Bugsnax review (PS5): A Nightmare on Sesame Street?

This man is the acting Mayor, and - let me be quite frank here - is an absolute stupid twat.

Being a launch title can be a real boon – for AAA titles they can sell more or less 1:1 with the console, see huge business and stellar reviews and become legendary. Take Breath of the Wild, for example – that title literally sold Switches, it was such a flawless whopper.

Or, being a launch title can be cover for a developer releasing a decidedly tepid game knowing it’ll do decent business just because there’s less new stuff to choose from – the “initially small pond making a mediocre fish seem relatively bigger” ploy (Oh, hello, Godfall. Don’t feel compelled to hang around, or anything. Yes, off you pop to obscurity. Bye.).

But a launch title given away for free? That’s either got to be one heck of an intro experience to a new system that the manufacturer feels everyone should enjoy without an entry fee (like Astro’s Playroom on the PS5, which is an utter delight), or it’s an absolute honking bin fire of clunk that in any other scenario would slide straight off people’s radars like a buttered fried egg from a platter made of ball bearings.

And with that greasy thought in mind, welcome to Bugsnax. Free with a PSN subscription for PS5 owners, and yet somehow so guff-filled it still seems overpriced.

News of the Weird

 

Bugsnax is, in brief, 1/3rd of a sub-par Pokemon game clumsily sellotaped onto a second-string daytime soap opera populated entirely by muppet rip-offs, that towards the end drunkenly veers off into a ditch. You play a journalist, apparently, sent to investigate the disappearance of a questionable explorer who has allegedly found an island full of strange but cute little creatures – half junk food, half animal. It’s your job to talk to the other inhabitants of the island to piece together what happened. That is, if you can somehow muster the energy to care.

 

What then follows is a series of tedious, repetitive quests where you do multiple fetch tasks for each member of the island’s community – who, I should mention have personalities that range all the way from “really quite annoying” to “outright shitbag” – to encourage them to move back to the island’s main town, at which point they’ll give you some sort of clue that furthers the main plot after you interview them. These interviews being entirely linear affairs – you just click through a fixed sequence of Qs and As, and there’s no actual skill in “questioning” to extract useful info, nor is anything you’re told in the interviews themselves (a) of any use other than as background to characters you probably don’t give a toss about anyway, or (b) related in any way whatsoever to what clue you get.

Poke-your-mum

 

But hey, surely the “gotta catch ‘em all” factor makes it fun? Well, here’s where we hit Bugsnax’s first big problem. The vast majority of the tasks you do are indeed “find and catch a certain type of bugsnack, and feed it to me”. Which would be fine, but you rapidly realise that aside from cosmetics, catching and feeding people different snax does nothing. There’s no imparting of special abilities or logic to what each person wants most of the time, it’s just an excuse to make you have to catch a new creature – and the bugsnax are also boringly similar. They either hide, or are aggressive, or are in an awkward area, or some combination of all three. But very, very few do anything unique, and once you’ve seen a handful the novelty rapidly wears off.

 

Be thankful this isn't a video review, because christ alive this character's singing is annoying.

When you do feed people snax, all that actually happens is each creature consumed can replace a body part of who you feed it to, so the characters look increasingly stupid as the game progresses and they get kebabs for wrists and gherkins for genitals (noses). If creating a gallery of charmless freaks is your thing then this may have some appeal, but outside of a couple of obscure PSN trophies there’s no need to feed anyone anything outside of what’s needed to complete quests.

 

Disturbingly, one secret trophy requires you to feed snax to the character who lovingly keeps them as pets and doesn’t eat them, and to get round his morals you have to feed him while he’s sleepwalking. He then wakes up and freaks out, because OF COURSE HE WOULD AS THIS IS REALLY CREEPY BEHAVIOUR. But afterwards he immediately forgets this and treats you like a friend exactly the same as before, because – and here you may sense a theme developing – nothing in this game makes coherent sense.

 

Double licker

The exception to the changes not being meaningful is when the game implies a body change is needed, but this is solely in the sense of gating quest progress. For example, the unpleasant salesman guy wants ice lollies for feet to walk across the hot desert. So you have to do quests to unlock the snowy area, then catch and feed him ice lolly bugsnax, and change his feet. But it’s just ticking a box off a list – it doesn’t actually alter the gameplay in any way, no other character including you is affected by the desert heat, and he just leaves the desert and never goes back, and it’s never mentioned again.

 

By the way, your character can’t eat the bugsnax (this is established early on in a throwaway plot point), so where there was blatant scope for the game to let YOU do stuff like access hot areas after eating cold snax or vice versa, or be able to smash rocks after eating beefy snax, this is entirely squandered. This whole thing is an absolute waste of an obvious slam dunk of a gameplay mechanic with huge potential, and I can’t fathom why it wasn’t made any use of. It’s a bewildering omission.

 

Catching the various bugsnax is also a chore that only becomes more tiresome over time, as the game makes it deliberately more awkward to do so not by making snax more cunning and unique but just by putting in awkwardness obstacles and red herrings. In one part, you’re asked to catch a cinnamon bun snail, and there is one right next to you on an outcrop – indeed, the character you’re talking to directly refers to it. But that particular example of that kind of Bugsnax is incredibly tricky to catch in the game because of where it is placed, and what you should actually do is go to another area and catch a far more easily accessible one.

It’s a deliberate misdirection for no reason other than to annoy and be a barrier to progress – you could spend ages trying to suss it out because it’s implied you should catch that specific one, when you can just grab one round the corner in minutes. It’s a complete “fuck you” moment to players, and I have no idea why they did it.

A bad workman blames his tools, or something...

