Kasul and I hadn’t been down to the retro game stores for awhile, so that was our Saturday — lunch at Arby’s, checking out the game stores in Newington (where I bought some Citadel paints for mini adventures), back up to Manchester for The Grid and Retro Junk… we found some stuff.
It’s hard to believe, but back about twenty years ago, kids would enter kindergarten with absolutely no experience playing platform games or, in many cases, not even understanding one word of Spanish. I have an admission: even though I’m a little older, neither did I. My lack of video games growing up stunted my social and emotional growth. It’s a hole that cannot be filled.
Until I found Dora the Explorer: Dora saves the Snow Princess. The episode of the cartoon left so many questions unanswered; Nickelodeon was forced by the FCC to answer the questions with a video game. This “Metroidvania”-style game follows Dora and her friends as she explores a snowy wonderland and the dark caves beneath, in search of her friend, the Snow Princess. It’s a treasured addition to my PS2 game collection.
I’d never heard of the PS5 game “The Pathless”. I was surprised to find two copies of it at one of the used game stores. The reviews called it a relaxing game in the vein of Journey, Shadow of the Colossus and other games that emphasize puzzle solving over combat.
The protagonist of Pathless is a silent woman who has come to cleanse an island of a great evil; the gods of her people have all been captured by a shadow demon and have turned the island into a vast wasteland. The one pure defender, their mother the Great Eagle, is dying. Your job is vital, and only you can do it.
Your one weapon is your bow, and mostly what you do with that bow is shoot floating runes, that make you go faster. Keep shooting runes, you go even faster. You early on meet a regular-sized eagle companion, who can carry you short distances. If you keep shooting runes while being carried, you will fly higher and further without touching the ground.
These skills are necessary to solve the many puzzles scattered around the open world. The game is a masterpiece of environmental storytelling. You’re not explicitly told anything, but the tutorial zone is laid out simply enough that just by exploring, you’re introduced to the main mechanic — solve puzzles to earn light runes, use light runes to purify three towers, those towers make the next god available to be confronted.
Each god fight is different. The two I’ve done start with a chase, where you shoot runes to get fast enough to catch the fleeing god and shoot sigils off their hides. That segues into a second phase which include more shooting or puzzle solving while the god attacks; and the last is dodging an attack that will throw you out of the arena so that you can get your eagle companion to attack their last sigil. That knocks them out, and then you cleanse them.
It’s a short game, but it’s a lot of fun. The boss fight is a very small part of the game (though pretty cool), and mostly it’s gliding around the world at high speed, solving increasingly intricate environmental puzzles. If exploration and jumping puzzles and races were your favorite parts of Guild Wars 2, you will like this game.
I noticed my boyfriend was obsessed with a new mobile game, playing it constantly. It was Balatro, a poker-adjacent deck building game that won all the awards last year. “I’ve heard good things about it,” I said. “It’s a good game,” he said.
For days, whenever I noticed he was playing Balatro again, he’d just repeat, “it’s a good game”.
I saw it was on PlayStation Plus, and “free” is always the right price for a game, so I jumped in. Kasul helped me over the hump of having never played poker before (“it’s not poker, you don’t need to know how to play poker to play Balatro”). I was way ahead of him. I was searching for all these poker terms that Balatro was throwing up and none of them had anything to do with poker.
For those not in the know, Balatro is a deck building game played with a standard deck of 52 and some jokers. About a hundred of them. You’re dealt some number of cards each turn — eight, but that can change — and you make the best hand from that. You get some discards to try and better it. You try to accumulate enough points to get through the small and large blind and the boss fight. Bosses usually have some tricky mechanic you have to get through.
The deck building part of the game comes between rounds, when you can spend you winnings at the store. Planet cards increase the value of certain hands. Tarot cards add or modify cards in your deck. And jokers set up additional multipliers and modifiers that can send your score into the stratosphere.
It’s not a bad game. I haven’t won, but it’s not important to win. Winning does open up endless play and challenge modes, and if you want to see scores in the quintillions, it’s the way to go, but for quick play, the basic game is decently fun.
We’re playing Frosthaven now, finally, and we think it’s important to put our 3D printers to good use and make minis for all the monsters and map decorations. Kasul printed an army of Algox, the initial villains of the campaign, but it was going to be up to me to paint them. I’m finally getting around to it.
Part of the problem was that they were white furred. I tried so many different things to get the look right. I managed to get my Malifaux December models looking decent, but I took days on those things. I needed a production line for the Algox. I went online for suggestions and tried a couple of them. They aren’t great. But they are painted.
The dragon on the lower right isn’t for Frosthaven or Malifaux; it’s for HeroQuest. There’s a new, smaller version of the game at Target and I felt it would be just right for a Saturday game night. It’s a different campaign than the normal base box, and it comes with a dragon mini. Obviously unpainted. It was the dragon that got most of the paint love from Saturday’s shopping, with a nice deep red for the body, a dark purple for the wings, and an inky dark purple for the wash. I still have to do the teeth, horns, claws and eyes, but I really love how the colors came out.
Next weekend: Malifaux 4e and, I hope, HeroQuest.
