Month: August 2020

Ahead of the release of Scarlet Nexus, I got to check out a preview build of Bandai Namco’s upcoming action RPG. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get actual hands-on experience with the game, but Bandai Namco did provide an extended behind-the-scenes look at some gameplay, specifically combat. What I was most surprised by was how much it reminded me of The Force Unleashed.

Scarlet Nexus sees you play as Yuito Sumeragi, a psychokinetic who’s a part of the special task force that defends humanity from demonic-looking mutants called Others. Though he’s armed with a sword, Yuito’s primary means of attack is his powers–he can use his mind to pick up objects in the environment and fling them at enemies. Small boxes and bicycles can be tossed around with ease while flinging cars and ripping down the ceiling seems to take considerably more effort.

When paired with Yuito’s melee combat mechanics, it creates a sense of flow that reminds me of how Starkiller fought in The Force Unleashed. Yuito can dive past the Others’ long-range attacks to get in close and slice away. He can also pummel enemies from afar with whatever is lying around, and given that Scarlett Nexus takes place in a city, there’s plenty to throw. But Yuito seems to be at his strongest when he dances back and forth between the two styles, stunning targets with a thrown car and quickly finishing them off with a few snappy melee attacks.

Later on in the demo, when Yuito began confronting larger numbers of enemies, combat almost took on this frantic, dance-like approach as Yuito had to use his psychokinetic abilities to manage the crowd while his melee attacks dealt heavy damage to the targets closest to him. It all seemed pretty cool, especially when the demo skipped ahead to showcase additional psychokinetic powers that Yuito can unlock, like timing button presses to grab an object you’ve already thrown past an enemy to pull it back towards you and strike the enemy for a second time. Yuito can also break apart larger objects in half to pancake smaller enemies or combine several objects into a meteor-looking ball that he can slam down in an area-of-effect attack.

The demo didn’t show off much of how this would look like, but I’m a little worried by how party members might detract from the evolution of such a combat system. Yuito will meet and team-up with other individuals with extra-sensory abilities throughout the game, but they won’t be psychokinetics like him. Each one has a different power, which Yuito can temporarily borrow to augment his own skills and unlock new types of attacks. For example, in the demo, Yuito teamed up with Hanabi, a staff-wielding pyrokinetic. She attacks with wide-swinging melee strikes and lights enemies on fire. Yuito can temporarily borrow her powers, adding fire damage to his melee attacks and lighting the objects he throws on fire. Additionally, he is able to hold out his hand and fire a flamethrower-like attack, or swing his sword in a fire tornado area-of-effect attack.

Admittedly, it all looks fairly impressive (Bandai Namco said the footage was representative of expected Xbox Series X gameplay), but I’m skeptical about the idea of unlocking different powers that are presented as vastly different on paper, but don’t have a major impact in practice. As visually distinct as the Hanabi-influenced attacks are, they seem to accomplish much the same task as Yuito’s default attacks. These fire attacks look like they do more damage but they don’t really change how Yuito fights. And again, it’s hard to make a judgement call since Hanabi was the only companion we got to see in action, but I’m worried that Scarlet Nexus peaks relatively early when it comes to the types of attacks you can do.

I think there’s some potential to Scarlet Nexus. The idea of pulling off cool-looking combos with your sword while keeping track of the objects around you and coming up with an idea of how to telekinetically move them to your advantage sounds like it could become satisfyingly complex in the long run, especially if companions can influence how your powers work in intriguing new ways. But the demo didn’t show that. It seemed to imply progression would just be re-skinned versions of all the attacks you seem to unlock early on. And that could become boring after a few hours–I don’t want to just use different variations of the same attacks over and over. There’s only so many combos you can come up with in a system like that, which isn’t great for action games.

And granted, the Hanabi-enhanced attacks could feel fundamentally different from Yuito’s default moves. I just watched the demo being played–perhaps with a controller in hand, the pyrokinetic attacks just feel distinct from psychokinetic attacks and that may help in differentiating the two movesets and making it seem like one isn’t completely like the other.

We’ll have a better idea as to how Scarlet Nexus’ combat works and what other companions that Yuito will be able to rely on when the game releases for Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The game will support Smart Delivery for Xbox One and Xbox Series X.