 

Talking of catching stuff, your equipment – a snare trap, springloaded platform, tripwire, grapple etc., is without exception clumsy and unintuitive to use, often needing you to do absurd juggling like firing the trap awkwardly into the air using the spring, then rapidly swapping in the radial menu to be able to activate the trap midair to catch flying snax. This, assuming your trap doesn’t fall over first, or a nearby aggressive snak you didn’t see doesn’t butt you out of the way, or set fire to your trap (or you). And ultimately you can only carry 8 snax anyway, so inventory management is a massive pain in the arse even when you do catch stuff. There's no repository to store snax either, so you'll sometimes have to release snax when catching new ones only to find you needed one you let go for a later quest - thus encouraging you not to bother catching any if you don't absolutely need them, which doesn't really make completing your collection very appealing.

Get orf my laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand!!! (And doubtless go and do a boring quest for me)

If you like to make your weekly shop a challenge by doing it on a unicycle with a carrier bag that only has 1 handle, this might be the sort of tricky task you love. For the rest of us who aren’t having the time of their life laying sprawled and bleeding in the road surrounded by dropped yoghurts and dented bean tins, it just smacks of poorly tested game design.

 

So it’s an awkward game to play, with boring tasks and wasted gameplay opportunities. But does the plot rescue it?

 

In short, no. And in long, also no but with more words – the plot is a terrible fit for what the game seems to imply it is, veers from toilet humour to uneasy ignoring of the fact you’re eating cute creatures, and relies on charmless characters who make absolutely no sense as characters to carry it, which they unsurprisingly fail to do.

 

For example, the bodybuilding US teen jock dude is in an implausible gay relationship with the prickly, middle-aged unlikeable conspiracy theorist. And just to be clear, it’s not the gay bit that’s implausible – it’s the fact that these two people have absolutely no chemistry as written for any sort of relationship to be believable, let alone an intimate one. They don’t even hang out together much, but are just presented as caring about each other and having a history because “reasons”. Similarly, the farmer guy and his archaeologist wife can’t seem to stand each other, then do, then don’t again, the horrible mean gossip girl would clearly be hated by everyone, the loathsomely irritating singer inexplicably has the hots for the wet blanket pet guy yet also wants to eat his pets even though she knows what they mean to him, and I can barely bring myself to be arsed to type anything about anyone else.

Toilet puzzle frankenstein incident

 

They’re all devoid of endearing features, but more importantly what the hell are fuzzy muppet types and quirky fun snack animals doing in a game where you have to (ham-fistedly) repair failing relationships, spy on people like a paparazzi and investigate what’s slowly revealed to be an increasingly weird body horror plot in the first place? I mean, what the ruddy hell were the developers thinking of?

 

The game is a baffling mess of mismatched, half-baked ideas. On the one hand it looks like it should appeal to kids but is too frustrating for them to tolerate playing and the story might make them freak out (especially the ending), but on the other hand despite having a more “adult” plot than you might expect it’s too simplistic, not witty or interesting, and none of the characters are relatable.

Is supposed to be: a burger type thing. Looks like: a nappy full of coathooks.

 

Bugsnax feels like it was another half-finished game – quite possibly a number of other half-finished games – but for whatever reason ended up the way it did after a series of disastrous script reviews and haphazard cut-and-shut game design. Sure, it’s different. Surprising, even. But it isn’t much fun, it isn’t very funny, it isn’t challenging in a skilful sense and it certainly doesn’t have a story you want to explore. It isn’t even technically impressive – loads of the bugsnax are reskins of each other, despite being a small game it has notable loading between areas, and visually it probably could have run on a PS3 let alone a PS4. It isn’t even a jack of all trades – it’s simply crap at everything it turns its mutated, freaky hand to.

 

Like a jigsaw made of bits of other jigsaws that have been soaking in a toilet. Avoid.

 

3 Unhappy Meals out of 6 mouldy McNuggets

Ghost of Tsushima (PS4)

Is my hat on fire? It feels like my hat might be on fire...

So obviously, as a starting point for this review of Ghost of Tsushima – a game I’ve been looking forward to for aaaaages – I’m going to talk about two other games I’d also looked forward to for ages; namely The Last of Us pt. 2 and Jedi: Fallen Order. And what the heck, possibly Control as well, because if you’re going to veer dangerously off the road like a manatee that’s been inexplicably put in charge of driving the review bus, you may as well be a drunk manatee and the bus may as well be on fire. Ding ding, tickets please!

 

First up, TLoU2 – a game that’s so dark and heavy it’s a wonder it doesn’t have its own gravitational field. I confess I haven’t finished TLoU2, despite being a huge fan of the first game, because honestly it’s just too crushingly miserable for me. I can appreciate it for the relentlessly harrowing masterpiece it is, even though I’ve not slogged my way to the end. But not only was I not enjoying it (in as much as you can ‘enjoy’ graphic depictions of torture and the like), I realised I was actively not looking forward to playing it.

 

If you’re making excuses about needing to finish stuff in other games to avoid having to go back to a game because it’s such a downer? Then yeah – maybe that game isn’t for you (me).

Bleak house

 

The thing is, the characters – to Naughty Dog’s absolute credit – are so well rounded and real feeling, they’ve entered some sort of ‘uncanny valley’ of personality. It’s reached the point that the misfortunes heaped upon them and the dreadful individuals that inhabit the world seem all too genuine, despite the popcorn-faced wobbly monsters that pop up now and again to remind you this is post-apocalyptic zombie sci-fi rather than a disturbing fly on the wall documentary of (hopefully) late-Trump era America.

 

But there’s also another issue that slightly bugs me with TLoU2, and would have done even if I hadn’t found it ‘a bit much’ – and that’s that it is 100% linear. The crushing moral choices the characters make are never choices *you* make, or even influence. You as the player are always just an observer, ferrying them from one regrettable incident to another. Want to nudge someone away from the terrible mistake they’re clearly about to make? Tough. Big stash of ammo and health suspiciously piled up in the room before a locked door? Well you know what’s coming, how it will go down, and exactly where you have to go.

