Japanese children could have a Famicom at home and such well-meaning parents that they only had this and Popeye’s English Play for the system! Absolutely tragic.

Developed/Published by: Réne Rother / Devolver Digital
Released: 09/04/2024
Completed: 30/03/2025
Completion: Finished it (and with all but a couple of achievements, too.)

Looking for more 2024 games that I could polish off quickly after Mouthwashing, I saw this recommended in Aurahack’s Top 10 of 2024 and it just sounded and looked extremely cool: a scribbly neon sniper game where you only get one bullet per level and have to guide the bullet between enemies to take them all down in one shot.

And… it is cool! Despite being “Devolver Digital”-core with the violence and the neon and that, it ploughs a different furrow than the likes of Hotline Miami, as the player takes the role of “THE GIRL” who, filthy and insane, attempts to destroy the cult that took everything from her using her psychic powers. The game is, ultimately, a puzzle game of first observation (finding and tagging enemies in the level) and then path-finding (planning the order in which to take down said enemies) but the atmosphere is what makes it: the visuals are clear in play, but emphasise a world gone wrong, and the soundscapes created by Aiden Baker, experimental ambience with a gothic-western flair, get you completely in the headspace of a ruthless hunter.

Importantly, the narrative gets out of its own way, being told just enough to be evocative, but not so much that it overpowers “vibes” with “details.”

I don’t know why but the promo shots Devolver Digital created don’t really capture how the game looks or how it plays. The launch trailer is ok, but Sleigh Bells isn’t actually the vibe…

It’s simply a cool game to hang out in–long periods of observance and planning followed by sudden flashes of extreme and cathartic violence. The game builds sensibly upon the foundation so that by the end of the game you’re equipped with a rational amount of ways to manipulate the bullet and facing a reasonable amount of enemies with special abilities that force you to think laterally, and then the entire thing over before you’re bored of the systems.

If I was really to complain, it’s that latter levels (unfortunately) do layer all the systems over slightly too many enemies, and failing on your one shot and having to do it all over again does become a bit of a pain in the arse–particularly because some enemies, also psychically equipped, can place a time pressure on you once you’ve fired your bullet (oh no, “pressure/puzzle” rears its head again!) By the end you have to not just meticulously plan your moves but how you’ll execute them, using a rapid turn here, or accepting that you’ll have to aim more quickly than the game has trained you to there.

For me, the last level particularly came close to spoiling the whole thing, because the game’s pleasure in play is that your failures are educational–you might fire off a shot just to find out how to navigate the level–but once you start failing repeatedly because you can’t execute your plan perfectly, it becomes frustrating rather than a clean march towards catharsis.

But I don’t mean to beat up on Children Of The Sun too much. It’s possible I got hyper-focused on my own specific solutions. And I’d call the game itself “focused” rather than short, because you can beat it, feel you got your money’s worth and not, particularly, feel like you want more (the time spent stymied probably helps with this.) I could probably tear through a bunch more easy levels, but it would be empty calories, and the design doesn’t support longer levels with ever more complex enemy and bullet interactions.

I mean this game is the bullet–it might take a couple of detours, but it hits the mark and doesn’t waste your time getting there.

Will I ever play it again? There’s a horde mode, but I couldn’t be bothered with it.

Final Thought: Unusually, Children Of The Sun is also a game where doing the achievements is a reward in and of itself, because they almost all offer an interesting and fun challenge on the level to go for that (generally) doesn’t make finishing the level more annoying or anything. I didn’t do them all–as I said, some of the later levels are just a touch too long–but I’d recommend trying for them on each level you play (but not being too bothered if you don’t manage them.)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo
Released: 27/08/1983
Completed: Er…
Completion: Well, I’ve managed to win a few games against the easiest CPU, but never take a full match.

Something I’ve always been interested in is that when you look at history, all anyone cares about is the hits. Nintendo is probably the most famous video game company of all time, and yet swathes of games they’ve released go almost completely unremarked. Gomoku Narabe Renju is a perfect example: it’s literally the fourth game released for Famicom (well, released on the same day as Mahjong) and, you know… no one cares.

