Toby Fox keeps tutorialising mechanics as jokes or in very silly contexts and then paying them off in huge, dramatic ways and I fail to see it coming every time. I struggle to think of other games that so deftly use mechanics as both humour and storytelling device. And the game continues to just be really fun.

Plotwise, the tensions and mysteries that I assumed would simmer for most of the game are already threatening to boil over. The game really feels like it could go anywhere at this point and the two different paths of the story only feed this more, each painting a very different picture of Kris and the player’s relationship to them.

Also I love Susie.

The anniversary stream was very cute but pacifist Sans is just too annoying to fight. I finished that fight from Deltarune chapter three yesterday and that was incredibly difficult but fun but this is just infuriating. Which is, in fairness, very much in character.

Extremely cute little remake. Love to see something like this fit onto an actual NES.

This game continues to be wonderful. Up until the ending chapter three acts as a bit of a fun breather while also catching Susie and the inattentive player up on nature of darkners. I thought that Susie might have been strung along for a bit longer but there are such interesting tensions bubbling in this game now. It doesn’t seem likely that Susie is going to actually want to condemn darkners back to being mere objects and I really have no idea where the divide between Kris and the souls is going to lead.

But I actually started this chapter by continuing from my evil save file from chapter two. My snowgrave save file. I immediately wanted to know how that plotline continued and was handled. Is Berdly actually dead? How much is it going to be actually acknowledged? I suspected that these questions would probably be avoided and maybe only teased further at the end, putting off any closure on those questions into chapter four or five, but it goes even further and doesn’t acknowledge anything. After all, your choices don’t matter!

It is interesting how this handles both the player who is going through these chapter by chapter as the game comes out who knows all the secrets already, but also the theoretical player, a decade from now, divorced from the rabid fan speculation and Youtube videos dissecting every detail, who is simply playing through the finished game. The S-rank quest is much, much more signposted than snowgrave was but contains very obvious allusions to it. For those who have already played the weird route in the second chapter it’s a callback and a warning about what you might have to do in future if you want to keep getting stronger and for those who don’t it’s a strong hint that you missed something the last time around.

It is also interesting how it leads you down the dark path using the context of it being a game within the game. It even leads you in in a very gamey way, with the promise of a reward for clearing levels with the best possible ranking and then locking you into something more explicitly violent, but also more abstracted, than Deltarune itself is. There’s no dialogue, no real characters, just a sword and some enemies. I’ve read someone talking about refusing to use snowgrave but talking themselves into completing Mantle because, hey, it’s only a game and doesn’t seem like it will have further consequences on the plot. And yes, it is of course only a game, just like Deltarune is. And this circles back to the treatment of darkners as not being “real” people. When you’re talking to them as characters in the dark world they certainly seem as real as Susie and Kris, who are of course also not real. They are all just characters in a video game, toys and stories for our amusement. But people feel very strongly about them and are genuinely worried about where the plot is going and what might happen to them. And me? I am very interested.

That said, when I go on to chapter four I don’t think I will continue my evil playthrough first. As Ramb reminds us games are meant to be fun and in my first playthrough of chapter three I was worrying trying to puzzle out what the weird route might be and if I might have locked myself out of it. That only served to blinker me and stop me from giving the chapter the curious exploration that Deltarune rewards so much.

Neal has once again swallowed my morning with one of his little games. Cute little thing, made me smile and curse in equal measure. Much like real CAPTCHAs often do a bunch of these minigames push you to actually behave more robotically to prove you are actually a human. The easiest way to solve the chess game is of course to load up the best chess bot you have access to and play as black against it, copying the moves from one game into another and for the maths puzzle I did first try to make order of magnitude estimations for each number, assuming that they would be pretty wildly variant, only to realise that the numbers were much, much closer together in value than I initially anticipated and just using Wolfram Alpha to solve them instead. I also looked up a guide on how to solve sliding block puzzles because I hate them.

The final boss rhythm game was a bastard, too. I had great trouble mentally mapping ⏶⏷⏴⏵ onto the actual physical layout of my arrow keys ␤. I was tempted to start trying to figure out how to temporarily remap four adjacent keys on my keyboard to get through it. Moving to using up and down on the arrow keys with my left hand and left and right on the numpad with my right hand did help and I eventually got it.

