Life of Delta

It’s widely accepted that humans will be the first to go when AI takes over the world. What’s unclear is what happens after the dust settles and the nuclear fallout eases, likely due to humanity not being around to enjoy it. That’s not stopped Airo Games from theorising what could happen after the great Skynet vs Humanity war with the Life of Delta. The result isn’t your typical fight for survival in a Terminator-esq environment, but a more decidedly chill point-and-click adventure about a cute robot looking for his best mate.

When it comes down to the epic mankind vs machine robots, everyone assumes these are the only two parties with a stake in the fight, but in the opening moments of Life of Delta, we’re told we should have been looking at the reptiles. The radiation from the nuclear war brought back the dinosaurs who quickly reclaimed Earth, thankfully stopping before Godzilla arrived, that would make Life of Delta a concise game indeed. As humanity has fallen, the lizards managed to sneak in and overthrow the robots, creating a brutalist utopia in which anything mechanical is treated much like how we treat a broken toaster. 

In Life of Delta, I was thrust into the position of Delta, a not-as-cute-as-Wall-E robot who lives on the outskirts of a megacity formally known as Japan. A day in the life of this robot consists of chilling with its friend Joe, another service bot who is just trying to survive the harsh environment. Joe is unceremoniously taken away from his home by the lizard people, and rather than letting this happen, Delta decides to set out on a quest to rescue its best mate.

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At a Glance

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Before Delta can set off on its adventure, the first thing is to charge the little guy’s battery, which cleverly acts as a faux tutorial. To do this, I explored Delta’s apartment looking for the charger then having to find the item that activates it, before solving the puzzle to juice the robot back to life. Life of Delta does this by giving slight hints of what to do without holding my hand and guiding me through each step. Naturally, as the game progresses things do become tougher, but never to the point of overwhelming me to the point I put the controller down.

Once Delta is juiced, it’s off to explore the wide world, and to do this is as easy as moving the cursor to where you want the robot to go. Pressing the action button and watching the little machine trundle across the screen never got old thanks to the stunning world in which Delta exists. The 28 hand-painted levels of post-apocalyptic joy that make up Life of Delta are wonderfully crafted, each with its distinct areas that bring to life a Japan savaged by time. As I moved through the sandy wastes of the vibrant city, I was impressed by how well Airo Games blended the unrelenting grounds of Mother Nature with the grimy machine parts that made up the city.

A colourful cast of characters populates the landscapes and to Airo Games’ testament, each one has its distinct personality. A particular favourite was an angry mutated Rhinoceros that treads the fine line between paying homage to Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a class-action lawsuit. Importantly, each NPC was there for a purpose as they either gave nuggets of information to help progression, or they were the key to solving one of the many puzzles I encountered.

These little conundrums pop up regularly throughout Life of Delta and are used to segway into the next part of the story. Much like the “tutorial,” each puzzle is built up through the scenario, with hints being spread through the scene culminating in that eureka moment when you piece everything together. Typically this is straightforward, such as using a sequence of items in the right order, but sporadically, Life of Delta will challenge you to think laterally to find a solution. One of the very few times this happened, there were no clues or prompts that led me to the solution. It was only by dumb luck did I stumble on what had to be done, leaving me feeling utterly redfaced. 

Thankfully this only happened once during my time with Life of Delta. If I was getting stuck at every puzzle, the handful of hours I spent on the game could’ve spun out to a frustrating time. Other than the one stumbling block Life of Delta doesn’t provide too much of a challenge to get to the end. If you’re really stuck, you can tap the shoulder buttons to highlight every object that can be interacted with and work out what to do from there. For point-and-click purists, highlighting what can be played with might feel like a cop-out but I felt Life of Delta was more of an introduction to the genre rather than its magnum opus.

The gameplay and puzzle solving might not be to everyone’s tastes but the overall atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting in Life of Delta. Airo Games does a great job of keeping the focus firmly on Delta’s quest for its buddy while making a relaxing and chilled point-and-click experience. While we’re not talking about a game that presents Elden Ring levels of lore, Life of Delta’s story still manages to throw some interesting obstacles during its short runtime. I’m not sure of a game that takes time out of its important story so that a robot can hire me to play keyboards in a band, but somehow it works. 

During its 4-hour playtime, I realised that Life of Delta is perfect for those looking to make their start in the point-and-click genre. Some puzzles are decidedly unclear, which could frustrate newbies, but those who’ve tackled this type of game before might find the game easy when it comes to gameplay. For me, the biggest selling point is Life of Delta’s whimsical approach to a world post-humanity. The subject matter could’ve easily been a heavy science-fiction piece akin to The Matrix or Terminator, but the easy-breezy presentation and unpressured gameplay left me with a warm and fuzzy feeling that I wasn’t expecting as the credits rolled.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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Monolith

Monolith by Animation Arts is a point and click adventure that thrusts players into the space suit of Tessa Carter, a research expedition leader who finds herself crash landed on an unknown planet. The theme and style initially reminded me of other titles in the genre, classics such as Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky or LucasArts’ The Dig – I was hoping this would be right up my street, as both of those are amongst my favourites in the genre. The grittiness and tech of Beneath a Steel Sky and the sense of isolation from The Dig both look like they may be present in this game. The game invites exploration and problem solving as players look to guide Tessa through an unfamiliar and foreboding environment. With its focus on uncovering the secrets of this enigmatic world, Monolith appears to offer players a blend of adventure and mystery. However, whether it will propel us into a galaxy of intrigue or simply disappear into the black hole of also-rans remains to be seen.

So let’s step into the void! The opening cutscene starts off promising, with some ‘not too bad’ panning shots of space and your ship moving through. Alright, okay, let’s see what happens her… holy crap, we hit an asteroid! Going down! Time to crash land and hope we stop – cliff edge! CLIFF EDGE! Ok phew we’ve landed. Wait, what now? Cut to the hospital where we are met by a somewhat jarring set of character models. The up close shots of the characters have a very early-2000s look about them (think GTA San Andreas); there’s a real ‘uncanny valley’ level of shading to the skin, and the eye and mouth movement just makes you feel like you’re watching a really creepy marionette show. 

Into the gameplay, and we find ourselves in the crashed space shuttle and another quite ugly looking model of Tessa in her smashed up stasis tube. Here we’re introduced to the controller interface and how to interact with the environment, and I gotta say, I can’t get on board with whomever okayed this control set up. The Joy-Con is used as a motion controller and this cannot be turned off – whether you’re playing Docked or Handheld makes no difference. Trying to play by using only the motion controls is not a pleasant experience; they are extremely sluggish and all of the action buttons are set to that same Joy-Con when playing right-handed, so you can end up moving the cursor off the option you want when you press the button to select actions. It really should have had an option to have either motion or thumbstick control.

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At a Glance

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Getting into our adventure, the camera zooms out to give us a wider shot of the environment. I must say that the backgrounds are far more pleasing to the eye than the opening shots we’ve had so far, and that the character model doesn’t look so bad at a distance. We now get to see the game start to show its strengths. 

The world created by Animation Arts is really enticing; you want to explore it, you want to find out what’s happened to your pilot, you want to know where you are. Monolith does a great job of leading you on to the next part of the story without it feeling too much like it’s holding your hand or that it’s put you on rails. There are some really interesting levels of puzzling, from the simple stuff to get you warmed up, to some quite challenging but rewarding encounters later in the game. A particular favourite of mine is a puzzle where you take advantage of the strange alien bugs in order to find your way through the overgrowth, following the mystifying signal that your new found companion CORE has alerted you to.