Well, someone at Nintendo Japan remembered it, and it was released again on the Japanese version of Switch Online last year in what felt like a bit of a “let’s just dump what’s left” update (they even stuck up Urban Champion finally!) so I thought I’d take a look at it.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that no one cares about this one because it is, well, a board game. And not even a “full” adaptation of Go, but an adaptation of the tic-tac-toe/Connect Four-adjacent game, Gomoku, that can be played on the same board. In some respects it’s an interesting release because along with Mahjong it represents the only games for “grown-ups” that Nintendo would do for the system for a long time (apart from possibly Golf) and as only the second batch of games, you do have to wonder if it fit into some sort of strategy for the system or if–as seemingly was often the case if you’ve watched say Jeremy Parish cover the many obscure systems that competed with the Famicom–it’s simply that knocking up some board game adaptations is easier and quicker than other options when you want to bulk up your game library.

Almost certainly chosen because adapting Go would have been impossible (a Go title wouldn’t show up till 1987 with Igo: Kyuu Roban Taikyoku designed by Henk Rogers, which only manages a 9×9 board) “Gomoku” is quickly understood as connect five: you’re placing stones one after another, trying to make a row of five or block your opponent from doing so.

Unfortunately Gomoku–known as Gomoku Narabe, or “five piece line-up” in Japan–is, as many ancient games are, flawed. The first player (black) has a large advantage, leading to the “Renju” version of the game, which includes a few extremely inelegant rules updates that restrict the black player alone:

• Black can’t place a piece that would create two open lines of three stones, or place a piece that creates two open lines of four stones.
• Black can’t win with a line of 6 or more–it has to be a row of exactly five.

In addition, every game follows a set series of “opening” moves which attempt to balance the game even further.

As you lose the game immediately if you fall foul to any of these rules, what this means in practice is that every game of Gomoku Narabe Renju is a headache of watching out for edge cases and frustration as you navigate yourself into winnable positions that are actually automatic losses.

Now, with these rules the game is (apparently) fairly balanced, though complex, but for a newcomer Gomuku Narabe Renju takes absolutely no prisoners. While there are three difficulty levels, after playing for more time than I’d like to admit I can’t beat the easiest AI even half the time.

Although I find all the rule bodges in the name of fairness inelegant, I will say that the game design does, somewhat, have the same kind of “grand battle” feel that a real game of Go does (which I’m shite at, too.) You really feel the flow of attack and defence as you place your pieces; there’s a clear shift and feeling as you’re on the back foot, constantly placing stones to stop lines being made, and then an amazing feeling when you can push that tide back and force your opponent into that position–as you both attempt to strengthen your lines as you do so. The original simplicity is, honestly, quite beautiful, and it probably does serve, somewhat, as an on-ramp to Go and its own simulation of battle.

However, it’s not really a great video game–easily forgotten, easy to go unremarked. At best a competent adaptation for those who already loved the game and didn’t have any friends (or a pen and paper, which is all you actually need to play this!)

Will I ever play it again? I have a pen and paper; I can imagine playing Gomoku again, but not this version.

Final Thought: If you want to play this, pleasantly there is a full English translation out there–so you can at least understand why you’re getting your ass beat.

Developed/Published by: Wrong Organ / Critical Reflex
Released: 26/09/2024
Completed: 07/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.

If you can’t tell, recently I’ve been trying to play more games from 2024 to “catch up” on the zeitgeist, and it’s definitely been revealing to me that we live in a golden age of short, interesting video games. The kind of thing where you look it up on How Long To Beat and decide to just get it and install it immediately, because you can get through it. It doesn’t need to go on a backlog! You can just play it!

Imagine how “final facial expression from that Vince McMahon [“bad man!”–Ed.] meme” I was when I saw Mouthwashing was literally two hours.

I mean that’s the length of a movie! 