This game proved to be an extremely welcome distraction during a very difficult time, a lovely way to hang out with a dear friend, and just a really fun game.

A survival crafting game set not in an open world but in an interconnected facility in the vain of System Shock that you slowly unlock over the course of the game. The GATE Cascade Research Facility is, shamelessly, Black Mesa with a coat of paint. The game does not try to hide its influences at all, with one of the two character voice options being Gianni Matragrano doing his best impression of Harry S. Robins as a Half-Life scientist. Thankfully the character creator does not lock any options behind a choice of genders so I was able to pick that voice for my scientist while choosing a more feminine appearance. Look, voice training is hard.

I am not normally one for survival games or a heavy focus on crafting, they tend to be too directionless for me, but the metroidvania-like progression of slowly unlocking more and more of the map appeals to me a lot. Early on the rhythm of it reminded me a bit of the early Resident Evils; having a home base as a save haven to return to and resupply while planning out excursions into unknown dangers, planning out what limited resources to bring with me. Taking more weapons, more ammunition, more healing supplies with me is safer, but means having much less room in my limited inventory to bring things back.

And then your base expands, your toolset expands, your knowledge of what you are up against expands, and you grow more bold and more capable. The crafting elements are more than I would normally enjoy juggling but the structured nature of the game allows everything to be introduced at a slow and steady pace and its up to you how much you push forward into danger versus how much time you spend gathering and harvesting resources and building up your base and supplies.

There were a few frustrating difficult spikes in the middle to late game playing in early access, but the release update added an item upgrade system that should hopefully even that out.

As you unlock more of the base you unlock shortcuts to previous areas, the map is very interconnected, and a fast travel system that is very charming to anyone with a fondness for Half-Life: A series of Black Mesa Inbound-esque tram rides that interweave the sprawling facility (many of which can be traversed even faster with a deliciously overpowered long jump module you can get later in the game).

Unsurprisingly, the GATE facility has gone to hell as creatures from another world have started pouring in. It doesn’t take that long for you to visit this game’s Xen, here called Anteverse II, but after that it starts to reveal other influences. The second portal takes you to something jarring in that it is a much more human setting: Flathill, a small American town blanketed in fog clearly inspired by Silent Hill and The Mist. These self-contained portal worlds serve as linear levels exploring different gameplay concepts within the more open structure of GATE and also as renewable sources of supplies as you loot and clear out more and more of the facility. And as you do that you start to see that labs are taking after the SCP Foundation as much as they are Black Mesa.

The game has its own catalogue of “immurement registry” objects, which encompasses not just the aliens you are fighting but such things as an arcade machine that sucks you into the game itself; a creature that is only visible to the person it is stalking and will disappear if stared at for long enough; a cube that reduces gravity in the area around it and many things that have no gameplay effect and only exist as in readable journal entries or props with no special function such as a table that causes everyone who sees it to hate it or inexplicable yellow paint that seems to manifest to guide people who are lost.

The journal entries and email exchanges that you can read are often very fun, foreshadowing upcoming enemies, revealing plot threads, showing daily life in a mad science lab and often just being very funny. The exchanges between the Gatekeepers—the ostensible security forces for GATE who have taken to using all the various otherworldly and occult resources the organisation studies for themselves, becoming more and more inhuman and strange as they become stronger—and the normal research staff are particularly delightful, as are random exchanges about Doom and the W.W.F.

I played through this with one other friend and while there is a singleplayer mode I feel that the game would probably drag significantly more without more than one pair of hands and more than one backpack to fill up when scavenging and managing resources. More than two would probably have been ideal but also it’s not a game where you will want to miss sessions where the group is exploring new areas or progressing the story and every person you add is going to make organising sessions more complicated, but if you can get a group for it I highly recommend exploring the Garrick Advanced Technology Enterprises Cascade Research Facility with some friends.

A gorgeous little object that I am glad to have a physical copy of. A lot of care has gone into this from the already lovely “base” version. The colourised sprites, the rainbow gradient pages with their dithered backgrounds, the clay models. Just a perfect little guidebook for a game that does not exist.

