A Short Hike (Steam)

That bridge needs some handrails. It's a health & safety nightmare!

Beep boop…hello, Madam! Mobile phones are both a wonder of the modern world, but also a total pain in the frenulum when you either get a call at the worst possible time or need to make/receive one but can’t. 

For example, I once got a really important call about a house we were trying to buy that I absolutely had to take, but with the worst possible timing my phone had rung while I was in the ‘smallest room’. That’s right – I was doing a poo in the airing cupboard! Again!

Normally, my phone ringing while I was indisposed wouldn’t be a problem and I’d do what anyone would: send it to voicemail, use the loo, and return the call. But I knew this call was time-sensitive and if I didn’t take it we could lose the house, so it had to be there and then.

And of course, it just so happened that ‘there’ and ‘then’ I was getting over a dose of food poisoning, so lavatorial visits were a lot more high-stake events than usual.

Thus, I ended up spending a wretched half-hour attempting to discuss my mortgage with a very polite but somewhat bemused solicitor, with me frantically muting things on and off mid-conversation – under the utterly rubbish cover story I’d concocted in a panic of my neighbour doing loud DIY – to spare them hearing as much as possible of what they’d probably have described as someone repeatedly half-filling a balloon with gravy, then the rest air, then letting it ‘razz off’ into a bin. 

Still, these days the country is so strewn with mobile masts it’s starting to resemble the face of that bloke from the 1980s horror film Hellraiser. So while calls at a bad time will always happen, at least not getting a signal when you need it is an increasingly unlikely thing.

Wander out into the sticks, though, and you can still find yourself in a ‘dead zone’ bereft of reception – usually just when you need it most, too. And that’s essentially the premise of the delightful A Short Hike. 

"Why yes, my house is very small because I don't earn much on park ranger wages. But on the other hand: shut up."

You lookin’ at my bird?

You play Claire – a small bird (an actual bird, I haven’t gone all 1970s un-PC slang) who, while visiting her aunt on holiday, is waiting for an important call from her mother. However her aunt is a park ranger, so Claire is out in the middle of nowhere and the only place there’s any phone reception is at the very top of the huge mountain at the centre of the park.

What follows is her adventures trying to reach the summit; along the way she meets a whole host of oddball creatures who are eager to help but naturally have issues of their own to deal with, who all dish out little tasks for Claire to complete for them. Doing these usually results in some reward that will help her on her way and/or a little bit of backstory.

There are also chests and coins to discover hidden about the map, and these often reward you (either directly or via trading with NPCs) with feathers. The more feathers you have, the more stamina you have, and the higher you can climb and fly to take you ever closer to the peak of the…er…peak.

(On this note, admittedly I’m no ornithologist but I’m pretty sure shoving extra feathers up a bird to make it fly better isn’t quite how birds work. It’s a video game though, so we’ll give them some creative leeway.)

It’s all very standard RPG-lite type stuff, and there’s nothing here that will tax anyone for too long. In fact there’s nothing here that will take too long at all, and you’ll probably be done with the story in a few hours tops. But that’s fine, as today we’re not in longevity town. We’re in lovely town.

Slum landlord

A Short Hike has been described as Zelda meets Animal Crossing, and it’s easy to see why – the quirky, humorous personalities of all the creatures you meet could be straight out of Nintendo’s town-o-sim, and the exploring, climbing and adventuring is very reminiscent of Breath of the Wild’s (very) open world.

But at the same time, it’s entirely its own thing. There’s no effort here to make a genre-redefining epic like Link’s most recent outing, or something that you’ll keep coming back to for years with busywork (mainly to finally pay off grasping loan shark Tom bloody Nook, who I’m convinced evicts people to die behind the scenes in Animal Crossing). 

It is what it is – small, but perfectly formed.

I was as good at fishing in this game as I am in real life. Specifically: terrible.

Nuggets

The gentle background tunes suit the action – if you can call something as laid back as this action – perfectly, and delightful pixel-style/cel-shaded 3D art gives the game a slight retro feel as well, like it’s some long-forgotten SNES title. You can turn these off and make the polygons all sharp and modern if you like, but that does take away a bit of the charm.

And charm is really what it’s all about. I won’t spoil the end to the story, but for a game about a bird doing silly tasks so she can climb a hill it’s remarkably touching and life-affirming.

It’s not just the ending though – the game is full of these little nuggets of joy. A funny conversation with an NPC, finding a new vista and the treasures hidden about it, or even just literally enjoying a short hike about the park. There is stuff here for the more trophy-loving too – it’ll certainly take you a fair while to catch every type of fish and find every last bit of treasure. 

It’s testament to the game though that you’ll probably want to do this even once the story is done, just because it’s such a nice place to be – and the author clearly realises this. There’s no ‘game over’ screen to bring it all to a crashing close. You can just carry on exploring to your heart’s content once the credits roll.

