Oxenfree Ending and New Game Plus Discussion. Spoilers Obviously.

General review is here.

So...lets talk about that ending.  If you want to play the game, go do that, and come back.  It's only 5 hours long (it took me 7 cause I stopped a lot and wandered around looking for one missing anomaly for over an hour only to find it where I started!).  If you don't want to but still want to know what the hell I was talking about at the end of my review about a gimmick ending, read on.

Spoilers again.  Last warning.

Cloudberry Kingdom Review

It's been a long time since I've played a super hard platformer, so figuring that I was a little out of practice, I decided to jump back in with arguably the hardest platformer of all time in Cloudberry Kingdom.  I typically have quite a bit of patience in these kinds of games as I can die hundreds of times on one stage and not get too worked up about it.  Cloudberry Kingdom's late stages however, could reach thousands of times....if I actually managed to make it that far.

I mean come on.  Look at this shit.

For those that have never played, those lasers coming from the sky also kill you.

Cloudberry Kingdom is deceptive with its difficulty at first.  Stages 1-50 are a breeze.  But each time the game introduces a new obstacle, it adds to the difficulty simply by adding more of them, until the screen is filled with instant death.  Even with everything going on, it's seemingly possible to speed run each stage (until the late stages) and often times, it's the ONLY way to pass some of them.  This game demands precision platforming a la Super Meat Boy, but with a Sanic like sense of speed.  

Rather than just throwing a meteor shower at you while you try to cross a slaughtering house, the difficulty has one other wrinkle to frustrate you just a bit more by frequently changing the way you control your character.  Sometimes he is tiny but you can jump high.  Sometimes he is huge and can't jump high.  Sometimes he phases between being small and huge with a questionable hitbox.  Sometimes you have a double-jump or a jetpack.  Some of them get really weird like "hero in a box", in which you can't move WITHOUT jumping, or a rocket powered minecart, in which the game decides you are not dying fast enough.

The bunny ears and pink suit just make you cute.

The three absolute worst controls however, are wheel, the pogo stick, and the spaceship,  The wheel has you strapped onto, uh, a wheel and as you can imagine, lets you build up some incredible momentum, making stopping a nightmare.  In case you don't know why this sucks so hard, it basically turns those stages into the old "ice level" cliche from older platformers.  The pogo stick ends up being the vertical version of that same problem which oddly enough is WORSE in this game.  I'm constantly bouncing all over the fucking place.  I don't think I'm ever yelled at my TV saying, "I just want control of my character back!" before this game.

And....the spaceship.  Holy shit, the spaceship is a lovecraftian nightmare.  Those stages are setup like a horizontal 2-D shooter only without the shooting.  You have to dodge everything, and by everything, I mean hundreds of flies.  This isn't what pisses me off though since I usually made it through the flies just fine.  It's the elevator platforms, right before the checkpoint, that I died on all the damn time.  In other stages, this part right before the checkpoint is often the "safe zone" with a column of platforms going up, and another immediately afterward going down.  Now, imagine that, and try to fly through it.  Oh, and the checkpoint is tantalizingly close.  It's a goddamn miracle I didn't rage quit on these levels.  

I WASN'T KIDDING ABOUT THE FLIES.  And they are not stationary, they move.

The varying controls do not help with the precision platforming, but neither do some bugs.  Occasionally they benefit you as I've been able to survive direct hits a few times.  Usually though, they screw you, as I've fallen through platforms I obviously landed on.  The worst is a frequent jumping bug when you try to jump off of bouncy boxes and the aforementioned flies heads.  Similar to many platformers with the same mechanic, you can not hit the jump button to do a soft bounce off of these things, or you can press the jump button to reach higher terrain.  Routinely, if I tried to jump off certain bouncy things, I would fail 5 out of 10 times.

"Bouncy things", when stages are still easy.

YES, YES, I know what you're thinking.  Maybe I just suck.  Sometimes this is true but not this time. Around stage 150, I noticed something about all these bouncy thing jumps, and only if I hit the jump button.  Regardless of wither I succeeded or failed the jump, the game would produce a goddamn jump SOUND EFFECT (do you see how angry I am?).  The sound code for the game was registering that I jumped while the graphics did not.  That. Is. Some. Bullshit.  