Technically I watched a friend play this but I am going to count it. Honestly this was probably the better way to experience it because I don’t like the free roaming randomly generated structure as much as something more directed like Franken. Still an unbelievably charming and sweet little world to explore. I am also very taken with sproutbug in spite of it being one of the more basic creatures. I am a girl of simple tastes.

Extremely funny and charming game. Great sense of how to play off the RPG tropes for comedy in a loving way and some expertly deployed cursing. The Cerberus boss sprite is probably my favourite joke in the whole thing.

Very interesting tradeoff with having to hold off using your most direct means of self defence against hostile fish to capture higher value targets instead. It plays very well into the tension of having to try to scour the level quickly to reach the designated score within the time limit but with sloppiness resulting in added time penalties.

Channelling the spirit of a 00s game reviewer: The scariest thing about this game is the controls!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tagline of “haunted house simulator” really does fit as this game has no ideas beyond walking through a series of corridors with the occasional jumpscare and that walking is so, so painful. I am a fan of gimmicky control systems and motion controls but this game feels like trudging through syrup at all times, inching towards the next inevitable jumpscare that will arbitrarily trigger the level to progress until Kayako finally puts you out of your misery.

There are parts of this that almost work as a budget, janky version of Sonic Rush. The boost works, the art is rather nice and the renditions of Unleashed level music are surprisingly good. But then there are no sound effects and the music cuts out after a few seconds (I don’t know if that’s an emulation problem or if the game is just like that) and you run into the brick wall that is the utter shambles of the jump physics and collision detection that makes platforming in this game barely manageable. I guess it’s impressive that this ran on mobile phones at all but it constantly feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

It is, mercifully, short. Only four of the locations from Sonic Unleashed are here and all the hub worlds and everything else extraneous is gone. Even the plot is barely there. There are some brief bits of dialogue at the start of levels between Sonic and Chip that are lines taken from the main gain, divorced from their original context. Other than that there all there is is some interstitial titles between levels that were clearly written by someone who was not given much if any guidance on what the story in the game is meant to be. It refers to Sonic in werehog form as just “Werehog” as if it was a name and talks about Sonic going to “Athens, Greece” instead of Apotos (which is actually based on Mykonos) even though the title cards for levels actually do use the made up names for these places, correctly calling it Apotos. This itself is weird because that’s not the name for the level in the console versions of the game, that’s the name of the hub area. The level is actually meant to be called Windmill Isle! The ending screen also just goes on a weird ramble that “We cannot live without the night, we all must sleep, we all must rest. Darkness is a part of our world, just as much as light.” Sure, great!

One last funny note is that after you beat each boss you get a Chaos Emerald. You might think that this means you are going to get all seven before you fight the final boss and there will be a Super Sonic section, but when you get to the final boss you only have five of them and then after defeating it the game just gives you two more and then ends.

It’s always interesting to see different takes on the same core idea. I knew when Unleashed Recompiled was released that I would be playing this alongside that fancy new PC port of the XBox 360 version. This Wii version takes the core concepts of the game and executes them in very different ways and it’s a lot better than I expected!

Being the budget version of the game a lot of fat is trimmed. Hub areas in each country are replaced with a more visual novel-style menu interface, using static renders of locations and characters from the PS360 version for visuals. This saves some time compared to running around and talking to people in the other version but is still tedious and fiddly and you do have to talk to people a lot more to progress. There is one part in particular after getting to Spagonia and Mazuri where you keeping having to go back and forth talking to different characters and watching cutscenes (FMVs that also use the in-engine cutscenes from the PS360 version as pre-rendered assets) for so long that I was begging the game to just let me play a level.

But when I actually got to play the levels they are quite fun! I actually prefer the werehog in this game to the PS360 version. There are motions controls if you would like, and it is fairly charming to do left and right hooks to attack or swing your arms rapidly to climb, but they are a bit much to play the whole game with, especially when there there is also fairly involved movement and platforming on top of it, but the game offers full support for the Gamecube or classic controller too. Even on the more standard control scheme the left and right punch are still bound to separate buttons. This is probably a holdover from the motion controls but I honestly enjoy it. It means you have to alternate left and right shoulder buttons to do combos making it just that little bit more engaging than just mashing attack repeatedly. Enemies also mercifully die much faster in this version.