 

Unsurprisingly the Uncharted games are very similar, and in that sense playing them is not a million miles away from just having to repeatedly mash a button to make a film proceed – you have control, and yet no control whatsoever. Only rather than a fun adventure romp with a wisecracking hero dude, the film in this case is Schindler’s List and you just have to sit back and watch the horror unfurl. TLoU2 is undoubtably a memorable experience, but when you think of it like that, it’s slightly…odd.

 

Lasagne of regret

With Jedi: Fallen Order, tone-wise it’s a helium-filled meringue to TLoU2’s venison in dark chocolate and tungsten sauce. But while I enjoyed the game, it left me feeling weirdly unsatiated once I’d finished it. The story was pretty simplistic, the characters a bit by the numbers (mildly grumpy mentor haunted by their past, comic relief short dude, feisty lady who has seen her people killed, uncertain hero – can’t think where they plucked them from), and then there was the whole “being a Jedi” part. Despite being a mythical warrior with a laser sword and magic powers, combat always felt a bit stiff. And again, though there was a bit more of an illusion of freedom in that you could pick the order of planets to visit, it was still very linear when you got there.

 

It’s akin to giving someone a choice of 5 restaurants, but regardless of which one they choose they still have to have lasagne when they get there. Even if it’s a Chinese restaurant, and the owner does rude gestures at you while pointing at the branch of Zizzi next door.

 

While on the one hand this looks heroic, on the other I have no idea at all how to get down from here and might have a little cry in a minute.

In fact, if it hadn’t have been a Star Wars title, and so able to draw on a universe of characters and locations with their own built-in pop culture icon appeal, as a game I think it would have been remarkably unremarkable; all the more surprising give it was made by Respawn, who created probably the best FPS of this console generation in Titanfall 2. Don’t get me wrong – there was nothing *wrong* with any of it. It’s just that it only ever gently tugged half-heartedly at my socks while letting off an indoor firework rather than blowing them off.

Jin & tonic

 

So finally, on to Ghost of Tsushima. The fact it’s a stunning looking game should at this stage be no surprise. It’s stylised for sure, as the grainy black and white Samurai Cinema mode attests to, but even with the colour on and the in-game grit cataracts removed one trip to Golden Temple at sunset should be enough to wow even the most jaded gamer that visually, this is something really special. The audio work as well, with a full Japanese language voice track, is great.

 

Impressive as they are, the technical achievements are only part of the appeal though. What I really like about Ghost of Tsushima, and why I think it’s deserving of its high review scores (including a very rare perfect score from legendary Japanese magazine, Famitsu) is that, as a game, it’s immensely satisfying because of its freedom on one hand, and it’s exceptional combat on the other.

 

Jin, your character in the game, has various unlockable talents and abilities which mean you can set yourself up to excel at ranged combat, stealth, quick close combat, parry and block style swordplay, or a mix ‘n’ match of all of them. And the impressive thing is, you can switch between all of these on the fly, and it’s simple and intuitive to do so.

 

i wish I'd brought my sunglasses. Or indeed invented sunglasses, what with this being 1274AD.

How does this work in practice? Well, take the example of a mission fairly late on in the first act where you have to clear out a town of Mongol enemies. I re-ran this mission 3 times to see if I could tackle it either as a sneak, jumping around on roofs and literally stabbing people in the back, or as a brave but foolhardy samurai walking openly into sword combat and calling enemies out, or as a ranged archer using bows, sticky bombs and throwing knives as well as environmental ‘weapons’ like wasps nests that distract enemies. I finished the mission each time and, apart from the fixed duel-style final boss fight, it was an entirely different experience requiring different skills and a different approach each time.

Remarkably, this open approach can be applied to the vast majority of the whole game – for story missions, side quests and even just random world encounters.

 

Yes, there will be missions that do push you down one way or another (certainly early on, when they’re teaching you your skills), but the last game where I felt I had this much leeway in tackling stuff was probably Breath of the Wild, and any comparison to that game is always a compliment. The ‘unguided nature’ theme is strong throughout the game too, with gusts of wind, songbirds and foxes showing you the way and leading you to places of interest rather than some anachronistic blip-covered radar.

Get wood for NPCs

 

For the story and characters, I admit I am a Japanophile so there was added appeal, but Jin’s weighing up of the code he has always lived by and the tactics he now has to use is handled well, if a little lightly (he does seem to get over having to do ‘dishonourable’ things quite quickly). The map being peppered with side missions and stories of the characters you meet along the way is nice too – you get to know a lot more about them, and it’s often revealed they may have some (ahem) moral flexibility to them as well.

 

There are also artefacts and bits and bobs to collect that reveal more about the world, as well as little events like coming across hot springs and places where you’ll write haikus. Do they make any difference to the core game? No. Are they lovely little asides nonetheless? Absolutely. 

 

A lot of open-world games pack themselves full of tedious busywork rather than little surprises like shrines or poetic vistas, but thankfully Ghost is lean in this sense – there’s no Red Dead 2-style wood chopping or game hunting to take stuff back to camp just to keep some random NPC happy. There is resource collection to upgrade your gear, but for the most part supplies are plentiful, not secreted away in awkward places you have to spend ages parkouring to just to find a bit of bamboo, and the game is clear in showing you what your upgrades do and when you have enough of any particular thing to improve an item.

It’s the combat that really, really shines though – when the rhythm clicks and you start being able to chain together blocks, strikes and stance swaps to in turn take on shield men, sword men and spear men in one fluid motion you can be absolutely devastating. It’s what I wanted to feel when I played Jedi: Fallen Order but never really did – like I am an exceptionally trained, highly skilled warrior rather than a 45-year-old guy lounging on an armchair who’s biggest offensive threat is that I know a lot of swear words. 

