Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

Bayonetta 3 is probably the worst game I played this year. I legit enjoyed We Are OFK more than this. I’m halfway through but I have to vent as I can’t recall the last time a pretty basic game premise was fucked up this hard.

Actual combat makes up what feels like less than 50% of the game. This is perhaps my fault for trying to get everything in a level the first go around but doing a lot of this side shit gives you pretty useful bonuses and weapons you can’t get elsewhere. Basically, each level has pretty gigantic open stretches of nothing because the game introduces demon-summoning as a key mechanic and, with it, lots of movement and traversal options tied to each weapon. The intended playstyle fits the puppet archetype like V in DMC5 where you just summon stuff and avoid enemies, except in Bayo3 you can summon then move back then summon etc. The problem is summoning just takes forever and is less dynamic. It’s a neat premise at first but then the game becomes unwieldly and almost every part of the experience is ruined by it.

The demons are so fucking big the camera has to make Bayonetta a protagonist-for-ants as she is often reduced to a small stick figure on the screen. I’m sure this looks really cool in footage but to a player this is the first strike against it. It becomes hard to reliably dodge and attack and the demons don’t really add much other than a powerful attack that takes ages to execute. Half the time the camera is making giant demon models transparent just so you can roughly understand what is going on.

Outside of combat there are just a lotta huge stretches of less engaging not-combat in this combat-oriented character action game. Not-combat includes:

  • Setpieces where you just run/move through crumbling environment
  • Setpieces where you basically play rock paper scissors with a giant golem
  • QTEs
  • Umbran tears (hidden animals in the level you have to chase or find, their hitboxes are minusucule- fuck these tears)
  • Little platforming tasks
  • Timeline shifting platform challenges (at what stage in time do you need a broken platform to be to get somewhere)
  • On-rails shooting
  • An Uncharted 3 walking-sim desert sequence which is so close in its storyboarding it feels like an homage
  • Playing as a cat demon for about 5 minutes (entirely new control scheme and animations for 5 playable minutes in the entire game)
  • Elevator Action homage (could these sections not have been side-missions? It was neat the first time but not multiple times in when the core combat is better realised).

There is a collectable that, when hit, starts up a platforming trial where you have to collect 5 floating pieces in the environment before a timer runs out. If you fail the challenge, which you will in later levels because the traversal options are not the game’s bread and butter and some are just really difficult, restarting the challenge plays the same unskippable Zelda-esque cutscene which shows the position of each of the 5 floating gems. How is this still in a video game in 2022? Let me skip.

Another thing that doesn’t belong in any modern videogame is quicksand which traps the player, requires that they mash, not to escape and jump out, but to move through the sand. Only when you’ve moved to a ledge can your character actually climb out. Failure to do this is an automatic death. So if I mess up the game’s precarious platforming mechanics I am met with a mash or die situation and that’s only based on whether a piece of land is even within range. If not I should just accept I died. This is even worse for someone who physically speaking should not be mashing at all.

This challenge is not remotely related to what these games are about, and I really don’t get why there’s such a heavy emphasis on environment in Bayo3. I can understand cases where you are prompted to use a demon to interact with the environment in some novel way, but the quicksand, the wind that blows you off course, it’s all just frustrating. I don’t feel particularly good for having avoided it and I definitely don’t feel good for landing in it.

Let me play with the goddamn combat system. God you just do too much shit that isn’t to do with combat, it’s like the game is worried you’ll become bored of its core loop. Then half the combat you do do is filled with this Astral Chain, Ice Climbers camera stretching.

The game has a second playable character who’s like an extremely nerfed Bayonetta since they can only enter witchtime by parrying and demon summoning completely removes their defensive options.

Not that the plot is a huge draw but the only thing making me wanna persist is seeing alt-universe Bayonettas in the multiverse and getting new weapons.

I really think I should just quit, I’m getting nothing from it but bad design lessons I’ve seen in games from over 10 years ago.


Really enjoying Signalis on the other hand. When just want to be comfy this is the game for me, especially as we approach sub-zero temperatures. The design is pretty straightforward for the Resident Evil/Silent Hill frame. The biggest innovation is to do with how sections play with cameras and intercut footage of things the player has never seen. You can get items from within strange little mise-en-scenes when you watch a video or pick up an item which lends it a dream quality on top of a mildly interesting sci-fi setting. The walking sim stuff is a nice pace-changer and the game is super breezy as long as you’ve cranked up your spatial-awareness for puzzle solving. The aesthetic is hard to ignore and there’s lots of interesting tensions although I’m not sure how many of them are intended. The cyber punk anime aspect of it all is kind of hovering between homage, genuinely neat world (German automated space labour gone wrong), and the devs just like ‘badass’ beautiful fighting girl Kisaragi character designs.

One minor complaint is please let me see my inventory have a slot taken up when I pick something up. When an item is presented, I can see all the slots available but the game doesn’t visually fill up a slot when you choose to pick up an item. Please do this to help my mental accountancy!


Demon’s Souls update - I’ve decided to forego the order to get 1-4 out of the way, it’s just too big a roadblock for my character.

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