CORE is a really well thought out addition to the game. Your very own little robot companion (think Ghost from Activision’s Destiny), floating alongside you, giving you some small solace to snap you out of the trepidation of exploring too far from the safety of your crashed ship. It allows them to drip feed your character information without giving the game away. There’s a storytelling mechanic with CORE later in the game (no spoilers!) that’s something I’ve not come across before, and I enjoyed its implementation greatly. I also think that there are some charming interactions between Tessa and CORE that, although quite hammy, are pleasant enough, and really lean into Tessa’s feeling of isolation in this desolate place. I think there are perhaps some translation difficulties, as some of the lines do hit a bit strangely in English, and the delivery can be quite wooden. However, as the developers main language is German, it’s mostly forgivable and it doesn’t grievously break the immersion.

Exploring further, you really get into the swing of things and you can feel that the writers and developers were in their groove during the main part of the story. There’s an interesting plot line that runs throughout and that you’re constantly exploring and discovering more. It truly does an excellent job of making you want to know what the next part of the chapter is going to be. Playing late at night with the ambient music softly lilting out of my speakers and a green lava lamp on (for ambience) really put me in the game; like a kid hiding under the bedsheets with a torch, wanting to finish the current page to find out what happens on the next. 

The only problem is that someone has seemingly ripped out the last few pages of the book and left in its place an ending to an unfortunately awful, cliched story.

What was once a fantastic sci-fi romp into the unknown, with some truly fantastic twists and turns becomes a turgid, on-rails game, where the story is so bland it’d make buttered bread look adventurous. What was becoming a ramped up chase to the finish line becomes a trip and fall, and you’re standing there with your shorts around your ankles, as everyone watching wonders what the hell happened. I know I’ve stressed the point twice here, but I don’t think I can express how much I was absolutely gutted by the finale.  I don’t want to go into too much detail, as I still feel this game is worth a play for anyone who casually enjoys a point-and-click and likes an immersive experience, but the end left me extremely disappointed and questioning whether I should have put all that initial effort in. I’d argue that, for the 8 or so hours I played to completion, it’s not too costly to finish the game, but if you want to be left with a sense of wonder, maybe turn it off at hour 6? Like a magic trick, sometimes it’s better not to know.

Overall, Monolith is a bit of an enigma of a game. Worth a go, for sure, but this might be one that really leaves you most with a feeling of disappointment. If you like ambient settings, some light hearted dialogue interspersed with some fascinating story arc ideas and absolutely loooooved what they did to the finale of Game of Thrones, it’s time to blast off and pick this one up! If you’re someone who can’t stand a bad ending, maybe leave this one on the digital shelf – personally, I’d have preferred a Sopranos style fade to black… hole.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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DREDGE: The Iron Rig DLC

It’s been more than 6-months since I set sail to The Pale Reach, and a mysterious voice has been calling me back to sea. Thankfully, it wasn’t some otherworldly creature of the deep, but the team at Black Salt Games, whose horror-fishing game DREDGE took the world by storm in 2023, and they’re back again with their latest DLC, The Iron Rig. Previously delayed in favour of their icy tale of deception, The Iron Rig finally washes ashore on a wave of dark malaise and corporate wrongdoing.

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Turning the keys in the ignition of DREDGE once again, you’re immediately blasted with the new opening theme for The Iron Rig, which is incredibly catchy. Opening with an accordion ditty that fits the nautical style perfectly, it quickly erupts into some sort of Transylvanian folk epic, and a tsunami of church organs and screeching strings crash over you. The soundtrack to The Iron Rig is just as good as the OST for the original game, with some nuanced ‘retellings’ of the same songs as the urgency and mood changes throughout the tale.

Getting into the game proper, I opened the map to find an imposing oil rig logo now printed firmly in the northern portion of the archipelago, and setting sail, it’s hard to miss the new landmark. The towering research platform stands out as an imposing addition to the skyline, guiding your ship in with a grand column of glittering lights. Upon reaching the platform, you chat to the foreman who explains that the rig is owned and operated by the Ironhaven Corporation, but it’s massively behind schedule due to shipments of materials never arriving. Being the entrepreneurial soul that you are, you volunteer to help, and set back off to investigate the last known whereabouts of the Ironhaven freight vessels.

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At a Glance

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After a little investigation and retrieval, you help get the building works back on track and that’s when things really move into high gear. Once the research platform is operational, the team drops an enormous drill into the seabed, accidentally opening a great fissure in the crust of the earth and releasing a mysterious liquid into the ocean around the archipelago. You’re charged with investigating this dark liquid and bringing back samples of local sea life so that the scientist aboard the rig can check for contamination or other issues. Not looking to give away too much, it won’t come as a surprise to veteran sailors of DREDGE that there is much more going on here than meets the eye, and it doesn’t take too long until you’re at the centre of something much more sinister than a simple environmental check up. 

From a purely gameplay perspective, The Iron Rig introduces a significant new landmark (in the rig itself), a bunch of new quests, and tonnes of new fish for players to catch. It seems that the giant crack in the ocean floor released shoals of prehistoric fish into the waters of the archipelago, and that brings the total number of catchable species up to a whopping 230 (if you also have The Pale Reach expansion)! As you’d expect, the new missions in The Iron Rig are mostly made up of fishing-fetch quests, with a dollop of Greenpeace ocean clean up on the side. While you do get a new spiral-catch mechanic for the new fish, there isn’t much deviation from the core formula in The Iron Rig, so it’s all down to your enjoyment of the original DREDGE to how much you’ll enjoy the newest DLC. If you go in wanting more of the same, and not the reinvention of the wheel, you’ll dig it.

As you complete missions for the employees on the rig, you’ll be able to use recovered Ironhaven assets to improve the research facility, which I found a lot of fun. Being the tech savvy bunch they are, the Ironhaven Corporation have all manner of goodies at their disposal, and it’s in your best interest to build up their labs as best as possible, so that you can outfit your ship with some of their new, swanky tech. The Tech Lab offers upgrades to existing tools like your lighting, telescope (which I’ll admit I used for the first time during this expansion), and foghorn, as well as upgraded rods, nets and winches for pulling stuff out of the fissure. There’s even some entirely new gear that helps speed up gathering materials for the building effort. The Foundry is the other key location on the station, where you can convert materials from one kind into another; you can either manufacture Ironhaven goods out of scrap, or break finished products down to their composite parts if you have more need for the bits and pieces instead. 

I was pretty stoked about being able to farm the flotsam and jetsam for scrap and, more specifically, the ability to use that scrap to make meaningful items like Research Parts. I never completed the research in my playthrough of the main game, mostly because Research Parts were pretty hard to come by, but The Iron Rig changes all that. With only a few bits of new kit I was able to pull together a huge number of Research Parts in just a couple of hours, and I blazed through my remaining itinerary in no time. Now, as a player who’d finished the main game and was just mopping up, this was brilliant, but I also got the feeling that this introduction might significantly change the dynamic of the main game for players experiencing DREDGE with The Iron Rig expansion right from the start. I felt that the original DREDGE set a very deliberate pace, and for better or for worse, being able to farm materials from the get-go is likely to speed things up, at least for those players who commit their resources to the long game right from the off. 