 

I might have a danger-filled life where I could get slashed in half at any time, but at least I'm not the poor sod who has to sweep up all these leaves.

A typical combat sequence might start with a standoff – time that right and you can take down up to 3 enemies in one go. Then throw down a smoke bomb and take out 2 while they're stunned. Maybe 3 if you're lucky. Dodge a rushing attacker, throw knives to take out an archer, then change sword stance to break the block of a shield man, finishing him with an unblockable attack that lets you instantly sprint on to your next target. And this all happens in a few seconds – but when you do pull off a successful sequence of blows like this, and take down 6 or 7 foes without a scratch, it both looks amazing thanks to the slow-mo visuals and crucially *feels* amazing as well.

Genuinely, the last time combat in a game made me go “Ooh!” when I got it right like this is Superhot. That adrenaline rush never gets old. Ever.

 

Ghost of Tsushima is a rare thing in that it is pure escapism in its beautiful historical setting, with game mechanics that have been as highly polished as an antique katana. It takes old ideas like wayfinders and adds a new twist, gives you genuine freedom in how you approach missions, and has an engaging, living world that you’ll often find yourself stopping to just admire (well, assuming you’re not mid swordfight). I absolutely adored it, and it was exactly what I needed right now – a fun, substantial, gorgeous game that just takes me out of it. It's one of the best, freshest examples of an open world game I've played in a very long time.

 

Similarly, I’ve recently started playing Control (see, told you I’d get that in somewhere) and though very different in style and plot, it’s equally good at just taking you to a very different, unique world. Which really, is what games should always be about. I might come back to TLoU2 one day, perhaps when reality is marginally less of a miserable place. Until then, I’m back off to 13^th Century Japan – those Mongols aren’t going to eviscerate themselves, after all.

 

136 Yen out of a £.

Knights & Bikes (Switch)

"What shall we do today?"
"Go and throw rocks over the border into Devon?"
"Sounds good to me!"

I tell you what – if there’s one thing we need more of in games, it’s pasties. Not only pasties, but the history of pasties as well. On that basis Knights and Bikes should get top marks immediately, as it features both pasties AND information about what pasties are – but as an added bonus, there’s a bloody ace game bolted on to the bakery-themed exposition as well. Also: scones! And cantankerous waterfowl!

Set on an island that’s never named as being in Cornwall (but 100% is in Cornwall) in the mid-1980s, Knights and Bikes is a hand-drawn cartoon style RPG-lite about Nessa and Demelza – two young girls fighting ancient monsters while on a quest for long-lost treasure. Or at least that appears to be what’s happening, because like a Friday night after you’ve moved on to drinking hand sanitiser it’s not entirely clear whether some, none or all of the shenanigans going on around you are real or a load of imaginary “mind fudge”. 

The plot, other than looking for said lost treasure, revolves around Demelza’s dad not having enough money to run the family campsite, the recent death of her mum, and an ancient curse being awoken that – among other things – possesses a crazy golf course, and turns the old lady who runs the mobile library into a flamethrowing witch who gatecrashes a terrible low-budget theme park. So as you may gather, it’s a bit of an eclectic mix.

Beef envelope

What it also absolutely is, is another excellent example of an indie game (in this case one funded via Kickstarter) building on the legacy of the old back-bedroom coded games of the past. You could absolutely imagine a 2D Speccy version of something like this harking from the era it’s set in, complete with slightly unhinged and very British storyline and humour.

However, rather than being stuck rendering the aforementioned Cornish beef envelopes via the disappointingly chunky 8-bit pixels of yesteryear, we get to enjoy a frankly gorgeous art style and animation that makes the whole game look like a children’s book. In fact, the whole thing is basically a love letter to childhood adventure – doing skids on your bike, exploring mysterious places, sleepovers with your mates, even your character making ‘Fwoooosh!’ airplane noises when they sprint.

Talking of mates, the entire game is designed for 2 players to tackle together (which is why, even though it was first released on the PC and PS4, the Switch seems like its natural home). Though if you currently find yourself in an isolation ward due to our viral friend, the AI is more than adequate – and even if it does falter, you can also flip between both girls to take manual control at any time too.

All I wanted as a kid was a BMX with pads. Instead, I got a Raleigh Grifter. For you modern kids that's like expecting an iPhone but getting a pager.

2 Girls, 1 Cup (of cider)

The best way to play it is definitely with 2 people in the same room though; as the whole game is built on teamwork, it just feels right. It’s not just 2 people meaning twice the firepower either: each character has their own set of special abilities and literally can’t make it through without the other, such as when Nessa has to douse route-blocking fires with her water bombs, or Demelza has to rip up manhole covers with her toilet plunger in search of delicious fatbergs (OK, in-game currency – but I bet you’d get a few quid for a fatberg too).

I’ll be totally honest and say that it’s unlikely you’ll be overly stretched in the skill department when playing this game – combat is relaxed rather than sweaty, and there aren’t many spots where you’ll struggle for too long. But there’s still enough here to make battles feel like they’re a hurdle rather than a formality, and given the theme and style of the game a punitive grind would kill the fun stone dead anyway.

Puzzles won’t have you tearing your hair out either, and subtle but helpful markings on the ground and strategically-placed scenery will make sure you don’t wander too far astray. It’s admittedly pretty linear, but with just enough freedom and exploring to avoid it feeling like it’s on rails. Plus there are plenty of mini-game interludes to break things up and hold the attention of easily-distracted types – and nicely these are entirely just for fun and, win or lose, present no barrier to progress.

In that regard, this is a great game to play through with younger or less experienced gamers, who’ll get as much enjoyment out of it as seasoned veterans without getting overly frustrated. But at the same time I’m absolutely NOT saying is that this is a ‘kid’s game’, with all the negative connotations of overly watered-down gameplay and a lack of effort that implies. This is just a game that happens to be suitable for kids because it’s really well made, not diluted.

