Of these games, I think Might and Magic 7 would be fun for anybody who likes open worlds. I enjoyed Deadly Premonition and Death Stranding for their bonkers direction, but that might not be enough for you.
Might and Magic 7 has the best balance of directed RPG with Ubisoft-style open world out of Might and Magic 6,7 and 8. And, like all of Might and Magic, it has New World Computing’s popcorn simple-yet-addictive stamp all over it.
Compared to MM6, Might and Magic 7 is smaller and its world more carefully designed. Conversations point you toward interesting places with an intended story flow. Dungeons are still just as interesting, but now they’re part of the main quest more often than not.
The tutorial island, while clichéd, also makes it a lot easier to learn the game compared to MM6. Plus, MM7 introduces the best card mini-game I’ve played. Exactly the same popcorn-addictive flavour in a card game.
Anachronox, remember, is the not-Deus Ex game by Ion Storm. The graphics look pretty similar, but it’s a JRPG with a Han Solo vibe. Unique for the time — made in the USA — and still today — as a comedic JRPG. Ultimately, though, JRPGs have to be amazing for me to stick with them, and Anachronox wasn’t that special. The pacing bogs down into a linear series of adventure-game-lite quests mostly inspired by puns.
Shout out to the early level design which feels like a cross between Hong Kong in Deus Ex and Midgard in Final Fantasy, but more confusing. It wasn’t good but it sure was distinctive.
Mount and Blade is a life-simulation-focussed Eurojank RPG-thing, but I didn’t quite get into it. I did play enough to start growing my warband and get in a few battles.
As is typical with Eurojank, it’s packed with poorly-explained, poorly-integrated systems, only some of which I explored. The coolest part was adding losers to the warband and watching them level up. But levelling up was a result of battles which are so ropey (at least in the early game) that I didn’t like or understand them. Then there is personal interaction with rulers. I think this gets a lot more important if you can attain nobility, but early on nobles are just quest-givers and bosses.
There’s an element of you-had-to-be-there to the fame of any game, and Planescape: Torment is both famous and old. Which is to say that I didn’t like it much. The tabletop D&D wrapper muffled the story for me, in part because I let a huge gap go by between playing the first and second halves of the game. For as much as I did experience the narrative, it feels targetted: extremely meaningful for people in a younger time and place, but not so much for me. If you’ve (1) had a parent die (2) decided to stay in the US through two elections of Donald Trump, you may have already thought through the lessons this game can teach.
Death Stranding is Hideo Kojima’s hiking game about his vacation to Greenland, and his thoughts on the fracturing of the United States. They’re aren’t deep thoughts, exactly, but they are conveyed in Kojima’s trademark style. So you may know whether you’ll love or hate Death Stranding before playing it.
It’s less obvious, but it also follows on, stylistically and mechnically, from the Metal Gear games. In particular, I feel like Kojima finally made a successful anti-war game, nestled inside a surreal walking simulator. All those hilarious bosses from Metal Gear? They’re now friends you meet along the way. The flirtation with surrealism? Full-blown now. Stricter and stricter sneaking mechanics? Half of the enemies are invisible now, and the other half shouldn’t be killed. Guns that are a mistake to use? They’re clunkier and less lethal than ever. The attempts to make war unpleasant? War scenes are overwhelming, exhausting and monotonous — and rare.
Max Payne 3 is actually a good game. It’s just not written by Sam Lake. Mechanically, it’s the same kind of challenge-puzzle third-person shooter as the first two. But there’s little of the purple prose of Max Payne or the (slightly) subtler strangeness of Max Payne 2. Instead, it’s very much a Rock Star game, with purple prose replaced with depressed observations of a hired killer. Also, explosion-based set pieces and a focus on sexy sleaze.
Looking at the big picture, Max Payne 3 is what you’d expect from a sequel: an approximation of earlier work, with innovations. I guess that its bad reputation comes from the knowledge that its differences are largely the result of Remedy selling Max Payne to Rockstar, more than the actual differences.
Deadly Premonition is a cult game for a reason. It’s a barely-working wannabe mix of Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil and Twin Peaks. With influences from Majora’s Mask and Metal Gear. When it’s working it’s fascinating. When it’s not (which is most of the time), it’s hilarious. Unfortunately my save refused to load after Chapter 6, but at least I got to experience the open world and some of its activities.
Still, it’s good enough that I still think about trying a third port of the game, the Switch version. Surely one of them works.
Bonus: If you live in the Seattle area, you may notice that the map is a smooshed rendition of North Bend and Snoqualmie. Milk Barn even shows up, although it’s a grocery store in Deadly Premonition, not a burger place.
Budget Cuts seems like a good idea: a stealth game in VR. I really didn’t like it, though. I think it’s a simple lack of polish. One possibility: the last quarter isn’t well polished, with obtuse insta-fail sections. Worse, it’s easy to avoid the instant-fail, but to do so you have to hide away from places that might let you figure out what to do. And when you do figure what to do, if you get caught before you do it, it’s a long restart back to the beginning of the sequence.
Another possibility is that teleport movement doesn’t scale to a longer game. Or any action. Under pressure, it’s too hard to move by aiming mixed in with shooting by aiming. The overall effect feels extremely like Ultima Underworld’s mouse-driven interface, which was simple but similarly overloaded.
Cycle: Frontier is an extraction shooter that focusses on PvE. In theory that sounds like it could be fun. But the reality was that the PvE part was badly explained and rather boring. I played right before the game shut down, so it’s not a surprise that the PvP part was — dead. I saw 2 (two) other people in my playtime, who seemed almost as disoriented as I was.
So I gave up on the search for a casual extraction shooter for now. My interest in the genre is so casual that I suspect that a player-made mode in Fortnite is probably what I would find most fun. Sad. But true.
I’ve never gotten obsessed with a rogue-like enough to beat one, and Rogue Legacy didn’t change that. It’s solid, fun platforming with proper rogue-like randomness and rapid difficulty scaling.
It’s not perfect—the platforming is just a tiny bit zoomed-in, a tiny bit skaty. I haven’t played the sequel, but I expect it fixes those shortcomings.
Curse of the Crescent Isle is a Wonder Boy clone (Monster World IV specifically). It’s pretty clunky—much like Wonder Boy—and not very polished, but it’s the work of basically one person. Nice as a nostalgic callback. I quit at a puzzle boss where the gimmick failed occasionally in a way that was outside my control. Still, it was nice as a nostalgic callback.
Gunmetal Arcadia Zero is a nostalgic callback to Nintendo-era action platformers. Let’s say: Castlevania 2, because there’s talking and backtracking mixed in with the running/jumping/swiping. Everything’s a bit more polished than the old days, though. Nice and short, too!