“Roguevania” is a curious genre tag that I’d never heard of before seeing it on Mother Machine’s Steam store page. I sort of understand it conceptually: take the randomly-generated level layouts and progression over the course of multiple “runs” of a roguelite and combine it with the “upgrade yourself to improve your ability to traverse the world” mechanisms of a Metroidvania. However, upon dissecting that idea, I immediately start finding holes. If you’re lacking a particular upgrade on a given run, does that mean it might be impossible to complete? Wouldn’t randomized level layouts be a nightmare to properly balance to give that satisfying sense of progression that the best Metroidvanias are known for? It seems like a recipe for disaster, which made me all the more intrigued to see how Mother Machine would pull it off.
Tag: Atmospheric
Boxes: Lost Fragments Review
I love a good virtual puzzle box. In reality, they’re wholly impractical devices: complex, expensive mechanisms interlinked with one another that you solve once and then either discard or bestow upon someone else to see how they fare. In the gaming space, though, they allow for layered, multi-stage puzzles that stay manageable due to the simple fact that everything you need to find the solution is right in front of you. You may have to rotate the box, recall an indentation that perfectly fits an item you obtained elsewhere, or recognize that one of the box’s legs looks slightly different from the others, but at the end of the day it’s all there in a contained, isolated environment. I got some enjoyment out of a couple of games in the The Room series on mobile way back when (no relation to Tommy Wiseau’s hilariously disastrous film of the same name), but eventually they started branching out in design directions I was less keen on. So when Boxes: Lost Fragments entered my Steam library, I was particularly intrigued to check it out and see if it could offer a compelling puzzle solving experience.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice Review
Mental health representation in entertainment media is a bit of a thorny issue, mired as it is in all manner of problematic tropes. Horror properties in particular suffer here. Whether they’re painting the mentally ill as gibbering lunatics in insane asylums or serial killers without a semblance of a moral compass, horror books, movies, and games so often are the place where subtlety and nuance about psychological struggles goes to die.
Enter Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game which clearly wants to be a sympathetic, well-informed look at psychosis and how it affects people – so much so that the first names in the opening credits belong to mental health (as well as historical) consultants. And dammit, if any development team should need to front-load their consultancy credentials, it’s Ninja Theory, aka the same folks who (in this reviewer’s opinion) utterly botched their handling of slavery in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Of course, then the question becomes: is Hellblade a redemption story for Ninja Theory’s writing? The short answer is: … kinda.