I think Tunic was basically Fez, so that’s a sound read and response.
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how to kill all enthusiasm for a game in a single sentence
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I like Songbringer a fair bit. It’s a bit squishy for as actiony as it wants to be but it goes for it. It sure is happy to be stupid
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I mean Tunic is very intentionally designed while Songbringer is all procedural and roguelike, so that seems like they were going in two completely different directions with things.
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Usually I hate that but it won me over! So that’s extra credit!
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Celeste is a fine Super Meat Boy with the aesthetic of a PSP Mini, and, like Super Meat Boy before it, was timed just right to get all the people who were too young or disinterested in gaming to realize it’s predecessors.
And of course, when it comes to gamers & journalists, a repackaged and polished version of a game they’ve already played, is the very thrill they live for.
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2000s : Braid :: 2010s : Celeste
It’s Fez without the puzzles
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Tunic had some whole layer of optional-ish secrets so I feel like it does have that in common with Fez. I absolutely didn’t want to engage with it, by the time I got to the “end” of the game I was more or less satisfied with what I’d gotten out of it. I liked poking around in its little dioramas. The mystery game manual conceit was cute I guess but I could take it or leave it.
Maybe a game ultimately less than the sum of its parts but I liked enough of those parts to have a net positive opinion.
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wait did phil fish (fez) also have a pee jug or are you confusing him with jonathan blow (the witness, braid)?
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The control mapping thing has got me thinking back to the old King Kong game on og xbox and wondering why no other games seemed to do the tutorial segment as button mapping thing.
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I totally thought the witness guy was the fez guy. Totally forgot about super Mario in a business suit being in the mix.
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I remember just being surprised it had a jump button at all.
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fsr i dont mind it that much in botw cause i feel like you dont have to move camera while sprinting thatt much (maybe down to the camera not auto rotating as incessantly as a lot of games so you can sort of set it and forget it a lot of the time), but i hate it in the souls games and i always remap the sprint/dodge button to one of the shoulder buttons cause you’re basically required to aim the camera while running and dodging in those games
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Beat Saber is not exactly a remarkable or innovative or even new game, but playing the (thankfully, free) PS5 update yesterday with my PSVR2 was the most recent “ok, yes, i live in the future” moment i’d had in a while.
the clarity of visuals and feeling of total immersion/loss of corporeal self is really something
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Pretty unhappy with the way things ended in act 1 of Pentiment last night!!
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Yes, it’s kind of unfortunate that Celeste is sometimes thought of as a successor to Super Meat Boy, when (as you point out) Thorson was actually refining her own ideas after arguably creating the subgenre with Jumper in 2004.
And some people sure hated those Jumper games back in the Game Maker forums. (But of course more people loved them.)
I wonder where Earthblade is going to fall in the Metroidvania rankings in this thread. I hope it’s good. Looks kind of like a pixel art Ori.
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did you uncover the truth??
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Only in my masterpiece 
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That’s wild, but also thinking about it I wonder if Nintendo designed themself into a corner.
What I want to be able to do is easily run and jump at the same time. The easier button swap would be the bottom button (jump) with the right button (action), so you can press right and top at the same time. However, the action button is the “confirm” button, and the Nintendo system wide design is the right button is used for confirming things while the bottom button is used to canceling things (this was Playstation before PS4 too, of course). So it would be incongruous to move the action button down to the bottom.
I guess there was always the option of moving attack from the left button to the top. I don’t know if that’s taboo in some way.
I will say this is still better than having to press the awkward and mushy shoulder buttons for attacks in the way Souls games popularized.
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