I honestly can’t think of a bad thing to say about A Short Hike. Its low price reflects its literal brevity, but it’s just such a warm hug of a game I’d be willing to bet you’ll play and replay it more than titles thrice its size and cost. 

Leave your cynicism at the door for a few hours, and go for a walk. I promise you’ll feel much better for it.

6 miles out of 10km

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

New Star Manager (Switch)

"Simon Read" does not look to be a healthy man.

There’s a widely-held theory that, every so often, it’s healthy for people to get out of their ‘comfort zones’. Challenge yourself. Do something different. Stretch your boundaries.

But here’s an alternative take: this idea is a right pile of honking dog eggs. Comfort zones are nice precisely *because* they’re comfortable, and being comfortable is ace. Would you attempt to sleep on a pile of bricks while a clown wearing nothing but a soiled pink leotard does squat thrusts over you and think “ooh, what a lovely change from my comfy bed! I’m really growing as a person!”? 

Unless you’re a titanic pervert, clearly this: no.

Anyway, if there are 2 genres of game I really couldn’t care less about, it’s football sims and resource management/world building type sims: they are my own personal ‘squatty the clown’, getting his crotch all up in my comfort zone. I know some people lap them up, but to me the latter have all the appeal and excitement of filling in a tax return. And the former?

Well, as far as I’m concerned, the zenith of amusement you could eke from a footie sim was reached in about 2004 – this being the pre-licencing cheapskate days when players in some games came set with stupid fake names such as “Devid Bockham” and “Fronk Lumphard”, but if you wanted you could amend them to correct them all.

You know: if you were a colossal dullard.

Pelmet

My football-adoring flatmate around this time, who dutifully bought the new Pro Evo release every year on his PS2 even though it was indistinguishable from the previous one, meticulously undertook this tedious editing effort for every team in every league every time a new game came along. Worse still, he hogged the TV in the house for days to do it.

It eventually became too much to resist vandalising this absurd fanboyism in revenge for his monopolisation of the telly, so while he was out one time we randomly changed about 50 players back to things such as “Ron Pelmet”, “Magnum PI”, “Hitler Jr.”, and my personal favourite, “Fußballiö McExcéllenté”.

He was not pleased, even though (a) this didn’t affect the game in the slightest, and (b) it was obviously hilarious, made all the moreso by his annoyance. Oh, and he somehow never noticed we’d also changed the name of his local team to “Oxturd Untied”. Some fan he was.

Still, with all that in mind you can imagine my happiness when Mr Biffo asked me to review a hybrid football/resource management sim. I almost inverted my ribs in delight! Nevertheless, let’s pretend I’m an objective, professional reviewer and not just that other bloke who occasionally writes stuff, and see whether I can expand my horizons and eke some fun out of new and scary things. Or at least do that without having to resort to getting drunk first.

Yes, there really is a black player in this game who they decided to call "Carbon".

Cadaver

NSM starts with you choosing a country, and then trying to save a team in their lower league from relegation with a couple of intro games (I chose Iceland in the hope I could call my team ‘Athletico Bjork’, but sadly it seems to default to ‘New Star’ wherever you pick).

Theoretically it is possible to lose these training wheel efforts, but given I’ve never played a game like this in my life and won these matches comfortably, I suspect you’d have to be inebriated to the point of anaesthesia to really struggle. 

Periodically, a waxy-faced corpse will pop up and blurt out some advice on what to do next. Further investigation reveals this cadaver is actually your assistant manager; why he appears to have been depicted in such a way to make it look like he has recently died is not made clear, but regardless I always followed his tips due to this: laziness. Later on, though, you’ll be expected to make all your own terrible decisions without his guiding yet clammy hand.

Defecating

Slightly oddly, in matches themselves you only take control of the actual players when something exciting such as a goal opportunity or a tramp defecating on the pitch is about to happen (sadly, the second example is entirely a fabrication on my part). The rest of the time, games play out as a Final Score type teleprinter feed of key points such as corners, penalties, players imploding (again, regretfully fictional) and goals from your opponents.

When you do assume control, rather than constant live play releasing the buttons lets you cue up your next action – you can hoof the ball about in the hope one of your football men will catch up to it, pass directly, or stroll up the pitch yourself and have a shot. 

Or you can do what I did and literally walk the ball into the goal, as in lower leagues at least the opposing teams barely seem to be aware of your presence. Then, when they do eventually notice you’re encroaching on their ‘special area’, they shamble towards you with all the urgency of someone discharged mistakenly early from hip surgery.