“This isn’t so bad,” I thought to myself as I scampered through the admittedly spooky forest, the opening level of Little Nightmares II, which I got to play in a preview build of the game. Mono, the paper bag-wearing protagonist of Little Nightmares II, handles just as nimbly as the original game’s Six, which makes it easy to navigate the dangerous obstacles in my path. Whether it’s leaping over the poorly hidden rope to avoid getting caught in a snare or chucking abandoned shoes and sticks into piles of leaves that are clearly hiding active bear traps, Mono is up to the task–he’s an intelligent kid. Which then begs the question: Why in the hell is he choosing to continue down an increasingly dangerous path that is obviously leading up to something even worse?

That something turns out to be a dilapidated shack of a house. “We could just go around,” I say out loud, but Mono isn’t having any of it. The only path forward, apparently, is through, so into the obvious murder house I go. Inside, Little Nightmares’ more traditional puzzles come into play–just like the first game, you’re controlling a very tiny child who has wandered into a space that’s home to people who are significantly larger than you. So Mono has to clamber up and down staircases, crawl under furniture, and move boxes in order to leap up and grab the handle of doors in order to open them. It’s all fairly simple stuff, though there is an urgency to my actions, as the unsettling sound design and occasional environmental context clues are really selling that I’m not alone in the house.

Plus, ya know, there’s that whole cannibalistic aspect of the first game in the back of my mind reminding me that there’s a good chance that I’m going to run into someone who wants to eat me. The original Little Nightmares reinforced the notion that you shouldn’t trust anyone or anything in this terrifying world–given what Six is willing to do in order to satiate her hunger, you’re not even sure you can trust yourself. Little Nightmares II builds on this unsettling feeling of mistrust by introducing a partner character you can’t directly control. She may be a familiar face, but your partnership is born out of necessity, not a mutual bond.

Locked in one of the rooms in the house is another child–it’s Six, though she’s not wearing her memorable yellow raincoat, appearing as she did in Very Little Nightmares, the mobile title that acts as a prequel to the original game. Six doesn’t wait around to thank me for saving her, bolting out of the room. I decide to follow, and here is where Little Nightmares II reveals its new puzzles: cooperative challenges.

There are puzzles in the game that Six and Mono cannot solve on their own. Sometimes one has to boost the other up to reach something that’s really high, for example, or hold an object in place while the other interacts with it. For better or worse, you have to trust Six to make it through the game–when you pull on a rope to decrease the gap in a bridge to allow her to make the jump to the other side, you have to hope that she is willing to then come back and reach out her hand to catch you as you make the further jump. There’s no way to directly control Six. She wanders off and doesn’t wait for you to catch up unless she encounters a problem that she can’t solve on her own. You can hold her hand–sacrificing speed to ensure you both stick together–and call for her to come to you. But there were a few moments when I called out and I could have sworn that when she looked back at me, she paused to consider whether it was worth it. Maybe it was just a latency issue, a bug to be ironed out ahead of release, or maybe she doesn’t trust me yet. And if she doesn’t trust me, it makes it hard to comfortably feel like I can trust her.

And that’s where Little Nightmares II’s true tension lies, in the unnerving position you find yourself in where your survival is dependent on relying on someone you’re not sure you can completely trust. You do need Six too, you just can’t abandon her. The game does a fabulous job of hammering in that fact within the first few moments of meeting Six. Because after saving Six, you encounter the being that likely took her captive: the Hunter. And you will not get away without her.

“Why do they call him the Hunter, Jordan?” I can hear you asking. Well, the first time you see him, he’s skinning animals with his bare hands, which seems like a very outdoorsman, hunter-y thing to do. Oh, and upon seeing you, he decides his best course of action is to load a shotgun and just start blasting.

What follows is a lengthy chase through the rest of the forest, with you and Six working together to move heavy objects, climb over obstacles, and discover ways to temporarily hide from your pursuer. Chase sequences aren’t new to the Little Nightmares games, but Little Nightmares II does a much better job with them than its predecessors. You still immediately fail if you’re caught–which for the Hunter means he sees you and blows your head off–but the sequel does a better job of teaching you how not to fail because you now have a partner. At the beginning of the chase, Six immediately takes off sprinting and hides behind a box, a cue that you should do the same. The Hunter shoots at you but the box takes the shell, and during the time it takes for him to reload, Six sprints to the next hiding place. After this, Six follows your lead, but now you have the knowledge of how to escape the man who’s chasing you: Run to a box, hide behind it to survive the shotgun blast, run to the next box, repeat.