I also quite like the werehog’s general movement. There is a real feel of weight and momentum in the way you skid while turning when running (even if having to double tap a direction to run is fiddly) and I also like you hold X to grab things rather than just tapping it. It gives you that little feeling that you’re gripping onto it yourself.

The night stages are also divided up into sets of three smaller acts rather than one big level. This puts them in more manageable chunks and means you lose less from a game over (which are a bit more likely in this version, more on the lives system later). Each act also takes place is a pretty distinct area. In Dragon Road (set in Chun-nan, based on China) the first area takes place in an area with lots of shrines and pagodas, similar to the PS360 version of the stage, but the two subsequent acts have you ascending a waterfall and then running across the Great Wall.

For the daytime stages the motion controls stop being a fun gimmick and are really just a hindrance, but the control scheme for more standard controls work just fine. The day stages are an interesting and very different take on the boost gameplay. How that should work was not set in stone yet and it feels like a real road not taken for how the series could have worked. Boost being discrete bursts of speed rather than a meter you drain continuously was strange to me at first but works pretty well. You really have to think much more about timing when to boost because you are committing to it and it can send you off a cliff that you can’t stop running towards. That along with the system where you are rewarded with boost for action chains and drifting feels like the game really rewards constant activity and hitting everything in the level just right. Rings upgrading your boost gauge with extra charges also gives more incentive not to just collect rings but hold on to them which later games don’t really do. It’s really rhythmic and intense in a different way to the boost formula I’m more familiar with. I am a bit tired of these games at the moment but I’ve definitely tempted to come back and practise the daytime levels more and get to grips with what a perfectly executed level feels like in this game.

I did think the game was a bit unforgiving with lives, only giving you three attempts at a level before a game over with no way to collect more, but what I had missed is that extra lives are actually a permanent upgrade in this game that you have to get elsewhere, but once you get an extra life you have that extra life for every subsequent level that you play. This is what the sun and moon medals are for in this game; they don’t gate progress like in the PS360 version. They also aren’t found through exploring, not directly at least. They are gotten through getting good performance in levels. For daytime levels this does just mean going as quickly as possible and beating certain par times. For the nighttime levels though there are three separate criteria for earning them for each level: You get one for beating the level under a certain time, one for getting enough “force” (experience points, basically) which can be found in high amounts throughout capsules hidden in little nooks and side areas—thus making those medals your reward for exploration—and one for getting enough rings, which just means being careful to hoover them up as you progress normally. This gives you some leeway in how to play levels if you still want to get some sun medals without worrying about getting them all.

What the sun and moon levels gate in this version is side areas in temples with extra puzzles. These puzzles require you to change back and forth between hedgehog and werehog and use their different movesets to peal back the layers of the puzzle in a way that you never do in the other versions of the game. And it is optional, though one might struggle in the last few levels without the extra lives. I certainly did before I realised that I had missed this entire system.

The final boss is also better in this version I think. Certainly the Punch-Out section is more fun than the equivalent part from the PS360 version. The Super Sonic part is a bit dull but certainly a lot less janky than those parts often are in this series.

Like its alternative version this is not without major flaws but I was surprised by how much more I want to go back to and fully get to grips with this version, this different angle on the series.

It’s interesting playing this after Shadow Generations; going back to the first boost game after the most recent one. They landed on a winning formula but there has been some clear and needed refinement over the years. The boost, homing attack and air dash all being the same button is a less than ideal and it lacks a good way to half your momentum quickly, the stomp transitioning into a slide when you’re moving quickly rather than stopping you dead line in later games. But it’s at its core familiar and fun territory for the day stages. Very familiar, actually, as I’ve played all of these levels before in Sonic Generations through mods and only now am experiencing them in their original context. It’s an interesting! There are definitely some gaps in the version presented by the Unleashed Project mod where the toolkit available to Sonic Generations modders could not replicate the original gameplay. On the other hand the original versions have fiddly and surprisingly unforgiving quick time events, so there are trade-offs whichever way one plays these levels.