OH?  Yes.  I know.  Maybe I wasn't holding down the jump button.  Just like many platformers, you can tap the jump button for a light hop, or hold it down for a higher/longer jump.  It didn't matter.  While it was hard to test on the bouncy things, there was a stage with a safe platform, but with a very short window in which I could proceed.  Due to the speed run nature of this game, I would land on the platform and quickly try to jump off it only I repeatedly fell to my death due to lack of jump. After failing 100 times I'd yell, "I jumped!" only to realize that maybe I'm jumping too late.  Nope!  For the first second on that platform, which is an eternity in this game, you cannot jump!  I tested this by purposely stopping on that platform and hammering on the jump button (which would cause me to jump up and down rather than forward).  Nothing happened for the first 4 button hits or so.  

This means, that when you yell at this game saying, "I fucking jumped!" after running off a platform to your doom, you are actually correct.  This game IS fucking with you, you are NOT going crazy....but yeah sometimes you just hit the jump button too late.

There is a story to this game but who cares?  Not the right type of game for me to care.

Cloudberry Kingdom is a good game.  Not great due to it's precision platforming not always being precision, but still good.  I don't normally do this in my reviews, but I would recommend trying it out sometime.  The Story Mode has set stages, they get progressively harder, and can supposedly be finished though I think that is an ancient myth or something.  There is an Arcade Mode with several different types of play, all of which are infinite and randomized.  You can also make custom stages (sort of), where you can manipulate the types of controls as well as the difficulty.  Any of these modes can be played in up to 4 player local co-op.  There is no online co-op but I assume even a slight amount of lag would make this game impossible.

If you do decide to try this game out, keep in mind 4 things.

1. You will not finish story mode.
2. No seriously, you will not finish story mode.
3. Remember that video at the beginning of the blogpost?  That is stage 319, the second to final stage of the game (319 and 320 look similar in video).  There is a reason that leaderboard has a three way tie at the top.  Nobody had EVER beaten 319 legitimately when it was posted.  Oddly enough, you can glitch it, but even that is really, really difficult.  The AI beats the stage in the video above but if you look closely, it should have died multiple times from the lasers.  A handful of people have beaten it, and by a handful, I mean like 2.  (It's hard to find this data but 2 people on PS3 have with video proof on Youtube. Obviously there could be more on Xbox but it's definitely less than 10 people total and that's generous).
4. So I'm not kidding, you will not finish story mode.

This is what awaits at the end, only, all of that is moving.

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Check out my review of Papo & Yo here.  

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CounterSpy Review - Gotta Go Back and Kill Em All.

Maybe I'm just really picky when it comes to stealth games but CounterSpy is another one I didn't care for all that much.  I'm of the opinion that level design is possibly THE most important aspect of a good stealth game.  This game, uses randomly generated levels with randomly placed objectives forcing this stealth game to turn into a boring, repetitive, 3rd person shooter.

There are two dominate types of levels.  One is the 2-D platforming stealth sections that are pretty good, and the awful shooting gallery sections that make me wonder how stealth/rail shooter ever came up as an idea in the first place.  

The platforming sections are what everyone thinks this game is.  You can stealthy sneak up on enemies from the front, hang from a ledge and attack them from underneath, or jump up to another platform and come at them from above.  Speed is super important too as once you are spotted, or a dead body is spotted, a guard might attempt to radio in an alert which slowly raises the DEFCON level.  It's imperative to kill these guards as quickly as possible because if the DEFCON level gets too high, a 1 minute long countdown timer starts until nukes are launched at the moon (god this is stupid).  The DEFCON level can also rise from being killed, which is basically saying you have so many lives.  To make matters worse, any alerted guard left behind will ALSO raise the DEFCON level so you gotta go back and kill em all.

Arnold voice: "Hang out"

There are two flaws in these sections that I just can't get over though.  One is the guards better field of view and the seemingly random way they are alerted.  Icons will appear over a guard telling you if they are within alert distance, if they are investigating, or on full alert.  These icons are often on the side of the screen since your character should be able to see them, but you can't.  This kind of weirds me out as I don't know how many times I've killed a guard only to see 8 icons around the screen suddenly jump to full alert despite these guards being in Australia for how close they are.  Other times, I can do the exact same thing without a single person noticing.  Did they see me or not?  And I can't just leave them to maybe find the dead body, so I gotta go back and kill em all.

