Shing!

This had been on my radar for quite some time, as I like beat-em-ups, having largely grown up on them (Double Dragon, Final Fight, TMNT, River City Ransom, etc. were among my favorite childhood games). It's very comic-booky, and it attempts to satirize a lot tropes from both anime and beat-em-ups. The characters are sarcastic quip machines, and the story is full of knowing cliches from typical magical anime set in a techno-feudal Japanese setting.

The humor is mostly pretty lame if I'm being honest. The characters wisecracking at each other never results in clever dialog and the magitek world setting nods at itself throughout but isn't actually any different from the thing it's nodding at. It's basically a somewhat generic "feudal future" Japanese setting where demons are coming to steal the magic goo that has mystical powers and powers everything. Except the characters sometimes say swears and call each other assholes. Which gets old by the third level and leaves the protagonists forever one-dimensional.

However! Fortunately as a beat-em-up it's exceptional, one of the best I've played in a while. You have a ton of movement and combat options out of the gate and its freestyle approach lets you get as technical as you want, mixing up combo styles to match your flow, or just kinda button-mash. Although I would recommend playing on the lowest difficulty if you're a button-masher--the game starts out very easy after the tutorial but the difficulty gets pretty spicy, pretty quickly on anything above Casual. Combos are controlled by the right analog stick, a control scheme that takes a minute to get used to especially with the wide range of attack possibilities available, but makes the game feel fresh for the genre once you start free-flowing combos as you slice through hordes of yokai.

Like most games in the genre, you have the option of choosing between four characters. Unlike other games, who you choose at first doesn't really matter because you have the ability to instantaneously switch between all four characters at will during the game. Each character has their own unique weapon and moveset--they don't vary too much mechanically but it's worth your time to swap through all the characters in the first level or two and learn the differences, because unless you're good enough to never die with your preferred character, you're going to eventually have to play with them all. If your character dies it's not game over yet, as you can simply drop in one of the other characters, so the game isn't over until all four get waxed.

I recommend this game highly to beat-em-up veterans. The mechanics are pretty innovative for this kind of game and keep it from wearing out its welcome as you can frequently change up your play style experimenting with different combos between the characters. Not much about the presentation will grab you--the art design is solid and appropriately cartoony, but otherwise kind of generic, and the humor falls flat every time. For that reason, I don't think I'd recommend this one to newcomers to the genre, as the weakness of the humor and the narrative won't carry you through the potential frustration of the quickly ramping difficulty....especially once you meet the Tengu.

Arcade Paradise

This is a hands-on, first-person management sim, where you are the lackadaisical 19-year old son of a semi-wealthy "small business tyrant" living sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. He has put you in charge of King Laundry, the first business he owned as part of what eventually became a vaguely described local business empire. He does not believe in you, or your half of a business marketing degree you worked on before dropping out of college.

As you start your first day washing and drying laundry, picking up trash, and unclogging the one toilet, you will eventually stumble upon a back room that has three arcade cabinets in it. You can play them, or get back to work, or split your time between the two. At the end of your first day, you're instructed to empty the change machine for laundry as well as emptying quarters out of the arcade machines, and you will hopefully immediately notice that the arcade machines yield significantly more money. So you contact your sister via chat using the PC in the office, and she informs you that she put the cabinets there because she already knows what you figured out: People spend more quarters on games than on spin cycles. You also approach your dad with this revenue-generating idea, and he predictably shoots you down as a boomer who thinks vidya is all brain-rotting beeps n' boops. And thus, you start hatching a plan, with no money and not much spare space, to somehow turn King Laundry into a thriving arcade.

The game goes in timed day cycles, which you can track with the LCD watch on your wrist. You have a PDA that's a clear nod to the Apple Newton that tracks goals, achievements, and game settings. You make money by actually doing laundry and keeping the store clean, but you make the games make more money by playing each of them to make them more popular--each cabinet has a popularity rating which you can raise by actually playing the games and earning achievements within them. The games are 80s-style simplistic game modes of types you're very familiar with: match-3, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, racing games, etc. Getting demonstrably good at them draws more players and more quarters. But in the short-term, you make more cash directly by your day job, so you have to time laundry cycles with how much spare time it gives you to work on becoming an S-tier gaming god. Eventually you earn enough day job money to start buying more and better arcade cabinets, and your devious plan starts coming to fruition.

As someone who very much grew up obsessed with arcades and has the deathly pallor to prove it, I love the concept of this game, I love the incredibly stylish presentation, and I almost love the gameplay itself. As the game goes on and you get more cabinets but need more money and popularity ratings, you end up in what becomes an increasingly frantic loop of sprinting between tasks--very typical of any management sim, where you're juggling resources and time--but eventually you get so busy that you have zero time to actually enjoy any of the games you're buying and gaining achievements in them as part of your goals becomes a tense exercise that starts wearing out its welcome after you've played a Pac-Man clone for the 1000th time and your watch alarm is screaming that it's time to unclog the shitter again.

I really wish this game had a more casual mode--I think this game would be a favorite for me if it had a way to play that wasn't so time-crunched to create its artificial sense of urgency required of management sims. I would love a "Cozy Mode" where I could just kind of bum around between trying to get a new high score in Not-Burger-Time and picking used chewing gum off the walls (an actual task in this game).

Shadow Warrior 2013

An updated classic boomer shooter wrapped in much prettier (and slightly less problematic) skin. So pretty in fact that I was surprised to find this 12-year-old game absolutely chugging on my medium-high-range PC without dropping some settings.

