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Static Spotlight

The Best Game I Played this Month

MOLE

MOLE really blew me away. The experience is definitely similar to games like Mouthwashing, Carimara, and ECLIPSIUM in terms of overall narrative, presentation, gameplay, and general scares, but while those other titles tend to excel in just one or two of those categories, MOLE excels in all of them.

The story is gripping, well executed, and fantastically paced. The puzzles, while pretty straightforward, are satisfying to work through and the devs throw in creative twists that really enhance the tension you feel while making your way through each section. The monster chases are legitimately terrifying, but they don’t feel cheap. I was really worried that they would devolve into sections requiring you to run and hide while collecting items, Slender Man style, but they were explosive and tense set pieces that effectively took advantage of the oppressive tone.

I wouldn’t have believed for a second that this would dethrone RE Requiem as my current game of the year going into it, yet here we are. Truly a killer experience that I would recommend to anyone who can stomach the terrifying atmosphere and sensitive subject matter.

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Completed

Mina the Hollower

Even though I spent about a fifth of my playthrough feeling deeply frustrated, I have to admit that Mina the Hollower is a great game. Exploring every area felt incredibly rewarding because the world is packed with well-hidden paths and secrets. It’s full of unexpected surprises and a distinct wackiness that gives it a truly unique personality. While I didn’t love Shovel Knight as much as most people, I always appreciated its quirky side content; Mina takes that design philosophy and pairs it with a combat and exploration style I vastly prefer over traditional 2D side-scrolling.

I found a lot of the bosses here to be pretty annoying and some of the room designs to be pretty obnoxious, but I can’t say that it wasn’t a memorable experience. I’m definitely planning to dive back in to hunt down the remaining collectibles and uncover whatever wild secrets I missed.

I don’t have a single ounce of nostalgia for the pre-PlayStation era, but I deeply respect how beautifully this game pays homage to retro classics.

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MindsEye

Truly the worst “AAA” game I’ve played all the way through.

• Despite having a pretty sizable open world, there is zero side content and zero optional collectibles. It really felt like you were just driving / flying between 3 areas the entire game, sometimes leaving one place only to return moments later.
• Possibly the worst story ever told in gaming. If this game wasn’t completely written by AI, then the writers must have slapped this whole plot together in a single afternoon drunk off of their ass. Terrible pacing, nonsensical objectives, storylines that go absolutely nowhere, and one of the most laughably abrupt and dissatisfying endings of all time.
• The combat encounters are bland and repetitive, forcing you to run in circles just to pad out the length.
• While most of these actors truly try their best to make this work, the characters themselves are either terribly bland or in-your-face annoying.
• Some of the worst missions in an open world game ever. Stand on a rocket and literally do nothing for 5 minutes. Fly in a straight line for 10 minutes while you mindlessly shoot drones. Rotate a satellite and try to line up shapes for some reason. Solve nonsense puzzles that do a piss-poor job of actually telling you what you’re trying to accomplish.
• The level creator tool boils down to a massive waste of time and resources.

The handful of hilarious moments that came from wild bugs and baffling game sections weren’t enough to outweigh the tedium that seeps through every pore of this game

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Crushed in Time

GOOD

• The core stretching mechanic is used in very creative ways and is very satisfying
• Animations are very high quality and I really liked the overall art style. It felt like a mix of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and Viewtiful Joe.
• Quality voice acting, which addressed one of my biggest issues with the dev’s previous game, “There is No Game: Wrong Dimension”
• Fun post game illustrations that pay homage to other games.

MIXED

• Puzzles are always pretty clever, but they’re not always that fun to actually play through
• Interesting meta narrative and journey through the video game production process, but it just doesn’t come together very well. There was really no explanation given as to how a placeholder in a video game created a reality-bending device that was able to rewrite history and jump between dimensions. I thought there would be an interesting meta reason behind the stretching gameplay, but it never really comes up which was a bit disappointing.
• Chapter 9 features a very fun scavenger hunt where you need to use your vacuum to solve puzzles and suck up all of the rogue Watsons. There are a ton of them, most of them had fun puzzles around capturing them. Everything is great… except for the sound that these things make. They honestly couldn’t have engineered a more annoying scream and they do it all the time. It actually started to drive me insane. They continue to make this god-awful sound all the way through to the final moments of the game and I actually had to take off my headphones and play the game without audio to stop myself from throwing my PC out the window to stop the madness. A truly terrible stain on this otherwise pretty good game.
• The hint system is very useful in some sections and totally useless in others.