For example, there is a random hallway section I've ran into with three guards.  I'm at one end, 2 guards are standing next to each in the middle, and the 3rd is at the other end,  I pop out of cover and headshot one of the guards in the middle with a silenced pistol thinking the guard next to him will investigate but no.  He is oblivious, but the OTHER guard down the hall investigates instead.  He walks up to the body and begins to radio in the alert so I pop out again to kill him quickly, THEN the other guard goes on full alert allowing me to kill em all without having to go back.  Later on, I run into the same hallway section again but this time decide to kill the guard at the end of the hall first.  I headshot him, with the silenced pistol, and EVERY guard is on full alert now despite those other two guards not looking at me or the other guard.  What the hell?  These examples are in a relatively simple area too.  It's even worse and more head scratching when you're in a larger area with dozens of guards. Need to be extra thorough in those sections so I don't gotta go back and kill em all.

I wasn't thorough

The other problem with these platforming sections are the aforementioned randomly placed objectives.  The computers you need to raid could be anywhere, forcing you to explore everything and fight everyone.  Great stealth games usually provide ways where you can avoid combat entirely and some of these platforming sections actually have passageways that bypass guards.  Too bad you might also be bypassing your objective so...gotta go back and kill em all.

The other major level concept is the shooting gallery sections which are awful.  Get into cover.  Stay there.  Pop out to shoot baddies.  Move on when they are all dead.  Yes, there are explosive barrels and panels that you can shoot to help out but they are the explosions to this Micheal Bay of a level concept.  The guards rarely switch cover too.  Sometimes there is a rocket guy who shoots a slow moving rocket that can be shot for more BOOMS.  Also, they sometimes throw grenades which you can throw back in the VERY unlikely chance it lands next to you.  I mean, you remember that kid on your little league team who would always throw a baseball into the dirt 20 feet in front of you or 20 feet over your head?  All of these guards were that kid.  I kinda feel bad about going back and killing them all.

Sometimes these shooting gallery sections have a 3-D perspective and look like they can be avoided but I was NEVER able to do so.  Many of these room have like 8 dudes and you can try to wait 10 minutes for them to all have their back turned so you can sneak by.  It will never happen.  Sometimes you can go around it in the 2-D area but there is usually guards there too and if you alert one you alert all 8 of those FUCKERS in the shooting gallery.  SO I GOTTA GO BACK AND KILL EM ALL.

Every time I saw this room there were 8 dudes in there.

In case my point hasn't been made clear yet, a good stealth game should never force you to have to slaughter everybody.  A good stealth game gives you the opportunity to go unseen/undetected and gives you the chance to go back to that state without having to kill everything.  CounterSpy offers neither.  I'm not gonna complain that it isn't like most AAA stealth games since this is a low budget indie title, but you'd think "stealth game BASICS" would have been adhered too.  And it's sad too that the basics of good stealth games would go ignored because this game has a lot of good stuff going for it.  

The story is cheeky and lighthearted for a game about nuclear annhilation (Again, they want to nuke the moon).  The controls are really good, snappy and fluid, but there is strangely no crouch button (another stealth game staple ignored).  Shooting mechanics are basic but fine.  There are several enemy varieties with normal dude, armored dude, machine gun dude, rocket dude, and officers who can be taken alive to lower the DEFCON level (which I suck at. Not a game flaw here, I just suck at this).  There is even different security camera types making some harder to destroy than others.

But...still...I gotta ignore stealth game basics and go back and kill em all.  The LARGEST reason for this flaw is level design, which is exponentially worse due to the randomly generated levels and computer locations.  I've never been a big fan of randomly generated levels in games (MAN, I'm just killing it with the future blogpost teasers), but it seems impossible to have a good stealth game with this concept.  I don't need to know exactly where my objective is, but I need at least a little idea.  Otherwise I'm wondering if I already passed my objective, and I gotta go back and kill em all.

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I reviewed a AAA stealth game that is worse than CounterSpy.  Read it here.

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