For the night stages Sonic the Werehog is fairly fun. To begin with anyway. As the game wears on the combat increasingly overstays its welcome and while the platforming challenges can offer a breather they are generally not very interesting. Thankfully Unleashed Recompiled includes an option to turn off the battle music which helps with one of the more irritating aspects of the night levels. As a final nitpick I found the fact that all these Eggman’s robots and Dark Gaia monsters just hang out together and apparently work together in the night stages very odd. It feels like there should be a stronger dichotomy between the two types of enemies or even having them fight each other. Watching monster infighting is always fun!

Levels of both types can be pretty mean with bottomless pits and the like but the developers seemed to have at least noticed this and often put extra lives shortly after checkpoints before difficult sections.

Outside of the core gameplay the game does leave a lot to be desired. The world tour was a cute idea but the execution is tedious and a bit racist. It’s hard to ignore how western countries get towns and cities with levels that have you running through streets with human inhabitants, while elsewhere has small villages that you quickly leave to run through empty ruins (which you are also smashing up a fair bit), any significant construction or urban civilisation in these places being relegated to ancient history. When you arrive in Mazuri, based off Mali and other parts of Africa, you find yourself in a mudhut village devoid of any modern technology other than Eggman’s invading robots and one of the first people there you can speak to says something to the effect of “You’re looking for a professor. What’s that? Sounds tasty!” The one blessing is that when people are voiced they all just have American accents rather than any attempts to imitate different nationalities.

Even aside from all that going around and talking to people in general is a pain. Hub areas are littered with people but Sonic moves so sluggishly in them and no one ever has anything interesting to say, but there are times when you have to go around and mash buttons to advance their dialogue to the end in order to progress. That or go back to Professor Pickle’s lab fifty times only for him to tell you to go back to where you just were. It was only very late in the game that I realised that sometimes NPCs will give you challenge missions so there is actually reason to talk to them beyond reading them say inane crap. The fact that I had stopped talking to them whenever I didn’t have to meant I had probably missed a lot of those and did not help with my medal deficit.

You have to collect sun and moon medals to unlock stages and progress in the game. These are found scattered around both hub areas and levels and as long as you keep an eye out for them and make sure to collect them you can keep ahead of requirements for most of the game. I knew this going in and tried to be diligent but I still ended up hitting a brick wall on getting to Adabat (based on Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia) I had to go grind for sun medals for while before I could continue, which was tiresome and not helped by the fact that you can’t find medals or other collectables if you do the time trial or other challenge versions of levels, which at least might have let you do the grind with some more variety.

The plot is fairly insubstantial and dotted with comic relief characters who fail to ever be funny. Chip is Scrappy-Doo with pixie wings and proto-Orbot is even more annoying, ergo every cutscene with him in it is a pain to listen to, ergo I was annoyed every time I saw him, ergo I wish he wasn’t in this game.

Returning to the gameplay, the final level having you swap between both gameplay styles might have been cute if it was doing anything interesting with that, but it really is just day section, night section, day section repeatedly with one point where you can take a shortcut to stay in a day section for longer. I might have been tempted to replay the day parts if there was a way to do only them as it seems to have an interesting degree of branching paths that give it a feeling of semi-openness not seen in the rest of the game, but I do not want to go through the werehog sections of it again.

The final boss is… not the worst for a Sonic game. It’s passable. Like a lot of other things there’s some interesting ideas there that are lacking in execution.

For all its flaws this game did lay down a very solid foundation for the series going forward. Most of what is good about it was refined through future games and the worst parts of it were left by the wayside.

Surprising that this had an option for your shout of “no!” to be in Irish, and not just because it’s a minority language in a small country. There isn’t actually a direct word for no in Irish, so they went with «ní dhéanfaidh mé é», “I will not do it”. This does highlight how the word no is used in a bunch of different contexts in the game. It is often used to refuse a task, which this translation makes sense for, but it is also used to answer questions and other contexts where «ní dhéanfaidh mé é» doesn’t really make sense, and I wonder do any of the nos offered for other language don’t always make sense in context in the game.