I praised Indika heavily for its incredible high fidelity visuals, saying something along the lines of “it wouldn’t work otherwise” so I rather like that along comes Mouthwashing, a similarly narrative-heavy game that looks like a PS1 game and… also looks fucking amazing and works! Turns out–and stick with me here–”art direction” might be a more important component of video games than “it looks real.” Indika uses high fidelity pointedly. Mouthwashing uses low fidelity pointedly.

A psychological horror game set on a crashed, “blue collar future” space freighter (think Alien) you play the ship’s acting captain across a series of months as the food slowly runs out and the remaining crew–including yourself–get increasingly unmoored from reality; while as the player, you start to understand what’s really going on and what really happened.

I’ll be straight, immediately: I liked Mouthwashing, but I didn’t love it. It does some things incredibly well–it uses glitches and crashes that make you think the game has actually hung to transition across the non-linear narrative, and it’s always effective–but it doesn’t really come together.

In some respects, the game suffers from the fact I played Indika almost directly before it, a game that nails its interactivity when it matters (well, apart from those retro game flashbacks, but they dont linger in the mind.) Mouthwashing feels more like a visual novel where you have to walk between nodes for the most part (nothing wrong with that) but there are moments where it expects you to play it like a game, and due to the fact that it can’t suddenly go out of its way to explain mechanics to you, there’s a lot of stumbling about and failing which, sadly, pull you right out of the narrative that it’s trying to get you deeper into. And then the feedback for the mechanics are so poor you might not be entirely sure you’re even doing it right (I had to look up at least one section as a result. Not ideal.)

To be frank, also, the story doesn’t actually pay off. There’s a lot of interesting world-building in Mouthwashing–I love the reveal of what the ship is carrying, and how pointless it makes everything feel–but the characters are poorly sketched, without a lot of depth (the one female character, who is so important to the whole thing, is terribly served) and I think it makes the extremely heavy implications of the denoument feel sort of problematic. While I won’t spoil anything, I think there is a certain care you have to have over the kind of character you are asking the player to embody, and I don’t think Mouthwashing takes enough care over that.

However: the game does manage to be successfully creepy at points, and has an excellent line in low-poly body horror; I think it’s meaningful it’s trying to be more than just that. It may simply be a case of a team reaching for something they aren’t quite equipped for–but I respect them for giving it a shot.

Will I ever play it again? I don’t think I’ll ever need to.

Final Thought: Mouthwashing takes two hours, it’s interesting, it’s trying something, it looks amazing. More games should be doing this. Maybe they are! I love it.

Developed/Published by: Interplay Productions / EA (original), Krome Studios / InXile Entertainment (remaster)
Released: 12/1985
Completed: 05/02/2025
Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been itching to play an old school western RPG recently–really want to see some numbers go up–and got really excited when I discovered The Gold Box Companion, a companion app for SSI’s legendary Dungeons and Dragons RPGs that–because I was too young for them at the time–completely passed me by.

However… I couldn’t help but feel I’d be skipping a bit too far forward on my (personally imposed) chronology if I jumped to playing Pools of Radiance–I wasn’t satisfied when I played Pirates! that I had the historical context I wanted–that I nosed around a bit to see if there was something I’d previously skipped that might fit the bill.

Hence: The Bard’s Tale.

Now, I’d previously skipped this because I’d heard that it was, frankly, a bit boring. Actually, I was basing that entirely on The Digital Antiquarian saying “long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious” which probably isn’t entirely fair. But what drew me back was that The Bard’s Tale is one of those games that I think many who grew up in the “video game magazine” generation have–a game that I read about two sentences about but was always longing for.

It’s funny the things that lodge in your mind, isn’t it? Here’s the reader’s letter from Amstrad Action that’s stuck with me since literally 1991:

“Well, if this dork wants it so badly, it must be great!”

What’s funny is that in the intervening, uh, thirty years [“lies. The 90s are ten years ago”–Ed.] I managed to forget, I guess, that Amstrad Action’s “Balrog” ran an entire “The Bard’s Tale Club” section culminating with a short walkthrough just a few issues earlier. 