Guest starring Boaty McBoatface.

Smell the crabs

It’d probably come as no surprise to you if I told you that the game was developed by a small team who also worked on Little Big Planet and Tearaway, as the style, charm and attention to detail from those games is clearly present here as well. As well as the sense of childhood adventure, it totally captures the slightly naff vibe of a small, British seaside town in off season – you can practically smell the crabs and stale beer (unless you always smell of crabs and stale beer anyway, in which case this game just reeks of your awful bedsit).

Knights and Bikes is obviously not a huge release, and you won’t see it plastered over the side of buses like Call of Duty: Duty Calls 2: Call Harder (Brown Ops edition). So unless you scour the whole spectrum of the games press daily, sometimes it’s down to luck as to whether you even hear of games like this. But I’m delighted I did, because it’s lovely.

It’s not a mammoth game, coming in around the 10-hour mark, and the challenge might be nudging up to too lightweight for some. But sometimes it’s about the journey and not the accomplishment, and on that basis it’s absolutely worth your time and the time of finding a friend to play it through with too. Things this warm, charming and funny don’t come along every day, so grab it in your clammy mitts like one of Cornwall’s famous pastry semicircles. 

I mean, it’s got a goose called Captain Honkers in it. What more do you want? A cream tea?!?

St. Ives (5) out of Sennen (7)

198X (Switch)

I wish I'd been this cool in the 1980s. I didn't have Walkman - just a crappy pocket radio with a single earphone, so it looked like I had a massive hearing aid.

In the manner of a person attending a job interview and letting off a firework concealed in their mouth in answer to the interviewer’s first question, I’d like to start with a bit of a controversial bang: I don’t quite get how retrogaming has become such a ‘thing’.

I mean, I understand what it literally is of course – playing old games. There are some old games I quite like in fact, and sometimes I even replay the odd one myself. And I’m all for modern HD remakes that mean I can enjoy the experience in the here and now without the chronological shortcomings of blurry pixels, poor control schemes, hardware stutter, and of course having to buy stuff from a disinterested sweaty salesman in Dixons in the first place.

But: here’s the parping retro elephant in the room, whose dung is starting to pile up to worrying levels – both you and I know many old games look, sound and play horrendously, and once re-seen ‘in the flesh’ rather than viewed through your mental nostalgiascope are only 5% as good as we remember them being. Plus the further back you, go the truer this is. 

Yet retrogaming is now big enough to support devices and even whole events entirely dedicated to it. How has this happened? It’s just manky old stuff, guy!

Crusty banger

Take the Evercade, for example. There must be enough demand to make a new handheld games console that plays loads of old titles viable or it wouldn’t even exist, and some of the less dated stuff on it like Earthworm Jim doubtless remain fun to play. But you can also get Atari 2600 games on it. Games that came out almost 40 YEARS AGO, and absolutely look every one of those musty years old. 

Outside of a few minutes of curiosity, I don’t get why anyone would want to endure such crusty old bangers. And, of course, that curiosity could be satisfied with a free emulator running on even the feeblest of PCs or smartphones rather than spending £££s on a new gizmo. So I have to wonder…is it the games, or is it really the hardware that’s the big draw?

The other side of it is retro enthusiast one-upmanship, where fans seem to try to find the most obscure, awful nonsense so they can say “Look! Look what I’ve found!” when stumbling across a game no one has heard of since Milli Vanilli were in the charts, treating it like a revelation on par with unearthing a lost Shakespeare manuscript for “Taming of the Shrew 2: Shrewlectric Boogaloo”.

The reality? It’s probably just another badly coded knock-off that looks like the flashing dots machine they use in Boots to check your peripheral vision when you’re having an eye test, sounds like you’ve developed tinnitus while visiting a buzzer factory, and is as tedious to play as completing a cryptic crossword where all the clues are written in binary. 

You can tell this isn't a real subway on account of there not being some annoying twat playing the guitar and then demanding money for his awful rendition of "Hey Jude".

Brown smears

This, of course, is retrogaming’s problem: there are only so many times you can talk about, play, and find new and interesting info on the REAL classics, and genuine forgotten gems are incredibly rare. But to fill this content gap it increasingly means any old dreadful tat is now sought out and often elevated on merit of its age alone to a status it doesn’t deserve, just to give people something ‘new’ (old) to chase down, look at and play.

And that’s the bit I don’t get. There are so many great and interesting games out now, why seek out and laud things from decades ago that died on their arse even when they were contemporary? After all, games aren’t whisky: they don’t get better with age. Just mouldier.

Sure, sometimes fossil hunters find T-Rexes, but a hell of a lot more often all they turn up are vague brown smears on a rock from a boring old bit of seaweed – and would Jurassic Park have been as exciting if the camera had panned back from Hammond’s jeep, to the strains of John Williams’ epic score, only to reveal a landscape strewn with stinking piles of pre-Cambrian bladderwrack? 

Obviously, no. And that’s the unspoken truth of it: most old games = ‘damp fronds’, not ‘exciting fangs’.

However: playing new games that have a retro style, while doing things that the limitations of ancient hardware would have rendered impossible and telling new stories at the same time? Yeah, that I can easily understand and buy into. And indeed I did, having paid actual money for new-to-the-Switch retro love-in, 198X.

Puffy-jacketed skank

Set in a non-specified year of that decade, 198X tells the story of a young teen growing up on the edge of a big city, feeling like an awkward misfit until they discover the neon lights and kooky characters of an old-school arcade. Except of course it’s only ‘old school’ to us: old school back then would have been a load of farthing-powered bagatelle machines or something. A videogame arcade would have just been ‘school’. Though not an actual school, obviously. (Look, let’s just pretend I didn’t even start this mess and move on.)