Though honestly even shouting “no” in English sometimes felt like it didn’t really fit as a response. I was often waiting for dialogue to get to a point where shouting no fit in naturally, but it quickly becomes apparent that there is no point in doing this. Really this is just a game with a button to advance dialogue that also plays a sound effect and it does shockingly little with the idea.

Every once in a while you will be stopped to do a tutorial on how to do a different style of no, which sets up the expectation that these matter in some way but they do not; they are purely for a little bit of extra self-expression. That might have been a cute little bit of player controlled flair but the fact that they keep stopping everything to give me tutorials on something utterly pointless soured me on them. The control scheme for them also seems needless complicated. Why have them as different modes you have to toggle between with the d-pad? Why not just have them on the four different face buttons? None of the other face buttons do anything anyway so you could have just let them free for that. There is a shocking amount of tutorials to sit through in this game that has absolutely no mechanical depth. Maybe that was intended to be a joke in and of itself? Well it falls about as flat as most of the humour in the game, then.

The one little bit of mechanical choice is the decision to not shout no sometimes, which lets you progress some little mini scenes. These are cute but also they then run out of ideas for what to do with them and repeat the same staring contest joke five times.

Okay I’ve been enough of a grump. This is a short game with a cute idea and I do really like the Mega Man Legends-esque aesthetic and really liked the character creator. It’s okay.

This was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously. Despite the medieval fantasy facelift the game feels immediately familiar and charming but with a lot of thoughtful tweaks and changes to systems to make them fresh and more engaging.

I am very fond of the critical hit system making unit placement and countering much more thoughtful than a simple rock paper scissors approach of damage types and weaknesses.

I also quite like them sticking to the idea of making the different commander units representative of the different infantry types in the game to the point of having a dog commander.

The problem, though, is that this was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously and as part of that they tried to actually make it balanced! I don’t want balance, I want fun little weirdos with ridiculous abilities bouncing off of each other!

Every army is the same other than their commander, without even any passive buffs. Where is the guy who gets bonuses for roads? The guy whose artillery sucks shit but gets super buffed spearmen or something? I understand that they wanted to create a viable multiplayer game but I am just here for the story mode.

I mentioned that the commanders are based off the different types of infantry but even then they all have the exact same stats and only differ in their charge-up ability. The dog doesn’t behave like a dog unit, the vampire doesn’t behave like a vampire unit, they are all just super-footsoldiers. It’s a real shame.

And of course the other problem with this being made by Advance Wars sickos is that the difficulty is skewed pretty highly. I don’t think it’s massively unreasonable but it was harder than I expected and I certainly didn’t want to replay everything on hard to grind out stars, which you need to do to unlock the completely unreasonably gated final level. I ended up just downloading a completed save file to play it and honestly it wasn’t even that difficult.

This is the skeleton of a functioning Sonic the Hedgehog game under this that you can sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of before the mess of bad decisions piled on top of it re-asserts itself.

The addition of weapons is not inherently a bad thing, I enjoy the Gamma stages in Sonic Adventure, and having auto-lockon guns to blast stuff with as you run through a level is fun, and the way the rage mode gives you infinite ammo that lets you keep firing as long as you can destroy enough to keep your meter filled can be a cute little balancing act sometimes.

The weapons that don’t lock on are borderline unusable, though. Aiming is difficult at the best of times with these controls and rockets seem to have a habit of going straight through enemies and hitting a wall behind them and mêlée weapons are not something that works in conjunction with contact damage and knockback on hit. There is a reason that Freedom Planet excised those things from the basic formula.

But those are petty and mostly avoidable problems compared to the mission system. The Reloaded mod tries to smooth out some of the tedium but it does not solve the fundamental problems with it.

The levels are largely designed like Sonic the Hedgehog levels (and are often pretty fun when played like ones) with a linear structure but with some branching paths and shortcuts, shortcuts that you absolutely cannot use if you are trying to do missions because you will skip over a bunch of the sixty fucking individual soldiers you need to kill in order to do the dark mission so you can explore more branches of the story than the neutral pathway.

Absolutely no consideration seems to have been made for the mission system and branching story structure. The chaos control power is entirely useless to you if you are doing any mission other than the neutral one as it will simply skip you past your objectives. You must disengage with much of the games mechanics and rewards systems in order to experience more than half of the game.