Interestingly, I think this is one of those things where I can see myself maturing in real time–in the matter of months I went from a wean who skipped the Balrog section because it wasn’t about, like, arcade games, to a wee guy who was at least interested in them. That or a guy pretending to be a gnome caught my eye.

All I remember is that I’d missed my chance to get The Bard’s Tale. So, here I am, thirty [“ten… I’ll go as far as fifteen”–Ed.] years later, finally living my childish dreams.

First: if I’d got this in 1991 I’d have been completely baffled by it. Within a few short years I’d be playing Ultima Underworld, but I didn’t really even play that properly, and The Bard’s Tale requires, like Wizardry, a deep understanding of RPG character creation and party management. And also like Wizardry, it’s about as brutal as an RPG can get, killing your party or giving them debilitating, expensive-to-cure status effects that require you shlep all the way back to a temple to solve, in maps that wrap (no! Not again!!!) and are absolutely louping with spinners, traps and dark zones.

In some respects, I’m lucky that I mostly relied on luck and parental largesse to get computer games.

I’m also lucky that there’s a remake of The Bard’s Tale in the form of Krome Studios’ The Bards Tale Trilogy: Remastered, which rights-holder InXile Entertainment had them make (after, interestingly, a remaster from the team of one of the original developers, Rebecca Heineman unfortunately fell through). I’ll be honest, I was originally not planning on playing it, because it has genuinely awful Super2xSal-quality upscaled art. The game looks like this:

When in its best contemporary ports, it looked like this:

I know which I’d rather look at, though in some respects I thank god that the remake came out before they could us AI to upscale it all and make something that looked even worse. The benefit of playing this (nasty) looking versions outweigh the pain of looking at it though, because not only does it make a lot of quality of life improvements such as a shared inventory and doubled experience, it plays perfectly with a controller–so you can even play it with a Steam Deck comfortably.

If you’re a purist, however (and I don’t actually blame you) I have to admit that the version I played isn’t exactly The Bard’s Tale, as the “trilogy” version aligns all three games design, so in this version there are distance mechanics in the combat (enemies can start some distance from you and you have to advance on them) and bows and arrows are added, which I suspect changes the feel of the combat quite a bit. But to be honest, I can live with it. And I never used bows and arrows anyway.

Enough personal history. For the real history, you can of course go to someone like the aforementioned Digital Antiquarian, but it’s worth noting that even though The Bard’s Tale entered my own personal history in 1991, it was released in 1985 and is, I think surprisingly to modern eyes, the best selling computer RPG of the 1980s, selling a reported 407,000 copies.

I say surprisingly because The Bard’s Tale hasn’t lingered in the cultural imagination the way that RPGs such as Wizardry or Ultima have. It wasn’t first; it didn’t inspire much (Japanese RPGs were already divergent by 1985) and the series didn’t evolve any better than Wizardry did. By 1991, the year I discovered it, a cash-in construction set was released for anyone who hadn’t already moved on to the more active style of dungeon crawler begat by Dungeon Master, and it wouldn’t be seen again until The Bard’s Tale in 2004, which is a Bard’s Tale game in name only.

If you’re wondering what made The Bard’s Tale so successful, but then so irrelevant, it comes down to the fact that it is, ultimately, just a Wizardry clone that happened to come out on the popular C64 with nicer graphics than Wizardry years before Wizardry would reach the system, and be pushed by the already mature (and not yet fully soulless) EA.

Designed by Michael Cranford, it was his second attempt to directly make a Wizardry killer after HesWare’s apparently flawed Maze Master. For some reason, The Bard’s Tale is particularly known for the development team all sniping at each other publicly for years after the game’s launch (it even makes the Wikipedia) but it’s all so “he said, she said” and feels kind of… un-illuminating about the game. At least, it doesn’t add anything. The only part I find particularly interesting is that this game is officially called “Tales Of The Unknown: Volume I: The Bard’s Tale” because (and there is some argument over this) the series was supposed to be called “Tales Of The Unknown” but–and this might be a sign of EA’s encroaching soullessness–it was felt “The Bard’s Tale” was better known, so it got dropped.