You’re introduced to a few new characters during The Iron Rig, all of whom give off the same shady vibes as the existing cast, and fit nicely into the wider world. The story leans on contemporary views of heartless conglomerates and their unethical business practices, and interweaves those with the sinister and supernatural elements we’ve come to expect from DREDGE. While I definitely enjoyed the new story content, I felt like The Iron Rig came to a rather abrupt ending, and I didn’t find it as engaging as the tale told in The Pale Reach, which is a much more polished storyline.

That said, unlike the Black Salt Games’ last DLC release, the quests in The Iron Rig are not set in a single, new location, but instead send you sailing all over the original map. Not only does this mean that things take much longer to complete than The Pale Reach, but all that getting around also encouraged me to finish off the quests I had missed during my original playthrough. Returning to out of the way landmarks made me take a few sidebars, and with all the new kit from the various updates and DLC, I found those last few frustrating quests much more palatable to complete. I spent about nine and a half hours on The Iron Rig, which dwarfs The Pale Reach (two and a half hours) by comparison, though some of that time was dedicated to finishing off content from the original game that I simply couldn’t pass up this time around. 

The Iron Rig DLC offers that trademark DREDGE spookery, a myriad of new tools, and shoals of extra species to lengthen the overall experience. This new tale isn’t as well told as The Pale Reach, but the extra gameplay content is much broader in scope, encouraging me to even polish off quests from the main game that I had previously consigned to the deep. If ‘more of the same’ makes you want to pull your waders on one more time then you won’t be disappointed, but players expecting vast new experiences may want to give it a miss.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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Dreaming Sarah

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of Nintendo Switch games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!

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Dreaming Sarah, from Spanish indies, Asteristic Games Studio, is a game I have no recollection of adding to my backlog. Looking back over my purchases, I noticed that I bought it on Boxing Day in 2022, which does make some sense – I often get eShop vouchers for Christmas, and I do have a tendency to grab a couple of indie titles that are super cheap during the festive sales. I always hope to find a little hidden gem as a late Christmas gift to myself, but so far I’ve only managed to uncover a few lumps of Krampus’ coal…

Firing up the game, you awaken as the titular Sarah, who’s seemingly taken a nap in the middle of a forest. You’re not offered any narrative background as to how you got there, what’s going on, or what you’re supposed to do, so I just started wandering around to see what was what. It quickly became apparent that ‘wandering around’ is a pretty solid synopsis of the entire game, as there’s very little structure to much of anything, and you’re left entirely to your own devices. I gleaned from the title of the game that Sarah is sleeping, and therefore surmised that everything you see and experience takes place in her dreams, but you’d have no reason to think that if you skipped the title screen, as it’s never alluded anywhere else in the game.

To portray Sarah’s dream state, Asteristic Games have you travel through all manner of weird and wonderful environments, using portals to get between them. From the starting forest you’ll take an elevator to a strange void dimension, and from there you can catch a rocketship to a tiny yellow moon that you can run all the way around Super Mario Galaxy style. There’s also a grandfather clock portal that takes you to a haunted house, a mirror that leads you to a desert island and a well that leads to you magma filled cavern of some kind. I understand the idea is to be wacky and surreal, but there’s actually so little rhyme or reason about how these environments interact with one another that things just feel thrown together.

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At a Glance

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Portrayed in some basic pixel art, the game features a number of off the wall characters, though none of them really have any meaningful impact on your experience. Nobody sticks around beyond a few lines of text and a simple fetch quest of some kind, where they ask Sarah to find an item they’ve misplaced or require for some odd, arbitrary reason. Finding these items and returning them to the right characters makes up almost all of the gameplay in Dreaming Sarah, as the platforming never grows beyond basic navigation either.

Some of the items you collect can be used to help Sarah get around, like an umbrella that helps you glide when you jump or a necklace that turns you into a fish and lets you swim underwater. Sadly, some of the items you collect either have no use (like a paint bucket that changes Sarah’s colour palette), or simply don’t work. Early on you find a compass that’s supposed to ‘point to interesting things’ but I found that it only appeared after selecting it from the item wheel about one percent of the time, which is just frustrating. Also frustrating were the four or five ‘soft locks’ that required me to turn the game off and on again – for a title that can be finished in two hours (with room to spare), this is unforgivable.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that the whole of Dreaming Sarah is incredibly laid back and it’s not going to break the bank. Dying will cause you to respawn immediately where you entered the area, and there’s no way to botch any of the puzzles, allowing you to meander through the different environments at your own pace until you stumble upon what you need to progress. This is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, is very low stakes and will only cost you a couple of quid if you feel like it’s up your street. 

Dreaming Sarah is a rather nonsensical wander through a string of surreal environments and sadly never coalesces into much more than a hodgepodge collection of ideas. It’s a carefree and low stakes affair which may appeal to some, but with almost no story to speak of, and driven by only the tiniest sliver of gameplay, I found my attention span waning long before the two-hour runtime was up.

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Machinarium

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of Nintendo Switch games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!

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Perhaps one of the longest standing games in my backlog (on ‘current gen’ machines, anyway), is Amanita Design’s dingy-cute point-and-click adventure, Machinarium. I bought it on Steam almost 10-years ago – I remember specifically choosing it as a balance between finally having a machine that could play half-decent games, whilst also not wanting to shell out on top end titles. Yeah, you read that right – this is a PC game from my backlog, which definitely makes it something of an outlier.

Unlike a lot of titles gathering metaphorical dust in my backlog, I actually did start Machinarium when I first bought it. I don’t remember exactly where I got up to before I got stuck and gave up, but I know it wasn’t that far, and that always bugged me. I like to think of myself as a pretty smart cookie, but I like point-and-click games because they regularly bring me back down to earth and leave me scratching my head looking for solutions!

Functionally, Machinarium plays as a run-of-the-mill point-and-click adventure. You use the mouse to navigate the screen, clicking to move your character to the desired area and to interact with any people and items in the vicinity. You have a small inventory for collecting helpful items and some of them can be combined to create new tools that will help you overcome the various puzzles standing in your way. In a long storied genre, Amanita Design hasn’t strayed from the tried and tested formula at all, and I think that’s for the best here, as it really lets the world and characters shine.

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At A Glance

Want to see the whole of Drew’s Switch backlog? Check it out here and suggest something to play over on our socials!

If you’ve read any of my reviews before, you know I’m a sucker for hand drawn artwork in games, and that’s no different in Machinarium. The whole world is equal parts grimy, derpy, and adorable, drawn in a style that looks like Quentin Blake and Tim Burton got together to redraw the animated movie Robots (2005). The lead protagonist is called Josef; he’s a compact little robot with a domed head, goggly eyes and extendable limbs and is undoubtedly a sweet little thing. He’s something of a downtrodden citizen in the thriving robot city of Machinarium, and has often found himself on the receiving end of all manner of torment from a group of bully bots who have taken to throwing their weight around. The game opens with poor Josef finding himself discarded to the scrapheap, and it’s your duty to help him get fixed up, sneak back into the city, teach the bullies a lesson and rescue his girlfriend, Berta.