After a match, you can then do sim-like managery stuff, like improve player stats with booster cards you earn (more on these in a moment), build new things with ticket money like a training academy or health centre (and then later, upgrade them), hold press conferences where you’re asked trivia about your team, or most bizarrely, negotiate contracts with new staff via a player’s shirt number version of ‘Play your cards right’. 

Sadly the late B. Forsyth doesn’t make an appearance, but know this: while I suspect shouting ‘higher!’ or ‘lower!’ isn’t how real staff negotiations take place, to shake up football’s stale, laddish image I think it should immediately be made law that it is from now on, and that these deals should be televised. That, and extra time obviously needs to be replaced with 5 mins of ‘multiball’.

"O Almond" sounds like a non-dairy milk alternative.

Steamroller

Those cards I mentioned might seem an odd way to do things, much like the quiz show negotiations and stop/start play, but this is actually NSM giving away its roots – it was once a mobile game y’see, and one full to popping with wretched microtransactions and with a simplified interface meaning even the most sausage-fingered oaf could control a team. 

In its original form, buying enough boost cards – should you have been mad enough to splurge potential gin money on them – would almost certainly give you a massive bump in player stats and allow you to steamroller your way to the top of the league. 

You can’t do that in the Switch version though (or PS4/PC either), as the trade-off for the comparatively steeper asking price of £15 is the IAPs being pulled. So while fairer and less pay-to-win, it does mean there’s also no route to chivvy proceedings along either. Which is a tad awkward, as once you get promoted the AI does start to pick up and suddenly you can find yourself stuck mid-league in perpetuity.

And that’s really where the already limited appeal of NSM died on its arse for me – with no obvious way to progress other than randomly coming across good stat cards, winning a Brucie Bonus negotiation or just lucking out a chain of big wins, you more or less stay put. 

This is, I suppose, a fairly accurate scenario for the vast bulk of real-world football teams at least, who are stuck grinding out results until they get lucky or are bought by a bored business mogul. But put it this way: if you’re not a diehard fan, would you really make the effort to go and watch mid-league two Buttocksville Utd. Vs Anustown FC in the cold and rain every week for years?

NSM can very easily become the gaming equivalent of that damp, mediocre match between 2 sides you don’t really care about, played out over and over again. And there’s not even a pie shop.

Jellyfish

I’ll admit NSM isn’t as dreadful as I thought it would be, but it has far from convinced me I’m wrong either. It doesn’t pull you in by being great, or push you away by being unplayably terrible. 

It’s just there, like a jellyfish at a dinner party. No one is admitting to bringing it, you can’t ask it to leave, and it’s not going anywhere under its own power because it’s probably dead. And once you’ve prodded it with a biro a few times, all the amusement goes too. Eventually, someone will put a placemat on top of it to try and hide it, and after a few weeks you’ll forget about the jellyfish entirely apart from the weird stain on the tablecloth. 

NSM is that weird stain: briefly intriguing as to how it got where it did, but almost entirely forgettable. So forgettable, I forgot it was called New Star Manager and had to go back and change all the places I’d initially written ‘NFS’ for some reason (3 times. 3 times I did that). 

If you think it might appeal to you, you can at least try the (free) mobile version first, but I think mobile is its natural home and – ironically – on consoles & PC it’s well outside its comfort zone. 

As a full release it just feels a bit cheap and basic – and that’s no slur on the devs, because they’ve just ported over a game that’s been a decent success on mobile as is. It’s just far less obvious why you’d want it on other formats, as there’s no need for its mobile-oriented compromises. They make sense for a phone or tablet game, but they leave it wanting compared to other footie or management sims not hamstrung by their development roots.

Still, nice to see cadavers getting some work outside the medical research industry.

Half a dog on the pitch out of a no-score draw

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

DEVOLVER DOUBLE BILL REVIEW: DEVOLVER BOOTLEG (STEAM) / MINIT (IOS)

Yes. Yes I am, dubious bearded man!

I think it would be fair to say that, for the most part, games publishers don’t so much cover themselves in glory as they do rancid bird effluent dredged out of a clogged gutter.

Whether it’s shoehorning microtransactions into the tiniest cranny (EA), shutting down much loved studios to save a few quid but then inevitably losing far more when the new team assigned the IP stink it up (Bethesda), or milking an adored franchise so hard that its teats go grey and fall off (Microsoft), pretty much everyone who loves games has at least one tale of woe where a publisher has ruined something for them.

Thank criminy, then, for smaller outfits like Devolver. Not only are they dedicated to belching out absolutely excellent little indie games like My Friend Pedro and Gris across all formats, they also clearly don’t take themselves remotely seriously. Observe: they genuinely have a fictional CFO called ‘Fork Parker’, who has a Twitter account where he’s renowned for his inappropriate behaviour.

And if there’s one thing we all love, it’s grown-ups doing swears and stupids on purpose.