This pattern continues throughout the chase, with Six initially showing you how you can survive (hide in tall grass or dive underwater to avoid the light of the Hunter’s lantern, for instance) and then handing the agency back to you with the knowledge of how to survive for the next few minutes. So instead of experimenting with several different strategies and dying over and over at each checkpoint, I actually made it through the entire chase with only two deaths (and both were clearly my fault–I rushed ahead in fear when I should have taken a few seconds to take stock of the situation). It felt like Six and I were leading each other and working together to escape this monster instead of me memorizing the correct route through repeated trial and error. When it comes to horror games, I find it way more satisfying when it feels like I outsmarted the invincible monster chasing me–I don’t want to be reminded that I’m simply trying to solve a puzzle that’s dressed up to be scary.

The escape from the terrifying Hunter ends in a satisfying way. I didn’t really appreciate it until after the fact–in the moment, I was screaming, “Pick up the gun and end this motherfu-” as I tried to grip my controller with sweaty hands–but as Six and Mono were safely sailing away, I realized that most of the distrust I had for Six was gone. But only most of it, not all. Escaping the house and fleeing from the Hunter showed just how reliable Six could be in a pinch. She seems like an excellent ally to have. But I also can’t help but think back on the times when she ran off without me, only slowing down when it seemed like she would need me to help her. Does she trust me or is she only keeping me around for as long as she needs me? It’s a tense way to end Little Nightmares II’s first chapter, and it left me intrigued to see how the rest of the game plays out.

I guess I’ll find out whether Six is a trustworthy partner when Little Nightmares II launches for Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC on February 11.

Windbound is an excellent island. It’s just a shame that it’s a poor archipelago.

For my first few hours with the new roguelike survival game from Five Lives Studios, I walked a knife’s edge–blissful relaxation on one side, speedily encroaching anxiety on the other. You would be forgiven for being lulled into a false sense of security. The sunny skies and gorgeous ocean are inviting. The art style charmingly stakes out a familiar middle ground: cartoonish gloss, realistic proportions. The monsters are memorably designed, and even the most imposing are at least a little cute. But as welcoming as it can look, the red and yellow gauges at the top of the screen are a constant reminder that this world isn’t friendly.

You’ll stumble around early on, unable to do much of anything. Okay, you have grass, but what can you do with grass? Okay, you crafted a grass rope, but what can you do with a grass rope? You may try to wade into the water in hopes of swimming to the closest island, but your stamina gauge will quickly dash those hopes. Deplete it and you’ll wake up on the beach, back where you started. Eventually you’ll find a shrine on the island where you’ll receive an oar, which is, in some way, legendarily significant. Locating this artifact will unlock some new crafting recipes. Turns out you can craft a grass boat with enough rope and some elbow grease.

From here, Windbound’s waters open up. A tower in the distance, which tapers into a stony crab’s claw, beckons. You search for two more, each with a portion of the key you need to progress to the next level. After finding all three, you search for a gate, carved into a massive outcropping of rock. Pass through the gate and you’ll find your boat, waiting to take you on a river ride through a stone cavern. Hulking sea creatures breach the water as jaunty music, which threads the needle between sea shanty and battle theme, guides you along. This moment is genuinely climactic and cool and had me on board for whatever came next.

But, then it repeats, largely unchanged, four times. In fact, as the game progresses, all of these beats from the opening hour repeat four times. By the end, what was once fun and interesting becomes rote and boring at best and deeply frustrating at worst. There are always three towers to find but by the fifth level, the play space has expanded and the islands have become smaller and more numerous. Finding the towers in the latter half of the game feels like searching for a needle in a haystack, except the needle’s location is scrambled every time you die.

Well, at least that’s what happens on the Survivalist difficulty. Windbound can be played as a roguelike with permadeath or as a more forgiving, level-based survival game. I want to recommend the latter, because Windbound’s sluggish pace is a poor match for a roguelike’s structure. At one point, roughly three hours into a playthrough, a shark suddenly appeared and destroyed my boat, killing me instantly. I was playing on Storyteller, so I was able to begin again at the start of the level instead of at the start of the game. But all I could think about was how much effort I would have wasted if I had been playing on the more punishing Survivalist setting. Three hours of searching for towers would have gone down the drain in a blink of an eye. I can’t fully recommend playing on Storyteller, either, though. Searching for food to shore up your stamina gives structure to the Survivalist mode, and that’s missing on the easier setting. Your stamina gauge depletes much more slowly on Storyteller, so most of your time will be spent in the water, searching for towers–an act that becomes painfully tedious as the game stretches on.