The original Shadow Warrior was a game I was familiar with but never played. I thought it incredibly corny in a tedious way and just a lazy reskin of Duke Nukem 3D the time or two I watched a friend play it, so I just ignored the series. What brought the remake to my attention was picking up Evil West as a free game via my PS Plus subscription, and finding I enjoyed it way more than I expected. A good friend mentioned that he wasn't surprised it was fun because it was made by Flying Wild Hog studios, who did the Shadow Warrior remake that he said was a blast if you just wanted to turn your brain off and engage in a bit of the ol' ultra-violence. Coincidentally, within the next week or so SW2013 came on sale at GOG.com for $2 so I bought it and shelved it, as I am wont to do.

It is, in fact, quite fun, and I was hooked from the opening scene with Lo Wang speeding his Porsche through rural Japan cranking up and singing along to "You Got the Touch" (the main single from 1986's The Transformers Movie). He's a professional hitman sent to buy (or otherwise obtain) a famous Japanese katana, the Noributsu Kage, from a very wealthy collector at his compound until things go to hell, literally. Lo Wang's inherent corniness is more digestible here, as it plays more as the character's defensive mechanism against the absurd realities of his job and life--Wang is objectively and believably not a good guy or a hero, until of course he is. It would be remiss of me to not briefly mention that although FWH Studios is a smaller game studio out of Poland, I do wish they had been a little more intentional in their casting. There is literally not a single Asian person in the entire voice cast of a game set entirely in Asia, and it frankly shows.

Honestly the game kind of knocked me out with the visuals on reaching the compound, with beautiful swaying cherry trees, rippling koi ponds, and traditional Japanese architecture. It knocked out my frickin' GPU as well, and it took me time to find how much I had to drop the settings without losing too much fidelity or dropping below 40FPS. I settled for what was a pretty shitty framerate for a shooter in favor of nicer graphics since I figured (correctly) that I was going to largely rely on melee anyway, which requires way less precision than an MP5.

Beyond that, not really a ton to say about it. You shoot or slice up demons, you gain various ki powers and upgrade weapons, the humor is still corny but less cringey, you progress a pretty straightforward plot for this kind of game. This is not at all a must-play, there's nothing here you haven't seen before, but my friend was right that if you just want to pump bullets into some demons and blow stuff up in a good-looking environment, you could do worse than spending a few afternoons with this.

Stray Gods

I almost don't want to review this one. I don't think I'm qualified to. I'm not a fan of visual novels, or musicals. But I wanted to break out of my comfort zone with Stray Gods, a game that a lot of people raved about and I picked up on sale for a couple of bucks from GOG.com where it was rated 4.5 stars (few titles on GOG get that high). I was going to try something different, and let myself be surprised and delighted by something far outside of my usual lane.

I wasn't. At all. I can't say I enjoyed a single minute of the 3-ish hours I played of a 6-hour story before I gave up. The art style and character designs are very solid, to its credit. The main character is a goth-adjacent woman who in the game's first scene vaguely gestures at either a dark backstory or garden-variety depression, I never learned which, but who of course very quickly is revealed to be the Magical Chosen One Who Will Save Us All. At the beginning of the game you have the option to give her one of three personalities, Charming, Punk, or Clever, but they don't have any discernible effect except changing a few dialog options as you progress. The idea of "what if the Greek Gods lived among us in modern times" is one of the most played-out concepts of the last 30 years, although again, their character designs are cool.

But we gotta talk about the music, since that's the whole reason we're here. As someone who just said they're not a huge fan of musicals, I have seen a lot of them, and I can definitely be grabbed by an individually great song even if I don't love the whole production. I found the music in this game to be mostly talk-singing normal dialog in a limited vocal range, with nothing remotely approaching a hook or even a theme half the time, just a continuation of the initial conversation/argument with the odd rhyme thrown in. None of the cast of singers were specifically awful, but none impressed either.

I don't want to spend more time than I have to talking negatively about a game that a lot of people clearly loved, but I will say that it was.........................not for me.

Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker

Set in the world of The Witcher, this is a combination of RPG and tactical card battler in the style of the King's Bounty or Disciples series, in that you have an overworld map you move your "army" (represented by your hero character) around to collect resources and pick fights in order to capture or progress through pieces of the map. Instead of tactical hex-grid battles with units like in the aforementioned series, in Thronebreaker you play a simplified version of Gwent. Simplified in this case means there are only two rows instead of three, units aren't locked to specific rows (as far as I saw anyway), there's often only one round instead of three, and there are often special conditions to the fight beyond or instead of just getting the higher team score.

This was easily my favorite game so far for this round of Backlog Bingo, despite that this is one of my shorter writeups this month. The production values feel like a triple-A game, from the art style of the maps and characters and animated Gwent cards, to the voice acting and script, to the challenge level and goal variety. The protagonist, Meve, a queen returning from abroad to find her kingdom (queendom) in ruins with the invading armies of Nilfgaard knocking on the front door, is well-written and well acted and is a compelling and morally grey lead in a gritty, low(ish)-magic epic fantasy setting. You are often asked in short vignettes to make moral and strategic decisions as a leader both for your armies and the various subjects you run across, and every decision plays into the final result of one of 20 or so available story endings.

I was pulled into this game more than games of any type I've played in a long time. It fires on every available cylinder in terms of quality and presentation. The battles and the puzzles can occasionally be tough, but I was okay keeping a guide open on another screen just in case, and so far only found I needed to refer to it once (technically twice, but only because I'd misread what a certain puzzle card did, and figured it out after that hint).

And here's the funny thing: I've never played through any of the Witcher games. I'm familiar with the series but although I have all 3 games and all DLCs in my backlog I've never played through more than an hour or so of any of them. So I went in as a fan of RPGs and card games, not as a fan of Witcher, and was very pleasantly surprised. Very highly recommended if you like this style of game, whether or not you're familiar with or good at playing Gwent from the Witcher games or the standalone Hearthstone clone.