(And if you’re wondering why I find that interesting, it’s because it would happen again with The Legend of Kyrandia, which was actually supposed to be the “Fables & Fiends” series. I’m not sure how many more examples of this there are.)

Anyway. As I said above, writing about the experience of playing The Bard’s Tale feels almost exactly like writing about Wizardry, bar for a few twists (I like to believe if they’d kept to “Tales Of The Unknown” maybe the sequels would have diverged more.) The main twist people get excited about is that you navigate the town in the same way that you navigate the dungeons (step-by-step 3D movement) but let me tell you this–it just means you have to do an annoying amount of schlepping about and fighting piddly enemies when you want to heal or level up, and I’d honestly rather a menu. The thing I felt like I felt I did the most in The Bard’s Tale was stand around outside the “Review Board” save scumming to try and make sure my level up rolls were good…

The rest of the game, despite featuring several dungeons, ultimately boils down to what you’ll do in Wizardry–try and find the best way to grind so you can kill the final boss. In the original game, this was a particular repeatable battle, which led to one of my best ever “this is too specific, that’s not how memes work” memes, clattering out to complete silence:

What a hilarious meme! You should repost this a hundred times.

But in the remake, which has a smoother curve (and only lets you do this battle once) you can get away with just ordinary grinding (thankfully). Now, the game does actually feature some puzzle solving–you do have to find and collect certain items–but moreso than Wizardry, I realized how much I miss a “proper” quest and side-quest system. Here you have to notice text prompts when you step in certain squares (which zoom off the screen immediately in the remake which means you’ll never see them–a big mistake) and piece them together, but getting deeper into dungeons is grimly unrewarding when that’s all you get. I started my game mapping this properly, but the maps get worse than Wizardry even faster! So much of the dungeons in this game are made up of “dark” squares that you feel like you’re navigating almost the entire game blind, to the point where I almost can’t imagine trying to complete this without having another map at hand and the in-game automap (I can hear the hardcore crusty RPG types rolling their eyes here…) 

It could be alleviated, perhaps, if you could enjoy the combat, but there is almost no strategy to it. While it may partially be a flaw of the remake (where the updates fly off the screen at a hundred miles an hour) The Bard’s Tale has a bizarre difficulty scaling where you start by having your entire team killed by a single mouse holding a feather duster and about an hour later are fighting a squad of forty vampires at once. While it’s extremely funny to imagine them trying to all squeeze into a corridor, the problem is that your melee characters are just meat shields for your magic users. I made myself up the kind of squad that gets recommended for The Bard’s Tale and as much effort as I put into my critical-hit focused “Hunter” character (usually my favourite kind of RPG character! I love them crits!) I barely noticed them doing anything at all with their piddly single hit on one enemy compared to my magic users, who by mid-game have a spell that can wipe out every enemy you’re facing in a battle at once.

The game’s focus on the magic users makes it seem even odder that the series ended up going under The Bard’s Tale moniker. While your melee types are stuck in their starting class, your magic users are expected to change class each time they fill their classes’ spellbook, and they start again from level one keeping all their stats (quite unlike Wizardry…) meaning that by the end of the game you have spellcasters who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime hiding behind a flesh wall. The only reason you can’t ignore melee completely is that your magic users’ armour class is so bad–and that matters when you’re facing off against four squads of sixty enemies at least some of whom might get an individual hit off each before you’re able to hit them with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

(This magic user focus is symbolic of author intent, however. As Michael Cranford would explain in his GDC post-mortem of The Bard’s Tale and its sequel, he was “bored” by melee combat and was interested in making a game with seven different spell-casting classes that your characters would learn until they were able to become archmages, with melee combat your fallback when you ran out of mana. Although this was cut back to four classes with the archmage showing up in the sequel, this original idea explains everything about why The Bard’s Tale plays the way it does.)