The entire story is told without a single utterance of dialogue, and I have to say, it’s marvellously executed. Instead of any true narration, or even on-screen text, you’re treated to little recollections from Josef in the form of thought bubbles. These little bubbles play out his memories of various scenarios and give you a really strong sense of what’s happened in the world prior to you getting involved. Stylized as scribbly cartoons, these memory scenes are really well done; it’s clear who’s who, what’s going on, and they each give a strong sense of feeling to each story, allowing you to really connect with Josef and Berta, and heaping disdain on the mean-spirited Black Cap Gang, as the bullies are known. Having the odd characters you meet throughout the game use this same method of storytelling is incredibly effective; Amanita Design have done a wonderful job in building individual histories for each rundown robot you meet and in sharing them in a universally understood language.

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In fact, this strong sense of history runs throughout the game, and between the multitude of wacky characters and grime splattered imagery of the environments, the world of Machinarium feels entirely convincing and lived-in. While many of the areas you find yourself in have that common point-and-click problem of feeling somewhat ‘manufactured’ for the player (excuse the pun), I couldn’t care less about that here, as the places you explore carry such a tremendous sense of being alive beyond the borders of the screen. I regularly found myself pining to steer Josef into every dingy back alley shown on screen, or have him wander through every locked doorway, keen to explore the rusty world of Machinarium to the full. 

But the world of Machinarium is hardly all sunshine and rainbows, as there are some pretty bleak visuals stashed amongst the derpy robots and silly puzzles. Yes, you’re treated to a pretty playful and sweet story, but some of the imagery hints at a sinister dystopia lurking beneath the surface. I think it’s this dichotomy of cutesy characters living in a potentially dark world that really captured my imagination whilst playing the game. 

As I alluded to earlier, in a hands-on sense, Machinarium doesn’t do anything especially new in the point-and-click arena and instead plays its puzzling relatively safe. You’ll find a mix of traditional item collection, combination and utilisation puzzles, along with a number of more ‘mini game’ style conundrums too. The mini games were all centred around old school logic puzzles, like pushing buttons to move lights around a board, or rearranging blocks of different sizes to fit into designated areas – I certainly found them fun, but I think players with a lot of experience playing point-and-click games would have solved these puzzles a few times over in other games by now. On the whole though, I thought the difficulty was about right to keep my enjoyment level balanced with my frustration/determination.

It may have been because I needed time to get my brain into the right gear to complete point-and-click puzzles, but I found the first hour of Machinarium to be the least logical in terms of puzzle solving.  I thought there were a few bits of ‘moon logic’ early on before it settled into a much more steady and smooth progression for the rest of the game. Thankfully, for those players like me who loathe googling the answers to things, Machinarium does have a built-in hint system to help you progress should you get stuck, and I really enjoyed the novel approach Amanita Design took in their implementation of this. 

You can click on the hint button once per level to receive a vague clue about what you need to do to get moving, though I didn’t find this especially useful in helping me out. I usually knew what I needed to do, I just had no idea of how to do it. That’s where the next tier of help comes in – Machinarium actually has a whole walkthrough built-in, scribbled out in a huge locked tome that you can access from your inventory. You can unlock the tome any time by completing a little side-scrolling shoot-’em-up game, allowing you to see sketches that outline each of the puzzles in the level and see what you need to do to solve them. Cleverly though, you can only see the solutions for the level you’re currently on, and can’t flip through the pages to see every level in the game. This means that if you need a specific item that originates outside of the screen you’re on right now, you’ll have to unlock the tome again in a different place to see how everything fits together. And by having to play the mini game each time, it stopped me opening the guide every single time I hit a roadblock, and made sure I couldn’t idly do it on a whim without very consciously deciding I was entirely stuck. I think this is a vastly underutilised method of help that should absolutely become a standard in the genre. It not only eliminates the sense of defeat and potential spoilers of using Google or YouTube to solve the puzzles, but also ensures your hints don’t become an immediate crutch to players.

Machinarium is a ‘straight off the lot’ point-and-click puzzler that excels through some wonderful world building, clever storytelling and adorable characters. Whilst never straying far from the standard formula, there’s still plenty to enjoy, not least the fantastic, rust-covered visuals and well constructed soundtrack. This is one I’d recommend to newcomers and veterans of the genre in equal measure – while old school fans might not get much brain stretching out of it, it’s worth everyone’s time for the chance to experience this wacky welded world for yourself.

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Sword of Convallaria

TRPGs might be the bane of my existence when it comes to gaming. I love them right up until the point that they get difficult, and then due to my epic level of sucking, they begin to annoy the crap out of me. As a result, I’ve taught myself to mostly stay away from them. My resolve was soundly tested however, by XD Entertainment’s newest offering, Sword of Convallaria, which immediately grabbed my attention. Some may have been put off by the dual launch on PC and mobile, but after reaching the 5-million downloads mark after only a week or so, I was intrigued to see just what all the fuss was about!

I was struck by the beautiful art style right off the bat, and visually, I don’t think I could like a game more than I do Sword of Convallaria. As a guy who grew up on SNES-era pixel art powerhouses like Secret of Mana, I was blown away by pristine graphics that throw back to my childhood absolutely perfectly. The characters are wonderfully represented on screen, with Epic- and Legendary-level characters boasting especially impressive sprites – but then, even the run-of-the-mill footsoldiers are wonderfully characterful. Levelling up the prettiness even further, XD have folded modern lighting and water visuals in alongside the traditional pixel art, and the final effect really is a sight to behold.

Also standing out is the character artwork, which has been impressively penned in an expressive anime style. Each unit, from the lowliest grunt to the mightiest hero, is portrayed with a beautiful art card that really helps translate the pixel art sprite into a more real figure that you can better connect with from a story standpoint. As you’d expect, the characters are showcased best in the story mode, where you get to learn about their histories and relationships, and even listen to the characters interact, as all the key players are fully voice-acted in Japanese, Korean and Chinese. (I’d have liked an English dub too, and hopefully that comes in the future, but I was left impressed by the Japanese vocal talent, which is a who’s who of popular anime series and video games.)

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At a Glance

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Positives	Negatives
+ Top-class artwork + Stylish characters in an engaging (if convoluted) plotline + Complex battle system with tonnes of nuance	– Heavy use of gacha mechanics and microtransactions – Randomised characters completely unbalances the gameplay – Menus are very ‘click’ heavy
Available on:	• PC (Steam) • Android • iOS

I found the story mode fun, if not a little all over the place – as is customary with many JRPGs. You’re introduced to the main characters, who make up the eponymous Sword of Convallaria, a mercenary group who’ve banded together to protect their homeland, and to a mysterious talking cat called Kuro, who seems to know altogether too much about the universe. With some instruction from your new feline guide, you’ll learn that the world is made up of many dimensions, and moving between these realms allows you to affect the flow of destiny, changing the outcome of events and shaping the fates of your friends and the world. The characters you meet are bold and likeable, though you may have to forgive some of their trope-laden archetypes, like the drunkard mercenary leader and their fiercely loyal adoptive children.

As you progress through the early portions of the game, you’ll recover tarot cards which you’ll use to power up an ancient machine called the Astraraium, and each new card opens up a new dimension to you and your pals, allowing you to take part in various missions and battles. You’ll access all these game modes from the hub world of Elysium, where you’ll also manage your characters, interact with them between levels and even build a cosy home for them to live in. I loved the tarot aesthetic to the dimension hopping, though I was less fond of the incredibly drawn out ‘tutorial’ phase, which continues to drip feed you new mechanics after more than 10-hours of gameplay!