In short, if Digitiser (where this review originally appeared) were a publishing house they’d probably be much like Devolver. And further evidence of their ability to laugh at themselves is part one of today’s head-deficient Cerberus of reviews, which I shall commence with…now. 

Even though this is a spoof, it's better than 85% of retro games. FACT.

Devolver Bootleg is a collection of eight 8-bit style ‘ripoffs’ of some of their better-known games, all accompanied by some excellent retro-style chiptune soundtracks. In some cases, titles are warped into entirely different types of game compared to their original form.

For example, Gato Roboto (itself an 8-bit style Metroid-a-like with a cat in a spacesuit) is reworked as a Ghouls’n’Ghosts clone. Simian violence simulator Ape Out becomes Ape Out Jr, a Donkey Kong Jr spoof only with vast amounts more blood. Stylised open world fighter Absolver is transformed into a cartoony 2-player side-on punch up that looks straight off of a NES – you get the idea.

The retro style is also reflected in the steep as chips difficulty level (and before you complain that’s not the correct phrase, note this: the chips in question are up a big hill). If you’ve ever played one of the old freebie NES games on the Switch online service, you’ll know what I mean here – these games feel straight from the days when ‘longevity’ was synonymous with ‘horrendously difficult’ rather than ‘400 side quests and a ton of boring menial tasks’.

The amazing thing is, despite this all obviously being a joke (and as such, only costing the absurdly low £3.95 – so it’s not even a ‘Ha ha! We’re really wacky funsters – but we’re also going to fleece you to keep our accountants happy’ thing), some of the games are honestly quite fun. Hotline Milwaukee – yes, really – kept me going for about half an hour or so alone.

But even if the games were dreadful, for the low price and for the sheer daftness of, say, being able to play a giant shoe that’s also a gun, I’d still recommend it. In the increasingly bland high corporate world that big studios operate in, to say this is a breath of fresh air is a vast understatement – it’s more like a menthol cyclone gusting right into your chops.

Luftrousers 3 out of Luftrousers 4

Hello!

  

So on to our second game, Minit. And to start with here’s a gaming confession: I’ve never played Majora’s Mask. Yes, I know it’s a classic, and it’s not like I don’t play Zelda games. It’s just I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘time loop’ subgenre for some reason. Similarly, I used to get really annoyed with the ‘do over’ style of Dead Rising meaning you had to bludgeon the same zombs over and over again. Just let me get on with new stuff, man!

Anyway, you might have guessed from that non sequitur that Minit features some sort of similar chrono-mechanic, and you’d be right. Only here, it’s taken to the extreme that each of your loops lasts a mere single minute (hence the title). But despite disliking it elsewhere, much to my surprise the time gimmick in Minit wasn’t offputting to me at all. 

Rendered in a super-retro black and white 8-bit style, which would see it fit in perfectly with the offerings on Devolver Bootleg, Minit sees you controlling a beak-faced little dude who makes the mistake of picking up a cursed sword that puts him in his 60-second replay hell. 

Whenever you die, and obviously that happens a LOT, you appear back at your base. But crucially if you solve a puzzle it stays solved – so doors stay open, bridges up, coins remain in your inventory etc., meaning you slowly make progress in opening up new areas to explore.

Having only a minute to do stuff obviously sounds like it would get annoying, and I confess I had my reservations at first. But puzzles are perfectly pitched so that it rarely takes more than a few loops to suss out what to do, plus after not too long you get access to new houses and teleporters, allowing you to travel a lot further and eke more out of your tiny time window.

The same thing happened to me last week. I found a cursed sandwich someone had dropped in the street, and ate it. Well, I assume it was cursed seeing as it gave me the runs.

In fact, given it’s a mobile game I’d go as far to say that marrying the short burst gameplay to progression of a longer ‘plot’ is genius, as it’s ideal for the format. You can’t lose too much progress if you’re interrupted by a call or you get to your stop on the bus and have to switch off, but you can still get a little bit further even if you literally only have a minute or so to play, as a minute is all you ever have to play with anyway.

The game also features what’s rapidly becoming the signature Devolver style – it’s all a bit daft, and while clearly made with a love of old-school 2D RPGs is also happy to gently take the mickey out of standard RPG tropes as well. Having to listen to a wise old man dispense information about treasure is standard fare – having to listen to one talk deliberately, painfully slowly when you only have a few seconds to live is infuriating, but still funny.

For a couple of quid it’s a steal – I’ve played more of Minit on my iPhone this week than I have my Switch or PS4, and I don’t even have the excuse of a commute. Some occasionally fiddly controls aside (and that’s more the limitations of touchscreens pretending to be joypads than much else), it’s a fun-size wee game that punches above its weight and is a perfect fit for on the go gaming. 

45 seconds out of a minute.

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