But let’s be real here: the majority of The Bard’s Tale you spend not save-scumming level ups to make sure your spell-casters can mow down enemies like they’ve got a gatling gun is spend stumbling around in the dark or in battles you barely notice happening. The only real moments of tension are when you get given one of the many annoying status effects (reload–it’s not worth the hassle) or when you have to get out of the dungeon, because the game (sort of interestingly?) gives you absolutely no way to regenerate mana unless you’re outside*, so your grinding sessions are always limited by how long your mana lasts. But because you get so many level-ups with your magic users, it’s not much of a problem (by the middle of the game, I was staying down collecting three or four level ups before bothering to climb back out of a dungeon.)

*You can find magic items that let you regenerate mana in dungeons but I never found any. And there’s the occasional regen spot in a dungeon, but I only found a couple. So the point stands, largely.

The problem, sometimes, with playing a game like this is that devoid of the context–an old home computer, months of free time, it being the fucking 1980s–you play it as the object it is, rather than the experience it represented. Everything I’ve said is all true, but if you were loading this up on your C64 (or Amstrad!) with a bundle of paper maps in front of you and the latest “Bard’s Tale Club” tips, nursing your RPG party across months, slowly getting deeper into each dungeon, finding and writing down all the clues, I can see The Bard’s Tale as the evolution–a small evolution, but an evolution–of the Wizardry design it is.

You could recreate this if you really wanted! But the problem is that there are simply more fun, deeper, more interesting, less punishing ways to spend your time not even now–even then. Playing the first The Bard’s Tale, the same as playing the first Wizardry, you understand why they died out so quickly for not adapting. When they aren’t all you’ve got, they aren’t what you want.

The funny thing is, that I’ll still remember The Bard’s Tale fondly. Not for when I played it–but when I imagined it.

It looked like this on the CPC, too. Still better.

Will I ever play it again? You can continue the series seamlessly in The Bard’s Tale Trilogy, but the dungeons in the first game are so horrible I would never do this to myself.

Final Thought: Alright, you’ve read everything I’ve written and you still want to play this. You want to say you’ve played the most important RPGs! I get it. So next time, for supporters only: How to beat The Bard’s Tale!

Developed/Published by: Studio MDHR
Released: 17/09/2017
Completed: 29/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.

Well, it’s only taken nearly 8 years but I returned to Cuphead after bouncing off it immediately at launch, but I get Cuphead now. Apologies if this has been obvious to you for almost a decade, but… it’s Alien Soldier.

Cuphead is just Alien Soldier!!!

While in some respects, this is a mea culpa, let me stick to my guns by saying that Cuphead does close to doing nothing to explain what it’s trying to do, and actively seems to obscure it. When you start playing the game unless you’re extremely contrary, the very first thing you’ll do is play one of the game’s (rare!) Run ‘n Gun levels, which, and I am not being hyperbolic, is absolutely miserable. The level is immediately insanely busy, while Cuphead controls well, feedback on your attacks is terrible, hitboxes are unforgiving, and with only 3 hit points and no way to recover, you’ll die quickly.

If you’re me, it will just seem like a “git gud” ballache that isn’t worth your time.

The thing is, Cuphead is Alien Soldier. It’s not Metal Slug. It’s not even really Gunstar Heroes (even if it does take a bunch of inspiration from it.) The game is a succession of boss battles, not video game levels.

The Run ‘n Gun levels are just boss battles.

I dunno, maybe this was obvious to you. The levels are not to be played and reacted to. They are, as the rest of the game, to be practiced and learned.

Now, they’re still–I’d say– one of the worst parts of the game, in that they’re some of the least balanced content (in my opinion.) The trick with Cuphead, though–which isn’t immediately learned–is that almost no part of the game is more than about two minutes long!

In some respects, Cuphead is a more perfect example of video game form and function than I could have imagined. Visually inspired by the rhythmic cartoons of the 1930s but design inspired by the strict boss battles of the 90s, each level is a short “cartoon” that you have to play to the beat of to complete. 

It’s interesting. You have almost no “play” in the expressive sense–a Cuphead level is played almost like a song, where you are just one member in the band. You can riff a little, but it’s no jam–everyone else is playing to the sheet, and if you miss your cue, it’s all going to come tumbling down.