Thoroughly deserving of praise though, is the soundtrack, scored by RPG legend, Hitoshi Sakimoto.  Having written the soundtracks to tonnes of famous RPGs, dating all the way to Ogre Battle on the SNES back in 1993, through such favourites as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Valkyria Chronicles, Sakimoto brings exactly the kind of pedigree you’d want for a new and emerging RPG title. With all the highs and lows of a true adventure, this is a soundtrack to score the most nuanced tale and drive the most epic of battles. 

Getting into the meat of the game, however, things are much more up and down. Now, I’m on record as saying that mobile phones can be a viable platform for gaming, and I stand by this statement, but it only took a few minutes of playing Sword of Convallaria to understand why mobile gaming has such a bad reputation. 

First of all, absolutely everything in Sword of Convallaria is stashed behind a sub-menu, and requires a multitude of clicks to resolve. Being faced with the interface for the first time, I’ll admit to being somewhat overwhelmed. The UI is absolutely covered in icons, and none of them are labelled (presumably to save space on screen). As you randomly click your way through the various screens, you’re met with all manner of shops and ‘quests’, which all seem to require different collectables to interact with. There’s little to no meaningful explanation for what anything is, and I was loath to spend anything, in case I was unknowingly squandering hard to gather materials. Annoyingly, there just seems to be the expectation that you’ll just figure it out as you go.

Also, this may be a free to play game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out to make a whole bunch of money. Yep, you know what I’m getting at – microtransactions.

Like most TRPGs, your units are your main asset, and gathering new units is where my first main gripe comes in. You’ll unlock new characters by ‘summoning’ them, and by that I mean you’ll spend one of the (roughly) 50 currencies to pay for randomised character cards, gacha style. As with all these luck based systems, the very best units have eye-wateringly small chances of showing up, and you’ll have to either farm the quests until you reach retirement age or unleash the power of your credit card to stand any chance of unlocking the entire roster. I would never begrudge developers making money from their games, but I find microtransactions attached to percentage-based mechanics to be distasteful at best and downright predatory at worst. 

Using the free currency you unlock as part of the early story, I was fortunate enough to unlock a couple of Epic- and Legendary-level characters, all of whom can be used right away and with no restrictions from a progression stand point. This presents another problem, as the abilities of these characters are incredibly overpowered versus your run-of-the-mill baddies, and you’ll simply waltz through the levels if you manage to land them in your party. This ‘with rarity comes power’ model  further underlines the need to gather the very best (and hardest to acquire) characters, smashing any illusions that Sword of Convallaria isn’t solidly a pay-to-win experience.

A final annoyance, like many mobile games, in order to extend their lifespan and keep you coming back, you’re limited in how many missions you can play in any given session. Each level comes with an Endurance cost attached, and once you’re out of Endurance, you’ll have to put the game down and come back later. Of course, if you really want to keep playing, you can use items to replenish your Endurance… What? You don’t have any Endurance items left? That’s okay – OF COURSE, you can buy them with real life currency to keep on going. *sigh*

I feel bad griping about now well established (but admittedly gross) industry practices, especially since the actual gameplay in Sword of Convallaria is so solid. 

From a pure TRPG standpoint, there really is a lot to like. There’s a host of different unit types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses (in a rock-paper-scissors style cycle), and there’s a plethora of abilities and special attacks to unlock that makes each unit valuable in different situations. You’re offered a variety of area of effect and ranged attacks from early on, and understanding how to best utilise all your troops is a fun exercise – I just wish the unlockable legends didn’t strong arm their way into your roster every time through their sheer betterness to the standard options.

Like the character sprites, the environments are lovely to look at, and come with a multitude of details to keep you on your toes. From defensive blockades and staggered terrain that requires real planning in your movement, to interactable items like exploding barrels that you can use to your advantage, there’s plenty to think about. Eventually you’ll also unlock ‘Tactics’, which are effectively battlefield-wide powers that can turn the tide of combat with just a couple of clicks, and understanding how to best utilise these is imperative to progression if you don’t want to put your hand in your pocket to get by.

Overall, Sword of Convallaria leaves me torn. On one hand, the stunning artwork, impressive soundtrack and detailed tactical combat are all huge positives that would normally propel the game to a much stronger recommendation. But on the flip side, the time-restricted gameplay, unbalancing gacha aspects and aggressive microtransactions are pretty sizable turn-offs. Perhaps more palatable to experienced mobile gamers than traditional TRPG fans, it irks me that so much potential is buried beneath so many unsavoury pay-to-win mechanics. 

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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Kena: Bridge of Spirits

A lot of the time when you buy a game, you can roughly gauge what you’re investing in. Whether it be a vast single player RPG, a relaxing cosy farm sim, a multiplayer PvP sweat fest, or something sporty to make you feel like less of a potato sat on the sofa. I ask you this, when was the last time you played something that just made you feel? Something that, as you play, you take a moment to stop and just take in what is happening. This is exactly what Kena: Bridge of Spirits did for me. This absolute gem, originally released in 2021 by Ember Labs for PlayStation and PC, makes its journey to Xbox on August 15th. I can’t believe this beauty passed me by those few years ago, but this further release has not only revitalised its own spirit, but in some ways mine as well.

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This is an abridged version of our GAME NAME video review, which can be seen here:

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You play as Kena, a young spirit guide who uses her powers to aid those who have deceased in passing from the physical to the spirit realm. This responsibility has been inherited from your father, and the story revolves around helping the spirits in a specific village (that is suffering from a growing plague). Your quest is to ascend to the mountain shrine, as the power that dwells there draws to the power that lies within Kena herself . This concept of helping spirits to find peace is very much reflected in another brilliant title called Spiritfarer. Both these games excel at one of the most important details in a single player experience in my opinion, and that is making the player give a crap about the characters. Not just focusing on the protagonist, but building relationships with others and making you care about helping the spirits move on. What’s remarkable is that Bridge of Spirits can do this without reams and reams of dialogue and text, but with fewer and more impactful moments. I adored every character and every moment I shared with them, I was so invested in each of them and their stories, I just wish we got to see a bit more of them before they moved on. 

Meet the Rot; who act as our little spirit companions throughout our quest. These little fellas help solve puzzles, move objects, obtain items and even fight during combat. Immediately they remind me of Pikmin, and much like Pikmin they are bursting with personality, especially when you can customise them all with hats! Something so simple, but oh my days, I loved seeing their goofy faces wearing them, and it allows for a sense of individuality between them all. Honestly, I thought my wife was going to explode with joy as I showed her the rot entourage in their headgear, and she rates the game 10/10 from this factor alone. (Note to self, buy cute hats.)

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At A Glance

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These hats, along with the rot themselves, act as collectibles found throughout the world. As you find more rot, your horde grows and grows, and as you explore each nook and cranny, the little troopers pop up and wait for you along the landscape almost like tiny cheerleaders. Other such collectibles include charm stones that, when equipped, enhance certain abilities. Flower shrines that offer gems when prayed at, cursed chests that provide a challenge to open. Meditation spots that increase health, and spirit mail that unlocks more of the main village. There is a very helpful checklist on the map for these collectibles broken down by each area, so naturally, we were going to one hundred percent this bad boy. This included going for the difficulty and secret achievements as well. 