The story in 198X unfurls via you playing through homages to a number of games of the era like OutRun and R-Type. These are all original titles however, and you only play through a handful of levels of each (although I’d love full games for some, they’re so well done). You can immediately see where their inspiration lies though, and the essence of the games they hail from has been captured impeccably. They’re like little fun-size mars bars of gaming! 

Despite being teeny they’re nevertheless remarkably well rounded, with power-ups, checkpoints and even bosses. And, in proper 80s style, there’s a fairly unforgiving level of challenge – the Shinobi clone in particular will have you relying on twitch gaming skills that would do any puffy-jacketed skank who lurked round arcades in the 1980s proud. 

The only slightly odd choice (and the one I can’t pin down to any particular ‘muse’ game) is the RPG stage – not because it’s not of this era, as such games certainly existed then. More because it doesn’t really quite fit the arcade theme and is closer to the sort of thing you’d have played on a home console. It’s still fun though and not too jarring, so we’ll let it slide.

It's slightly unfortunate that the sprite effect tunnel does kind of make it look like you're driving through a vortex of rancid popcorn.

Don’t you forget about me

Interspersed between games are cutscenes rendered in 16-bit pixel art style, and a soundtrack that 100% nails the synth-heavy music of the era. In fact, for anyone like me who grew up around the time, this whole game captures the atmosphere of an angsty 80s teen coming of age movie so well it was almost a surprise to get to the end and not see John Hughes’ name come up in the credits.

The whole thing will only take you a few hours to get through, depending on how tricky you find some of the harder bits, and one annoyance is that the ending is a bit disappointing as it’s entirely set up for a sequel rather than offering any real resolution. But for gamers of a certain age it’ll bring back all the feels in the right places. The OutRun level in particular gets it just right, as you cruise through a neon city with a pure 80s soundtrack. 

It’s obviously been made with a lot of love for the games and media of the time, and if the alluded-to follow-up happens I hope they’ll give some of the minigames a bit more room to breathe and throw in a few more genres an as well. There’s a whole decade of source material, after all – Contra, Operation Wolf, or Donkey Kong ‘tributes’ would dovetail nicely.

Nostalgia rash

I know I’m probably at odds with a lot of Digi readers on this, but I’ve played the likes of OutRun and R-Type: I finished them at the time they were new, and I’ve played them again since to reminisce. Now, I’d rather play something like this (or, say, retro-themed platformer Horace) that knows where it’s come from and respects it, but takes that legacy and style and offers something fresh with it.

To me, that’s infinitely more interesting than dredging up some also ran from days gone by to scratch an itchy retro rash. Or worse still, playing an old game you loved over and over so often that it loses any nostalgic appeal and ends up as dated as a shell suit and espadrilles.

To paraphrase Kylo Ren, “Let the past go, Grandad – it’s full of wasps and syphilis!”.

Besides, a new game done in an old style – and done well like 198X is – is always going to be far better at evoking the sensation of what it felt like playing the games of the time it takes inspiration from than you’d get replaying those actual games again now. Which I admit sounds weird, but bear with me!

This level is *seriously* hardcore. I was so focused playing it, at one point my contact lens dried out and fell off my eye.

Vaseline

What I mean is this: I remember how cool it was sitting in an OutRun machine as a kid, music blaring and racing along. What I don’t clearly recall is that the graphics were grainy, the speakers tinny, and it was a real sod to do well because the dodgy arcade owner had inevitably set the difficulty dipswitch to ‘utter bastard’. But I know those things are true – not least because I still remember my mum telling me off for spending 10 quid on continues.

Yet in my mind’s eye, everything is much smoother, the sound less beepy-boopy and the experience more fun because memory is imperfect. You remember the good stuff, not the rough edges and the nitpicks, or indeed the fag-stained ceiling and manky carpet that was the style du jour of most arcades at the time.

198X isn’t the best game I’ve played, and it certainly isn’t the longest, but it absolutely had an effect on me because it brought back all the memories without the drag of the rubbish bit – the disappointment of a game now not being nearly as good as I remember from then. Essentially, the modern hardware and game design is the ‘vaseline on the lens’ to give you the soft focus you usually get from dodgy mental recall of the 8/16-bit era.

If you weren’t there first time round, so the appeal of retro to you is that it’s all ‘new’, your mileage may vary. But take it from me: sometimes it’s better to just be reminded of something than go back directly to the source, as the past isn’t always brilliant*. 198X does just that – it’s a fun, albeit brief, aide memoire. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on retrogaming thinly disguised as a review (I won’t be taking questions at this time).

*Apart from stovepipe hats of course, which remain unassailably excellent.

Now That’s What I Call Music 7 out of Now That’s What I Call Music 10

CES 2020 highlights!

CES: Where we render your cool stuff obsolete!

Well it’s a new month, a new year and a new decade. And you know what that means? Yes, that’s right: nothing, given our calendar system starts at an arbitrary point in time with no specific meaning. But as this has been going on for 2000-odd years now it’s probably simpler to just go along with it, yeah?

However: the turning of the year also heralds the shambling return of CES – the big annual electronics expo where companies spaff out a load of new rubbish you don’t need, right after you bought last year’s bloody model for Xmas. To show we’ve got our finger if not on the pulse, then at least hovering menacingly near your trembling wrist, here’s our rundown of this year’s most desirable ‘wares’. They’re so hot, they’ll scald your glabella!

You can practically feel the power. Either that, or I'm having a stroke.

Folding computers

Laptops, eh? First they were big, but terrible. Then they got smaller. Then they got big again, because the small ones were somehow even more terrible. But now, the chonk…oh man, she just too chonky! The solution? Make ‘em small again, only this time in a whole new way that makes them impractical and unusable anywhere other than plugged in and flat on a desk.