It does, of course, make me wonder again as to the value of these certain kinds of play. In seeing Cuphead through, I had to dedicate myself to learning each level and boss battle till I could play it from memory. I could have dedicated that time to learning how to play an actual song with an instrument. You could argue that the value I got was in seeing the obviously incredible art, but I mean… I could just look at that. 

But as I said above: every level is only about two minutes long, and I was surprised to discover that I’m generally “gud” enough at this exact kind of video game that once I learned what I was supposed to be doing (memorisation, not reacting) I was able to polish this off in under eight hours total, with (probably) about two of those on the unbelievably annoying, blatantly Gunstar Heroes-inspired Casino boss-rush that more or less caps the game.

You will see this what feels like eleven billion times.

That boss-rush, I think, sums up the weirdest thing about Cuphead, a game that famously took seven years to complete, because it’s the one part where you’ll actually sit with the game’s art and animation because you’ll be stuck there for so long. Otherwise? Cuphead is full of insanely carefully made art an animation that you see for like… a few seconds, and which is never used again. It’s so… conflicting. 

On one hand, it does actually look amazing. On the other, any “normal” game developer, on creating an insanely expressive walking plant (or whatever) would go “alright, that’s the base enemy for the first world” and make a bunch of levels featuring it. Here it’s in about a third of one level then never seen again. There are entire bosses that I saw once because I beat them quickly (turns out I was particularly good at the levels which are shooters?) 

(On the other, special third hand, I will admit that packing the game with filler just because you made a bunch of incredible assets isn’t actually an improvement. But here there’s no time to get comfortable with anything, never mind luxuriate in it, unless you really just want to replay the game on higher difficulties. Which I don’t.)

Another part of the game a “normal” game developer might have issue with is that the enemies and bosses have such specific and expressive animations and routines that there’s no place for actual feedback. There are no interrupts; as you shoot an enemy, some white flashes are the most you’re going to get. If I’m being completely fair, this was often true in the 90s, but I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where my shots felt so… irrelevant. Like, they’re absolutely not, you have to be hitting the enemies, but as they cycle through their heavily animated stages, there’s this sense that they’d just… still do it if you weren’t shooting them. You actually don’t have any sense of how close you were to changing stages or defeating them unless you die.

So the part of the game that’s going to stick with you is the Casino, because it’s where the game design “shines” the most, while also being the most annoying (as it breaks the “two minute” rule.) There are nine bosses each of whom could be used as an entire boss in any other platformer, and by the end they were burned into my mind, as I had to work out how to most efficiently get through the level through my weapon and power up selections (though I haven’t highlighted it, that every boss is a puzzle of working out which loadout works best for you is one of the most enjoyable parts, and most obviously Alien Solider-inspired.) 

It turned out that after beating my head against it using the “smoke bomb” dodge–which was allowing me to cheap out on a few of the earlier bosses–it turned out that it was better for me to take the earlier pain by using the P. Sugar (one free automatic parry) which would allow me to more easily beat the final boss of the stage.

It’s something that I wouldn’t have worked out if I hadn’t had to play it for so long, but did I enjoy that? Well, I felt the incredible shiver of relief endorphins on my winning run, but I can’t especially say it was worth it.

There’s a lot of artistry in Cuphead to go with a single-minded dedication to a particular kind of game design. I can say now that I respect it for what it is, and I’m glad it was over quickly.

Will I ever play it again? There’s a DLC, but I don’t actively see the point. This is one of those “ok, I get it” kind of games.

Final Thought: As I mentioned above, Cuphead took seven years, and as a game developer myself, I can’t help but wonder about some… inconsistencies(?) in the game’s setting that make me wonder if they were fixes to make up for cuts. Notably, not every cut-scene is animated, with some following a “storybook” format and some not, and the “storybook” concept doesn’t make any sense because all of the other signifiers imply that you’re not reading a book you’re watching a classic cartoon. 

If it was a result of late changes, as a video game developer myself I can relate… whatever you have to do to get the game out the door in the end!