The charm constantly pours out the screen as you explore the world that is very much inspired by Eastern locations and culture. Its beautiful artistic style pairs so well with the energy the game brings, sometimes it felt like watching something straight out of a Pixar animation. This equally applies to the gorgeous accompanying soundscape, with layers of music built up that morphed seamlessly between environments. This is something that struck me just moments into starting the game. You begin in a dark cave, illuminating your path in crystal blue light bouncing between the walls, hollow percussion sounds with a hint of woodwind playing in the background. Then as Kena emerges into the stunning forest of emerald green, a crescendo of sound blossoms, enriching her with energy and life. There were so many moments I caught myself just stopping and going “wow”, where I would leave the sequence going at a meditation spot, and my wife and I would bask in the peaceful ambiance.

When the peace is over, the combat begins. I found the mechanics fluid, with controls that were responsive and not too complex. Using a combination of light and heavy attacks with your staff, along with later unlockables such as the bow, you can string together simple and effective moves. As you battle, you gather courage orbs to then get the rot involved. Using an orb would allow you to use techniques such as the mighty rot hammer or a powerful piercing rot arrow. There is also a simple ability tree that further adds variation to combat, like the multi arrow and parry attacks. These abilities are unlocked by using one of two currencies collected, with the other being used to purchase the rot hats and the different outfits for Kena. These outfits are found by completing trials that unlock as you progress through the story, adding further replayability and challenge to the game.

The transition from Playstation to Xbox has so far been pretty fluid, as I have had absolutely no trouble performance wise. Controls have felt crisp, visuals sharp, frames indeed by the second, 60 of them to be precise, and in 4K. Load times are negligible, as are respawn times when you die. I would say however that my only, and very minor issue, came from the rot cloud ability and the camera angle, in that for a short time it seemed to either lock or freak out when the ability ended. One time, by accident, I activated the cloud as a cut scene started, so they just seemed to stay in that form until I moved on, again a minor issue, and if anything – funny.

I have absolutely loved my time playing Kena: Bridge of Spirits; I’ve struggled to find any real fault besides just wanting more of everything. I asked my wife her opinion, but she was too busy customising the rot with unicorn and mushroom hats to pay any attention. With a run time of about 10 hours for the story, and double that for 100% completion, I still can’t get enough of every captivating detail. The visuals and soundscape, the character investment, the platforming and combat, and the emotion that comes with it all. This game explodes with charm and feeling, and if you haven’t experienced it for yourself, I simply cannot recommend it enough.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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SCHiM

SCHiM is another one of those games I’ve seen doing the rounds on gaming Twitter for as long as I’ve been back in the fold at VGamingNews, and it’s had my keen attention since day one. Set against a background of cool looking visuals and some really unique platforming ideas, Dutch developer Ewoud van der Werf has been dutifully working on something I’ve been itching to try out for some time.

You play as an adorable little shadow creature known as a schim. It feels like you’re something like a soul, making up an important part of a person and accompanying them everywhere, adding to their sense of self in an intangible but very definite sense. Early in the game you suffer an unfortunate accident and end up disconnected from your human companion, and you spend the rest of the game scrambling to try and join back up and make them whole again. Without you, your human companion begins to meander through life, running into problem after problem, while you silently give chase and do your best to catch up and reconnect.

This, in itself, is the kind of lovely idea that could easily make up the plot of any Disney movie, but it’s actually the game’s mechanics that make it all the more engaging. Schims are literally made up of shadows and so can only travel safely to other shadows, where the light can’t dispel them. That means you have to hop your way from place to place, making the best use of the darkness cast by your surroundings in order to get around. If you jump out of a shadow and miss your target, you’ll be left as a little blob of blackness on the pavement for a moment, with only a quick chance to hop into the safety of some nearby darkness. If you miss again or you wait too long, you’ll be teleported back into the last static shadow you inhabited to either try again or find an alternative route. There’s something quite joyous about SCHiM that’s embedded in nostalgia; it stirs up feelings of jumping around, giggling with friends in the sunshine during school holidays. It’s playful at its very core.

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At A Glance

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It only takes a few minutes to get the hang of the gameplay, and you’ll soon find yourself scooting along slivers of darkness cast by lampposts, leaping into inky puddles cast by wheelie bins, hitching a ride under a passing car, or beneath the feet of a wandering pedestrian or stray cat. You’re rarely going in exactly the direction that you want, but that’s part of the challenge – and a big part of the fun. You have to use what’s around you to try to work out a path not from A to Z, but from A to L, back to E, then from E to Q, before returning to S and then finally making a beeline for Z. This is especially true in the nighttime levels, which you might expect to be much easier with darkness everywhere, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Since there are fewer lights around, you’ll have fewer deep shadows to utilise, and those shadows can be large distances apart and might even be moving, since they’re often cast by car headlights as they drive past. I loved the challenge of the levels set after dark, as both the change in visuals and increased difficulty gave them a very different feel.

In fact, the visuals in SCHiM deserve a huge amount of praise, as the entire game is incredibly stylish to look at. Everything in the game is 3D but has been cel-shaded using swathes of block colour in a way that gives the game a very two-dimensional, artistic look. Each level is set to a unique colour scheme that helps give you a feel for your environment and what time of day you’re exploring. By using only four different colours in each palette, you’re treated to a bonafide clinic on how to deliver light, midtones, and shadows, and the effect is nothing short of stunning. Also, for those players with additional visual needs or suffering with colour blindness (as lead developer, Ewoud van der Werf does), you can select your own colours in the menu screen, easily improving the accessibility, as required.

SCHiM is pretty cosy, in the sense that it’s a very low stakes affair, with no time limit or lives to worry about. This frees you up to hop about with reckless abandon, quickly darting between people as they pass each other in a crowd or attempting leaps of faith as you try to cross a wide road with little in the way of shadow cover. Interestingly, schims actually have some control of the beings whose shadow they’re inhabiting, and this allows you to press the action button to make use of their specific abilities. For many items, this might just be a little animation rather than any practical effect, but in lots of cases you actually have to use these abilities in order to progress. One of the most common examples is diving into the shadow of a set of traffic lights and changing their status from ‘Stop’ to ‘Go’, allowing the flow of cars to move and giving you ample opportunity to hitch a ride in the direction you want to travel. There are some other really great examples throughout the game, but these are best left unspoiled for maximum enjoyment when you give it a go for yourself.

There are some lovely little nuances to the platforming too, with many shadows taking on the properties of the items casting them, and you’ll need to use these to your advantage. For example, shadows of washing lines have a bouncy quality, allowing you to spring much farther than your usual jump; and when jumping into shadows cast by ventilation ducts, you’ll be carried along the length of the shadow, as if being blown by the air flow inside. These ideas aren’t especially groundbreaking, but with SCHiM’s very strict rules around traversal due to the shadow mechanics, they do help to add some fun wrinkles to a format that does threaten to become samey after just a few hours.