BAD

• Characters never shut up. I really wish there was some option to limit the amount of chatter that happens while you’re just trying to work out a puzzle
• Ch 5 sucks so hard. It’s supposed to be a commentary on modern games and how they’re rife with annoying dialogue choices and quick-time events… and then they make you play through an extremely annoying section where you do a ton of quick-time and dialogue options. It goes on for way too long.
• Super small gripe but I don’t understand why, in a game that revolves around stretching, spinning, and grabbing, they landed on “Crushed in Time” as the name.
• I ran into a few weird bugs where assets didn’t load properly or interactible items weren’t working, making puzzles unsolvable until I reset the game.

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Forza Horizon 6

Check out the full review!

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The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a very flawed game that has just enough charm to make up for most of its set backs.

GOOD

• Fantastic soundtrack
• The animated portraits of the main characters do so much to elevate the quality of cutscenes compared to how they’re handled in Octopath Traveler
• The HD 2D style continues to look amazing
• The weapon upgrade system is simple in a good way. Finding a more powerful weapon equips it automatically and you don’t have to worry about constantly reequipping your magistites.
• Incorporating the Boost from Octopath into weapon charges was a cool way of tying the franchises together
• Solid weapon variety and the magistrate you can equip to each can drastically change their properties
• Awesome final battle

MIXED

• I was always impressed by the boss sprites, and the fights themselves were at the very least decent, but they just re use them way too much. If they’re not popping up again in an optional dungeon, they’re definitely going to be part of a challenge trial at some point.
• Just like with Octopath, all of the most interesting narrative developments happen after you roll credits for the first time. While there are a lot of conveniences and contrivances scattered throughout, the way it ties together all of the different eras results in a fairly satisfying conclusion.
• Boss fights can be fairly difficult, but the ability to buy your way back to life really mitigates the challenge

BAD

• The overworld map is pretty small and there are very few discernable differences between the 4 eras you explore. Some may have different texture palettes slapped on top of them, but all of the pathing through these areas is practically the same. They even share all of the same dungeons and cave systems, which made going through each era feel a bit like Groundhog Day, repeating the same steps over and over again. I also found myself going into caves or dungeons and being left with the feeling of “Well, I guess that’s it” after finding a single chest or running into a dead end with no real reward before checking these areas off as completed. The issue is that there are rewards and satisfying endings to these areas … just not in the era you’re currently exploring. It’s a weird gameplay loop that makes some areas feel poorly designed as a result.
• Characters are very one note
• All of the shrine challenges kind of suck
• All of the cats have human meows and it bothers me immensely
• Side quests are largely underwhelming and usually just have you running back and forth between areas. One mission was literally just running to the same two points 4 different times.
• The magistite system isn’t implemented super well. You’re incentivized to generate as many gems as possible to level yourself up to get better drop rates for rarer items, which means that you’re literally generating hundreds of these things throughout your playthrough. These same gems are often rewards found in chests, and when you find one that you already own (and chances are you WILL have them because you’ve crafted so many) instead of giving you a copy it kindly recycles it for you and gives you… one magistite. One. When you fight through an entire dungeon just to get a gem you already have, it feels like you’ve wasted a bunch of time and energy for nothing because your reward is as close to nothing as you can get.
• End game drags on a bit too long

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NanoApostle

The bosses in this game are legitimately fantastic. While the story is a big nothing burger and the characters are as generic as they come, they make it pretty easy to skip all of this entirely if you just want to get into the next fight (though I wish the skip function actually skipped scenes rather than single lines of dialogue).

There are only 6 bosses in the entire game, but the devs really squeeze everything they can out of these encounters without making it feel unnecessarily padded. Each fight has a set of challenges attached to it. Some objectives you’ll have to complete over multiple attempts (reach phase 2 of the fight x amount of time, parry a certain attack x amount of times, etc.) while others are much more challenging if you’re really looking to test your mastery of the fight (finish in x minutes, complete the fight without getting hit more than once, etc.). Completing these challenges will reward you skill points that you’ll use to purchase gameplay altering chips that could really give you a leg up in battles, so you feel properly rewarded just by banging your head against a boss long enough.

Combat feels super responsive and hitting consecutive parries always felt very satisfying. There are also a handful of pretty unique systems in play here that all work together well and really add another dimension to each boss battle. There are also a handful of challenge levels, which don’t feel as good as the boss fights, but are challenging enough if you’re looking for a little variety between the main missions.

It’s a shame the devs chose the Loli girl anime aesthetic; otherwise, this would be the easiest recommendation to anyone looking for a fast-paced, parry-focused action game similar to Sekiro or Nine Sols.

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Dropped

Sydless

The core gameplay loop would be great if it wasn’t stuck inside an experience that felt so cheap and unpolished. 

It was a bizarre decision to introduce gear in specific levels that unlocked interesting upgrades only to take them away in the next area (unless this was just another bug amongst the countless others I encountered in my hour-long session). Having pits be instakills that end runs just seemed like a super cheap way of padding out the time to completion. 

Very lackluster overall.

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