Yes, if there’s one complaint we’ve pretty much never had about laptops, it’s that we haven’t been able to have one with a tiny, creased plastic display so it looks like a 1980s portable telly covered in clingfilm, coupled with the beguiling input choice of either a tiny Bluetooth keyboard we’ll lose down the side of the sofa after a week, or an onscreen one we can wear our fingers to nubs on. 

So, in this era of climate change and austerity, it’s great that tech companies have spent billions to address our non-concern! And did we mention gaming? No, no we didn’t, because you can’t play games on one of these. They’re clearly horrendously underpowered, as otherwise the battery wouldn’t last more than 8 minutes.

But hang on, love. We’re not satisfied with scoops on this year’s tech – we’ve got an exclusive shot of what’s coming next year! Take a look at this beauty: a whole new form factor with a BUILT-IN keyboard, a ‘disc drive’ so you can load up cool new apps even when the 5G signal at your hot yoga retreat goes down, and are you fed up with fingerprints on your screen? No problem with that here, as it’s a whole new ‘non-touch’ touchscreen that just IGNORES your incessant prodding.

Also, say hello to lots more privacy with a zero-megapixel webcam and the ‘ultimate firewall’ – a complete lack of connection to the filth-riddled internet. Thank Elon Musk that tech companies are here to save us all from ourselves!

Doorbells would be a lot less popular if they were called "Finger ringers".

Smart doorbells

Bing-bong! When a delivery man or bailiff visits your home, are you still opening the door to see who’s calling like some sort of peasant? OK, boomer, it’s time to get with the 21st century!

Smart doorbells are, of course, all the rage amongst always-on skinny latte jean-wearing trendy types, who are happy to share vast amounts of personal data to anonymous corporations in exchange for an almost imperceptible sliver of added convenience.

However, it’s not all techno-rainbows: the one area where these devices have fallen down is that they can’t actively repel people you’d rather not see, such as charity collectors, ‘Christ touchers’, or that angry man down the road whose garden is strewn with your cat’s dirty tods.

To address this, one of the big stories at CES this year was the brand new “Ring lord 3000”. It looks like any ordinary doorbell, but when depressed instead of a charming bell-like refrain it emits the infamous ‘brown noise’. This low, vibrating frequency immediately causes anyone within 50 m to evacuate their bowels, and all for the low price of $1!

Granted, if you happen to also be within 50 m of your own front door you’ll be similarly affected, but all you need to cover that is an expensive pair of easily lost noise-cancelling earbuds. In fact, probably 2 pairs so one can charge while you’ve got the others in.

You can’t put a price on the peace of mind of knowing who is at your door, of course, but it turns out you can put a price on peace of sphincter.

"Hello! I'm Elon Musk, the genius! That's right - I've uploaded myself into a new body that's even more rad and cool than my old human onezzzzzzzzzzzzzzz +++BATTERY ERROR+++PERMANENT SHUTDOWN INITIATED+++"

AI avatars

Here’s one that will be of particular interest to the 4 or so people who still plan to run a business in the UK after Brexit. Given we won’t be able to get desperate foreign types to come and do dull jobs with feeble wages anymore, what’s the answer? Well it certainly isn’t paying more money, you hippy! Except of course to tech companies. That’s fine.

Yes, to combat the dearth of potential employees, 2020 saw the debut of AI avatars – pretend people who can fill the gap in roles such as receptionists, reception workers, and people who work in reception-type areas. Programmed to be able to inaccurately answer at least 4 of your questions (assuming they’re questions about ox-bow lakes, which is of course the no. 1 search term worldwide), they’re virtually indistinguishable from the real thing!

In fact, YOU might be an avatar RIGHT NOW! And even if you’re not, at least it’s a decent cover story for why you keep shoving USB cables down your trousers to ‘interface’ with your ‘charging port’.

It corners like a dream. Assuming you're dreaming about an overloaded barge in a canal full of congealed marmite.

Sony’s electric car

After stunning everyone with the reveal of the PlayStation 5 logo, which – and hold on to your hats here, because it’s a real humdinger – turned out to be EXACTLY the same as the PS4 logo only with a 5, Sony then proceeded to ensure post hat-loss we were nude at either end by blowing our socks off with their unexpected unveiling of no less than an electric car!

Of course, the model on display was just a concept: the maker of design classics like the Sport Walkman (it’s bigger and yellow, and just as non-waterproof!), the second-most popular video format Betamax, and of course the MiniDisc – the format that took the most annoying elements of cassette tapes and CDs and mashed them into one anaemically-supported chimera – was bound to refine it before launch.

But today, we can show you some EXCLUSIVE shots of the final, road-ready car – and what a car it is! With seats for anywhere up to 1 person, or 2 people if they are missing their right and left arms respectively and sit in the correct order, the car also features easy access for any passenger (assuming they’re an experienced hurdler or professional contortionist).

We’ve also heard from a fascinating press release that the Sony car can hit speeds, and the battery lasts for a period of time – if not longer!  We can’t wait to whizz down Sony-approved A and B roads (available as reasonably-priced DLC; motorways pack sold separately) while listening to top Sony-approved artists such as Nickleback, Rednex, and Scatman John, before stopping off for a quick 2-hour mandatory system update in a layby.

It’s the future of yesterday, today!



(This review originally appeared on Digitiser 2000 in January 2020)

Observation (PS4)

"I swear, Dave - one more 'shiny helmet' gag and you're going straight out the bloody airlock."

As the famous tag line from the film Alien says, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Which is true, but then it’s also true that no one could hear you play a kazoo, alarm an ombudsman with a powerful erotic dance involving maracas, or emit a ‘bronx cheer’ either.