Developed/Published by: Odd Meter / 11 Bit Studios
Released: 2/5/2024
Completed: 20/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.

Alright so we’re on our third game in a row with a female protagonist whose name begins with “I” but at least it’s not Iris, and she’s not a motorbike. I call that progress.

A bit like with 1000xRESIST, however, it’s rather hard to explain Indika without giving the entire game away, and this is a game that the less you know about it going in the more it will surprise and delight you. So to cut to the chase: I really think you should play Indika. If you haven’t yet, it’ll take less than four hours, and you could probably play it on the big telly with a loved one if you like to do things like that (and if you think they’re up to the game’s heavy themes.) So you can do that and come back here whenever you like.

…

Alright, just us who’ve already played the game then?

Indika hooked me, I’d say, when, while performing the game’s first “mission” of pointlessly schlepping water from a well to a barrel, Indika’s internal monologue/the devil says:

“The sisters *loved* Indika. Christian love is known to be patient, merciful and faithful. However, in a lowly, human sense, they didn’t love her that much.

…To be completely honest, they didn’t love her at all.”

It is a beautiful piece of writing that immediately lets you know everything about Indika’s situation; and it is performed with incredible relish by actor Silas Carson, who (improbably) played both “one of the racist trade federation aliens” and “the conehead Jedi” in the Star Wars prequels.

Although if I’d been thinking, I’d have played this through in Russian, the English dub is so insanely good I’m not completely certain that it isn’t primary–or at least, it’s valid in the way that if you’re watching a Spaghetti Western it can often not be any more “correct” to watch it in Italian based on how they were made. Carson gives a performance that puts me in mind of Malcolm McDowell at his most demonic, and Isabella Inchbald might be even better with a performance that isn’t so much restrained as laden with the restraint that Indika performs.

If Indika was just the narrative, just the story of a woman trapped by context, I think I’d still love it. But what blows me away about Indika is that the game investigates and critiques its own video game form as it goes. In a strange way, Indika couldn’t exist as it does without the big-budget high-fidelity third-person action games it critiques, but via its critique it shows that, if you take an actual moral position, if you actually try and tell a story, if you [gulp] try and create art… the form is just as valid???

I won’t pretend that this aspect of Indika isn’t often a bit blatant. I do not, completely, love the use of pixel art and older video game tropes. I’ve seen people riff that Indika is “Nuncharted” but I really want to impress upon you that the “joke” is not that you’re playing a nun in an Unreal Engine game that looks insane. The commentary is, well, I think it’s dual. On one very simple level, it’s that you can make a high-fidelity third-person game where your main character doesn’t have to shoot anyone. On a deeper level, it’s that everything these games make you do is absolutely fucking pointless, and it intentionally tries to disillusion you with it to make your experience resonate with Indika’s!!!

I truly believe this is brilliant. Sure, as I noted above, the use of some tropes is perhaps to blatant–the levelling system might lead to the game’s greatest gotcha, but it’s weirdly neutered by the game telling you what it’s doing too early (or at all, actually.) But I don’t think there’s any mistake in that one of the things you do in this game is move ladders about literally exactly the same way you do in The Last of Us, which in context is so, so funny. Taking perhaps the most ridiculous example of “interactivity” from a series with absolutely the most bloated sense of self-importance to make you question the value of it all. I adored it.

To be completely fair, I can understand if you were to bounce of Indika because it is, ultimately, using this to give an unyielding, strident opinion of religion–there’s really no wiggle room on it (if you bounce off of it because it’s taking the piss out of video games, I’ll leave it at “oh dear.”) But I love that this game has an unashamed point of view and I love how it takes you there.

Will I ever play it again? I’d actually rather like to play this again, one day, on an absolutely psychopathically high spec system. Maybe some decades later…

Final Thought: This isn’t really an essay for people who haven’t played Indika, but I do feel that if you’ve read this far and haven’t played it, and got excited to, I should mention again that the game intentionally deals with some legitimately heavy themes that I think some people might find genuinely distressing–I suggest you look up content warnings if you aren’t comfortable going into things blind.