A lot of that tedium stems from how difficult it is to steer your ship. Early on, you row your boat with an oar. It’s straightforward, but it will take you a long time to get anywhere. So you’ll want to craft a mast which allows you to harness the wind. But, once you do that, it becomes very difficult to sail against the wind. You’re supposed to loosen your sails when the wind is at your back and tighten them when you’re moving against it, but sailing against the wind never really feels natural. It seems like you’re supposed to sail at a diagonal or slalom back and forth. Both options feel pretty counterintuitive, and I came to dread sailing between islands. It’s also difficult to see a tower until you’re very close to it, so instead of seeing a point on the horizon and sailing to it, you’re frequently sailing to the horizon and hoping that a point materializes.

As much as I disliked the act of sailing, I did enjoy the process of building a sturdy boat. In typical survival game fashion, as you find new materials you unlock access to new recipes. After building grass and bamboo boats for hours, it’s exciting to finally find the key ingredient needed to craft an axe and gain the ability to chop down trees. After that shark made short work of my grass boat, I went back to the drawing board and created a powerful wooden boat with multiple hulls and strong, defensive armor. Building a strong boat that can effectively brave the high seas is satisfying. And the absence of huts or houses helps the game maintain a sense of forward momentum.

When you are on dry land, you spend a lot of your time running from monsters. Some, like the docile bison-like Gorehorns, will leave you alone unless you invade their personal space. Others, like the creepy Gloomharrow, which slinks around like Randall from Monsters Inc., attack on sight. Some craftable items require parts from these creatures to make, and you quickly gain a sense for whether or not a fight will be worth it or not. If you’re flush with arrows, taking down a Gorehorn is as simple as clambering onto a rock just out of reach and pelting them with projectiles. But, if you’re running low, you’ll need to get up close and personal with a spear, or worse, with your knife. These fights mostly involve locking on to your opponent and waiting for them to make a move before you dodge and hop in for a flurry of attacks. Combat isn’t a huge part of the game, though. Fights are a risk-reward proposition and a major drain on resources, health, and stamina if you don’t manage to down the monster and/or if they don’t drop much meat. But it works well enough when you need to engage and each creature behaves distinctly enough that I never forgot where to get a certain part.

Overall, Windbound has its moments. Much of the time, it was relaxing enough to zone out and search for crafting materials. But the game is built around finding towers, and that process becomes significantly less fun after the first level. There are only so many times you can search for a tower, no matter how winsome the presentation.

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Actor Nick Offerman auditioned for the role of Wolverine many years ago, but the part went to Hugh Jackman. As it turns out, that wasn’t the only superhero role that the Parks and Rec star was in the mix for.

Appearing on Rob Lowe’s podcast, Offerman said about three or four years ago (so 2016-2017), he had a Skype meeting with a director “for a superhero movie.” The production of this film, whatever it was, had some issues, and the director was fired; a crew member replaced him.

Offerman said he knew from the very beginning that there was no chance he would get the role, due in part to how he wasn’t exactly in top physical shape, but he tried to sell the director on the idea that he would be the “funny” choice.

“I don’t get a lot of meetings for superhero movies,” Offerman said. “I knew that this guy wasn’t the first choice as director. The director had been fired, and this guy was a crew member who had been promoted to director. So I knew that, going in, there was no way I was getting this job. No way. You know the math.”

“The only way I get the job is if the man or woman is a maverick,” he added. “Anybody can go to the gym and get ripped. But I will be funnier than any of these other choices. I think the smartest thing you could do is to cast me. It’s the kind of thinking that will allow your superhero movie to stand out.”

Offerman said the same day that he had the call with the director for his project, he started running for exercise. He now runs 5 or 6 days a week, and 4 miles per day.

There are plenty of possibilities for what movie Offerman might be referring to here, and hopefully one day we learn the true answer.

Offerman recently starred on the miniseries Devs, which we thought was one of the best sci-fi shows on TV.