I was very impressed with the storytelling in the early goings of SCHiM. The game does a tremendous job of merging the gameplay with the unfolding story and really helping you understand your schim, his relationship to his human companion, and their place in the world. It felt similar to watching Pixar’s Up for the first time; you’re caught entirely off guard by a heartfelt opening montage, and whilst the intro to SCHiM isn’t so heartbreaking (thank god!), it’s absolutely as effective at connecting you to the characters. While there is an overarching story being played out across the entire game, with a silent subplot about the struggles of feeling disconnected with the world, like the gameplay, I thought it lost some effectiveness in the middle. I could slowly feel myself becoming less engaged by the goings on as the levels ticked by, though the impressive finale did a good job of drawing me back in. Each level you play also has its own little collection of internal stories too if you take the time to look for them, though it can be easy to flash past a lot of them as you hurriedly leap onwards towards your goal.

I finished my playthrough in just-shy of five hours, though there’s some stuff to keep you hooked for longer than that, if you fancy it. Hidden throughout the world are discarded items that have also become disconnected from their schims, and there’s the added challenge to reunite them all with their shadowy pals if you want to fully complete the game. Additionally, you’ll unlock ‘Risky Mode’ once you finish the story for the first time; turning this on introduces a maximum number of lives, as well as removing the ability to exist outside of shadows even for a moment, requiring greater precision and upping the difficulty in subsequent playthroughs.

Last, but by no means least, the soundtrack to SCHiM, written and performed by Moonsailor, is absolutely excellent. In a genre I can only (poorly) describe as ‘traditional’ video game music meets lofi, I couldn’t help but reminisce about consoles gone by, with much of the music reminding me (in the best way) of relaxing menu music from years past. Filled with chill piano and laidback synths, the music has a wonderfully calm vibe to it, underscoring the whimsical themes running throughout and perfectly meshing with the stress free gameplay. 

SCHiM is a sweet little platformer that takes a joyous childhood idea and turns it into a heartwarming story that’s engaging and enjoyable. It shows off some great silent storytelling that connects you to the main characters by way of a great introduction and finale, despite losing some steam in the middle. SCHiM showcases an undoubtedly wonderful mechanic against some striking backdrops, and while it doesn’t quite get into high gear, there can be no denying that this shadowy hop-fest is great fun, and that some of the finer details will certainly bring a smile to your face.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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Codename: Ocean Keeper

Codename: Ocean Keeper is a roguelike, bullet hell, dungeon crawler-type game that comes to us from the Ukrainian studio RetroStyle Games. My initial impression of the game was great, as it took me back to my days on the school computers playing a game called Motherload circa Miniclip.com. Shoutout to all those Motherlovers out there. I loved that game, so I was excited to see what Codename: Ocean Keeper had in store. The trouble is, the more I played it, the more I found fault and lack of polish. It is worth noting however that this game has only just been released in early access, and the developers are so active that mid review they brought out multiple patches that continue to address issues I have. So time to suit up, and let’s dive in.

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This is an abridged version of our Ocean Keeper video review, which can be seen here:

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There isn’t much, if any, of a story to delve into here, at least for now. The premise is simple: Start each round in your mech on the ocean floor, dive into the nearest cave, break rocks and collect shiny gems, return them to you mech in time for the wave of baddies and blast them away before launching yourself into the depths of another cave. Between these waves, you upgrade yourself and your mech with said shineys to improve exploration and survivability. Rinse and repeat until inevitable demise. Along the way you collect meta coins to permanently upgrade or unlock weapons or gadgets for either your diver or your mech, improving your performance capabilities in each subsequent run.

As ever with any roguelike game, you start off with not much more than a hope and a dream, where you do your best to cling on to dear life until you can upgrade yourself bit by bit. I usually like this challenge; see how far you can get early on based on mechanical skill instead of relying on abilities and upgrades. But at the risk of simply being told to ‘git gud’, I found the beginning of Ocean Keeper very unbalanced in what your mech could physically do versus a rather overwhelming barrage of creatures early on. This, combined with the slow accumulation of meta coins, and the effectiveness of upgrades being seemingly negligible, made the overall experience feel very ‘grindy’, with not much progress each run. I felt that each run was back from square one, and that I would get to a similar wave or boss before dying again. Each run would take between 20 and 30 minutes, but instead of feeling the urge to tackle it again, I would either take a break or turn off.

As the waves go on, the difficulty naturally escalates with new types of enemies spawning. You start with your standard goons that meander toward you, to worms that shoot green spit, glow bugs that run at you kamikaze style, and a mystery slug surrounded by a deadly Full Metal Alchemist looking pentagram that looks like it would do some serious damage. The occasional boss turns up, which so far looks to be only a handful in number, as on one run I found that they cycled back through them. The gems we collect are split between blue, yellow and green, and are each used in varying amounts to upgrade either the digger, mech, or any of the weapons and relics we collect. These relics are randomly found in caves, and are automatically used during combat, such as napalm bombs, missiles, and electric guns.

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Summary

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The home interface comes across as pretty basic. There are sections for the mech and the digger, with each having subcategories to spend meta coins on new weapons, secondary abilities, additional slots for relics, and tools to explore the caves. Having unlocked all that is available so far, I found that some weapons and abilities are much more effective than others across the board, as opposed to being balanced to suit the individual’s playstyle. The starting machine gun for the mech for example, seemed to mow down the bugs much better than anything else, and the turrets you can place that both shoot and take aggro, along with being able to put up a defensive shield, were much more effective for survivability than any other option. As previously mentioned, each option can be improved using meta coins, however they all have arbitrary values that don’t seem to increase much with each investment. I’m hopeful that with more patches, each weapon and ability will be better balanced, and that the meta upgrades will feel more impactful overall.

When it comes to visuals, for me there is a big difference between the ocean crawling and cave diving. The ocean surface continues to improve with each patch, with more striking colour contrasts such as between lava pools and coral reefs, balanced with the smorgasbord of enemies that inevitably fill the screen. The cave sections remain bland, with each one almost being a carbon copy of the last. The only difference being where the gems are and if there is a relic or not. I’d find them more interesting if there was more time to explore, to then accommodate some variation in each cave such as traps, baddies, or different terrain to excavate.

When watching the trailer, the music that accompanied the action had me pumped. The trouble is the actual in-game music only kicks in during the enemy waves, and it’s different, not as kick ass, and is the exact same every wave. I’d like there to be some variation to the music, especially during the exploration phase instead of just hearing the dirt sound effect each time between the same 4 droning notes.

Performance wise, I frustratingly still find myself sometimes getting almost rhythmic frame drops during the mech fighting phase, even when putting everything to the lowest settings.I encountered a couple of crashes, the first was when opening the tab to repair health the exact moment I died. This looks to have been a recognised issue now and has been fixed. The second was a touch more infuriating, as it was during a marathon run of over an hour where I found myself racking in those meta coins with an almost fully upgraded killing machine.. RetroStyle Games do have something here; there is a foundation that is constantly being built on, tweaked and changed. You can even see some of the directions being taken by the locked or greyed out abilities, such as the digger’s punch or laser. This for me signifies there is more to come with more ideas yet to be rolled out.

At present, Codename: Ocean Keeper leaves a lot to be desired; it’s a game that is worth trying at least once in its early access, if anything to then appreciate the final product once it’s finished. As it stands, it’s a game that lacks variation, feels imbalanced, and generally doesn’t have much to get you back on the ocean floor. As for now though, it’s back to being a Motherlover for me.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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Noreya: The Gold Project

When it comes to gaming, I’m one of those players who will take every side path before finally returning to take on the main quest, and perhaps that curious mind is what makes me enjoy Metroivanias so much. I love exploring their sprawling maps, puzzling about how to get around before finally returning with all of my traversal skills, dashing and leaping between ledges and traps as if they weren’t there. It was with great enthusiasm then that I picked up Noreya: The Gold Project, from Toulouse-based indie developers, Dreamirl, who launched their debut title in the genre in June 2024.

