The indie hack-and-slash action-adventure game Death’s Door is an experience about which I have a very mixed opinion. And in general, when I have a mixed opinion of a game and the bits I like are cleanly separable from the bits I don’t, I like to organize my review of it into a dedicated pro and con list.
Now, each of the previous three games I’ve covered with one of these ‘pro and con’ lists is a game I ended up recommending, for which I concluded that the good outweighs the bad (whether by a lot, like with Sekiro, or by a little, like with Crypt of the NecroDancer). This is the first time where that’s not quite the case. It is a close call, but I do think the bad slightly outweighs the good this time around. Nevertheless, I think you’ll initially be confused about me saying that, as I’ve got a lot of very nice things to say about Death’s Door.
Each of the first three titles created by Supergiant Games excels in some obvious way over their other offerings. Pyre contains their most imaginative fantasy world, and some of their best original characters. Transistor has the studio’s most innovative and unique core gameplay system, as well as their best soundtrack. And Bastion’s stellar implementation of dynamic narration and avoidance of the later games’ reliance on text boxes and paragraph-long info dumps make it so it’s still unmatched in their repertoire in terms of the successful integration of most story material into the actual moment-to-moment gameplay.
With that list in mind, it’s not immediately clear what Hades offers to make me say the following: it’s Supergiant’s best creation overall. That lack of clarity comes from the fact that it’s not any one single exceptional strength of the game that far outstrips the other titles—but instead the way that Hades echoes their strengths while addressing noteworthy weaknesses of each of their earlier games. Thus, in addition to sharing the high level of quality in art, music, gameplay, polish, and so on possessed by all of the team’s work, it is also the case that, in the few ways in which their earlier games stumbled, Hades dashes ahead.
This is a critical look at the mechanics of What Remains of Edith Finch. Now, probably, if you have only passing familiarity with the award-winning game in question, to that sentiment you respond: “Isn’t it just a walking simulator? Is this just going to be an article complaining about the game’s genre? Wouldn’t it make more sense to discuss the story?” And the short answer to all three of those questions is just, “No.”
In more detail, my answers are:
First, while the frame narrative of What Remains does indeed bear the trappings of the projects that are (usually derisively) called ‘walking sims,’ much of the substance of the game lies in a series of levels or minigames that pair with subplots of the story. It plays out like an anthology of tiny games. And it’s mostly the gameplay within those minigames that I want to discuss here.
Second, even if the frame narrative was all there is, I have no particular issue with the concept of so-called ‘walking sims.’ They’re done no particular favor by being categorized as ‘games’ . . . but in the wider world of interactive art, it’s natural that something came along to fill the gap between, on the one hand, audiobooks, fiction podcasts, and linear visual novels, and, on the other hand, narrative-heavy games with minor puzzle gameplay like Finding Paradise, Oneshot, and Firewatch.
And third, to say that it makes more sense to discuss the story than the gameplay is to imply that there is a sharp dividing line between those two things. I deny that there is such a divide. I believe What Remains of Edith Finch does a great job of interweaving gameplay and narrative—so great sometimes that there are segments of this game that I consider to be among the tiny-but-growing list of instances of games reaching the level of artistic excellence that is routinely found in older forms of art. But unfortunately, such moments (which I would not hesitate to say are brilliant), are in the minority within the game. And that’s true despite the writing of the game being truly solid and high-quality from start to finish. So that’s what I want to talk about now.
In this article, I will explain a potentially unintuitive belief that I hold about a specific style of games: that the best possible experience of playing roguelikes and derivatives of roguelikes is usually attained by pursuing 100% achievement completion as the primary end goal of the game. My test case for this purpose will be Dodge Roll’s highly polished and mechanically satisfying top-down shooter Enter the Gungeon.
Like so many of its peers in the increasingly-loosely-defined genre it at least partially shares with notables like Rogue, Spelunky, and FTL—Gungeon is a game that is played by repeatedly attempting to win difficult randomization-heavy play sessions averaging less than an hour each, where dying means a total end to that playthrough; to continue playing, a newly-randomized session must begin from the very start.
And why do I think that pursuing achievements (or trophies, or badges, or whatever you want to call them) offers the best way of engaging with Enter the Gungeon and other games in this style? Simply, because doing so offers a balanced, varied, thorough, satisfying compromise between two inferior extremes.
Super Meat Boy is one of the greatest 2D platformers of all time, and it is rightly renowned for having some of the best level design in the entire genre. Its follow-up is an auto-runner with randomized levels, sporting both a genre and a limited control scheme that seem targeted toward mobile gaming. The original creator of the title character, Edmund McMillen, who acted as artist and codesigner on SMB, was completely uninvolved in the development of the newer game. The musician Danny Baranowsky, who provided the iconic original soundtrack for Super Meat Boy, was also absent from the development of the new title due to parting ways with Team Meat after some kind of dispute in the intervening years. And for the first year that it was available, the new title was distributed on PC solely through a controversial platform: the exclusivity-favoring, light-on-features Epic Games Store.
These facts about Super Meat Boy Forever are by now well-established reasons that many players have bounced off of, negatively reviewed, or (more commonly) simply avoided the game. And seeing as I am a big fan of Super Meat Boy, and not in general a fan of most mobile games, you may suspect that I would agree with those unhappy and dismissive appraisals.
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