Obviously, the wording chosen is supposed to evoke a very specific sensation that space is scary, deadly and full of real weird stuff (so essentially, like the middle aisle in Lidl but with fewer discount patio sets) rather than just lacking the requirements to transmit sound. But is space really that scary? It’s basically just full of nothing, and even the titular alien itself is no worse than things you get in Australia – a continent so heaving with lethal fauna it’s a wonder the koala doesn’t have a handgun for an anus. Yet people still happily go there on holiday!

I think the real worry it’s trying to impart is this: fear of being alone.

What with its lack of air, heat, a floor, and branches of Costa, space is a bit rubbish to live in and so very, very few people do – and those that do have to exist sealed up in space stations: essentially giant orbiting caravans where you have to eat baby food, Velcro yourself into bed and poo into a special hoover (mercifully, not simultaneously). 

Should things go awry, having no one around to turn to for help while you float about trapped in a tin box surrounded by literally buggerall is obviously a bit rubbish and scary, and that’s the premise behind Observation; a creepy puzzle solver spewed out by the excellent folks at Devolver.

Malibu

In somewhat of a twist, you play not as the main character of the game – astronaut Emma Fisher, marooned on a damaged space station with a mysteriously absent crew – but as the space station’s AI computer system, SAM. Only you’re not quite yourself and periodically black out and behave oddly, like someone on a hen do activity day who’s been drinking knock-off Malibu since 10am and is now trying to convince a sceptical staff member at a go-karting track that she’s safe to drive despite only being able to see out of one eye.

It’s your job in the periods between being possessed by whatever thing is making you go wonky to help Emma repair the station and find out what the ruddy heck is going on. This is done initially by hopping about the station modules via CCTV cameras, accessing computers and solving logic puzzles. Later, you get a free-roaming drone to control and even have to engage in spacewalks and the like, pooting yourself about on little thrusters.

Being in space, and this being a ‘proper’ space station and not some fancy Star Trek type gaff with artificial gravity that looks more like a dentist’s waiting room than a spaceship, you can move, rotate and float about in all directions freely on any axis. Suffice to say, if this were a VR game it’d probably make you horrendously sick.

As it is, it might take you a while to get used to the fact that what’s ‘up’ when you go into a new area isn’t necessarily ‘up’ for that particular room – disorientation being something real astronauts (and, to be fair, non-space dwelling would-be go-karters who reek of discount coconut liqueur) often struggle with. That can lead to some confusion with puzzles and navigation at first, but once you get your eye in you’ll start thinking much more 3D-ish.

"Oh christ, I'm busting. If this one isn't the toilet I'm going to have to go in my suit. Again."

Violent cousin

It’s all very classic sci-fi in feel, and the stark, claustrophobic, and remarkably realistic space station is a genuinely unsettling place to explore. The game plays out very much like an interactive film – indeed, it only starts proper after you complete a few early tasks and then get a full-blown (and entirely splendid) movie-style title sequence. 

This cinematic feel continues throughout with the use of cut scenes, jump cuts, camera effects and the like, often at unexpected moments that help throw you off balance. It’s a game that’s as watchable as it is playable, and has that rarest of things – a real sense of originality to it. Although there are quite a few explore-o-puzzlers these days, I can’t remember playing anything quite like this. 

In fact, it reminded me most of the old Freescape 3D titles (Driller, Dark Side), or something like the even older Mercenary – exploring a spartan environment with very little immediate threat for the most part, but a definite sense of unease mixed in with the claustrophobia and agoraphobia.

I’m also relieved to say that this doesn’t just collapse into another ‘Jaws in space’ type thing either. Observation thankfully goes in for psychological spookings and high-concept sci-fi rather than outright horror, and there’s no slobbering, violent cousin of ET waiting to pop out of a space cupboard at the end to gnaw on your hapless astronaut’s legs. (That said, now I’ve thought of it Jaws in space would clearly be excellent – get to work, ‘Hollywood’.)

Unfortunate clog

If there are any frustrations to be had, it’s that sometimes the puzzle solutions are a bit too obscure and you can find yourself stuck in an area with no hint of what you’re missing. For example, in one module I was searching for ages for a file containing some information, and it turned out it was on a laptop that I thought I had already checked; there were in reality two different laptops, but the layout of the room was such that this was a really hard spot from the camera angles available.

Similarly, earlier on during a spacewalk I couldn’t find the area to check that the game was obviously asking me to look for, and the identikit sections of the station made working out where I’d looked and where I hadn’t that much trickier to suss out. 

These unfortunate clogs in otherwise pristine puzzle pipes aren’t game killers by a long way, but a patient approach is going to be a necessity in some parts. Again, while there are faster-paced points, on the whole it’s a more slow-burn movie-like mentality. 

But I’d argue that’s no bad thing now and again – after all, what sort of a mindless, vulgarian clot would routinely sit and fast forward through films just to get to action sequences and miss out on all the plot? (Answer: D. Trump does this. I rest my case.)

Even in space, Zoom conferences are compulsory.

Camp robots

While the game is ultimately fairly linear (there’s extra exposition to uncover, but no real branches off of the main story), and won’t take you much longer than 2 or 3 evenings to get through, I’d say it’s well worth your investment. It’s clever, different, and unsettling, and does exactly what it sets out to do exceptionally well. Plus it leaves you thinking without turning into a Kojima-style impenetrable bewilderment fest along the way.

It’s also refreshing to see someone try a sci-fi idea that isn’t a Star Wars knock-off, or a straight ‘kill all non-human life forms’ thing. I suspect I’ve sold a lot of you already on the idea of a more thoughtful, less zappy interstellar experience, but if you’re wavering I’d say this: if you think stories in space begin and end with camp robots, pointy-eared grumps or dudes in saucers with rectal probes, this is well worth a punt to broaden your (event) horizons.

2001 out of 2010

(This review originally appeared on Digitiser 2000 in October 2019)