The game begins with an animated cutscene showing a group of adventurers, merrily enjoying each other’s company around a campfire. Seconds later they are beset by creatures of darkness and are all slain, except for one – Kali, who becomes our protagonist. Instead of succumbing to evil and becoming a zombie like her friends, Kali instead becomes a kind of hybrid shadow-being, still part human but now under the influence of some dark power. We soon learn that this is the fault of the God of Gold, Auria, whose offerings of riches have corrupted the entire kingdom, turning almost every living creature into a mindless puppet, who can only seek more gold and more power. In direct conflict with Auria is Hemenis, the Goddess of Light, and it’s between these two self-serving deities that Kali finds herself torn.

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At A Glance

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As Kali, you traverse the vast world of Noreya, slaying monsters, collecting gold, and overcoming traps and puzzles. At a glance, the map might rival the scale of Hallownest, from Team Cherry’s genre redefining Hollow Knight, but whilst not being quite that big, the size of the world is certainly impressive. There are six unique biomes to explore, and each one is presented with attractive pixel art visuals and accompanying theme music that really showcase a mysterious and sinister world. Kali is depicted as a rather tiny sprite and many environmental elements are huge by comparison, offering a grand sense of scale for the world. I particularly loved the depiction and music in the opening area, Valsanre Forest, which is portrayed in autumnal golds and browns, and scored with a beautiful soaring theme song of synth-strings. This is a place that truly feels ancient, burgeoning with otherworldly mysteries and secrets.

The platforming and puzzling in Noreya are well designed without being especially groundbreaking, and has a stable middle of the road difficulty, which I appreciated. Getting around the map is great, as the controls are wonderfully responsive and Kali has a tremendous level of agility, making both exploration and combat a breeze. Speaking of combat, the battling in Noreya is pretty simple; you have a simple sword combo and a few unlockable special attacks, but no real dodge or parry skills to master, making this something of a spam-attack/brute force affair. Also bolstering the ease of combat is the rather ropey enemy AI, which often has baddies getting stuck on bits of terrain and simply waiting for Kali to put them out of their gold-plated misery. (I even killed two key bosses thanks to these hiccups, which is pretty disappointing.)

Noreya markets itself as offering each player an entirely unique experience, and while I certainly wouldn’t go that far, you are left to your own devices very early on. You’re quickly given the rough locations of the five guardian bosses you must overcome before facing the final boss, but you are free to explore the world entirely as you wish. While this level of freedom may enthuse some players, I found the openness something of a double-edged sword. Unlike most Metroidvania games, core traversal skills aren’t unlocked by defeating the key bosses in the game, but from sub-bosses who lurk in entirely random parts of the map. Your ability to fully explore the world is completely tethered to whether you’re lucky enough to stumble upon these abilities early on, or whether you finally find them after a lot of frustrating searching (like I did, some three hours later). I’d definitely have appreciated at least a little signposting towards these abilities, streamlining the significant amount of backtracking through one-way areas and cul-de-sacs, of which there are way too many.

The story, like the exploration, is almost entirely open, and I think it also suffers a little as a result. The tale of Noreya unfolds as you find statues, known as Steles, hidden throughout the world, and they read like diary entries from an ancient king, Aleph, who rails against the gods. There are more than 100 statues to find, and they offer veiled glimpses into the mission of Aleph and his motives, asking you to discern the specifics the more of them you discover. Now, I’m a big fan of fractured storytelling, but the plot in Noreya is entirely splintered. Once you uncover enough information, the story becomes an interesting one, but I wonder if some additional cutscenes or thoughts from Kali might have offered a little more engagement with the plot.

Also dotted throughout the kingdom of Noreya are huge plinths designed to hold statues to either of the gods, Auria or Hemenis, depending on your preferred allegiance. Practically, these statues offer you the opportunity to access and upgrade your skill tree and act as much needed fast travel points. With each statue you place, your devotion to that god grows, and with that so does their power. The strength of each god is tangible in game, as it directly impacts the world map: when Auria is dominant, Kali finds herself in the World of Gold, and conversely, when Hemenis is in ascendance, you travel through the World of Light. 

While this may sound very impressive, I was a little underwhelmed with how this excellent idea was actually implemented, as there’s realistically very little difference between the two worlds. Yes, a handful of map screens change as your allegiance shifts, but that aside, there is nothing tangible to differentiate the worlds of Gold and Light, which is something of a shame. The idea of gods vying for control over the universe is an epic one, and it would have been nice to feel more of their influence on the world as they each take control. Perhaps offering up some different enemies or music would have been incredibly impactful changes, or at the very least, some minorly adjusted colour palettes to indicate which deity is in power. At the moment things feel like a bit of a half-measure.

The warring of the two gods also has a direct impact on your progression as Kali, and thankfully, this is implemented much more impressively. The skill tree is split into three sections, with one dedicated to Gold, one to Light, and a Neutral section in between them. You can always access the skills in the Neutral section so long as you have enough Skill Points available, which you earn by offering gold at the deity statues. To gain access to the Gold or Light skills however, you are required to have a certain level of devotion to the corresponding god as a prerequisite. I really liked the idea of having to pledge your allegiance to one of the gods in order to access their most impressive abilities, as it not only encourages you to pick a side in their war (kind of), but also requires you to fully explore the map in order to find all of the available plinths and set down your statues. 

That said, not everything runs smoothly with the skill progression, as the devotion system isn’t very well explained to you as a player. I can live with a little bit of early confusion about how the system works, but I was pretty annoyed that I managed to waste a good number of Skill Points by unknowingly shooting myself in the foot. You see, the dedication of the statues aren’t permanently set, and you’re actually able to change them between Auria and Hemenis as you wish (likely so that you can swap between worlds and access some new areas). This then changes your devotion level, which can wipe out any high level skills you’ve unlocked from one side of the skill tree without offering you so much as a warning beforehand. It may sound picky, but this is the kind of quality of life feature that should really go without saying.

Unfortunately, this lack of attention to detail feels like a common theme in Noreya, and it tarnishes the glitter of a game that has a decent amount going for it. Whilst there’s nothing game-breaking, there’s a laundry list of niggly annoyances that eventually add up to a less than top-tier experience, leaving you with a final product that feels a little rushed. Whether it’s the semi-regular framerate drops, attack effects that don’t always act as expected, or the general lack of sound effects to accompany meaningful actions (like special attacks and teleportation, for example), I feel like Noreya: The Gold Project would benefit from a good few hours of spit and polish to help it live up to its shining title.

Overall, Noreya: The Gold Project is a sprawling Metroidvania that offers 20-hours of nimble exploration amidst some simple combat and a somewhat fractured plotline. Despite sporting some lovely pixel art visuals, a wonderful musical score and an intriguing premise, there’s a general lack of polish that left me a little wanting. Established Metroidvania fans will find a solid addition to the genre with plenty to enjoy, but in the end Noreya might serve as a reminder that all that glitters is not gold.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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