The branching story structure that this is in service of doesn’t seem to have any consideration put into it at all either. The same cutscene will often play at the end of a level regardless of which mission you did, the CIA mainframe will be hacked regardless of if you did that mission or not, the events of any previous level are never mentioned because they all just exist in complete isolation and make no reference to anything that came before. Every character will act surprised that you are not doing what they say at all times regardless of if you have spent the entire playthrough so far ignoring them.

The path where you only do hero missions is really emblematic of this. Black Doom will continue giving orders that he apparently expects Shadow to obey till the end, despite Shadow not having listened to him once. But Shadow himself is similarly ridiculous on this path, which contains the infamous line “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me!” On the path where you only do the good missions! This path also has you fight the Black Bull boss twice. Surely it should have been obvious that this would be a path that many if not most players would end up doing and that it shouldn’t have the same boss fight twice on it.

Another path that stood out to me is the neutral path, which alternates level themes between ancient ruins and overgrown jungle tech base which made it feel like you were going backwards repeatedly with Glyphic Canyon, Prison Island, Sky Troops and then Iron Jungle. It really gives the impression that levels were made and then just randomly distributed between the different story paths without any thought whatsoever.

And of course the structure of this requires you to replay the same levels over and over in order to explore branches that you haven’t done yet. The Reloaded mod at least allowed me to not have to play Westopolis ten times just to unlock Last Story but the five times I had to play it to be able to at least play every level once was still far too much.

And yet it’s still sometimes actually quite fun. It’s very frustrating to have this core game that is enjoyable but with a mountain of shit piled on top of it that consistently gets in the way of satisfaction.

Expert mode almost fixes these problems, simply offering the levels one after the other, mostly just letting you play them by getting to the end without having to worry about missions, but then throws in some blatantly unfair changes to some levels on top of removing continues entirely.

Overall I still somehow feel positively about this game but I am not going to go back to it any time soon.

Very fun dive into a bunch of absolute messes. Being divorced from the plot of the comic it’s based on means it’s quite self-contained but also that it gives a deeper view into a bunch of characters who don’t get as much time dedicated to them in the main work and it is impressive how the different story threads interweave and play off each other depending on the order you do them in and which paths you take.

The most important thing this game layers onto the Sonic the Hedgehog template is versatile movesets for each character that gives huge breath for improvisation and recovery, allowing more room for keeping the flow going as one glides through levels.

The tools each of the four characters are also very different from each other, each resulting in their own style of movement and their own challenges in different levels.

The movesets also result in fun, expressive combat. The game has thirty-two levels and all of them have bosses to fight (though some levels are just boss fights) and some of them are really gratifying to bang one’s head against a few times till finally getting how to read and dodge and counter them.

A few other tweaks from its erinaceous roots like lack of contact damage or knockback help to keep the pace of both the running and fights smooth even if you do fuck up a bit and make the whole thing extremely satisfying.

An incredibly satisfying short and sweet little mini-shooter that I found myself looping over and over again.

There is an incredible satisfaction in nailing a level of Sonic and/or Shadow Generations. It often feels almost as much like a rhythm game as a platformer, giving you that steady flow of obstacles to react to as you start off sight-reading and then eventually memorising the feel and flow of the stages, with plenty of alternate paths and shortcuts to tease out as well.

The contextual DOOM POWERS add extra layers to this for specific levels and Shadow turning into a squid now or using evil HM03 Surf is just kind of funny to see and Shadow’s chaos control power adds an interesting element of resource management to every stage as well, especially if you are trying to get the fastest possible speedrun time as, hilariously, when Shadow stops time he also stops the level timer.

The music is, like the levels, composed of banger remix after banger remix. I am listening to Space Colony ARK Act 1 as I write this and I will probably be listening to it a lot in the future.

The writing was also a surprisingly highlight. The plot is fairly simple but Ian Flynn uses the giant Sonic lore vault in his mind to weave different threads together in interesting and funny ways without coming across as fan wank. There’s a lot of references to past games but there’s usually some sort of point to it rather than saying “hey look at this thing!” and the supplementary material around the game with the Robotnik family history makes me hope Flynn or Evan Stanley get to explore Ivo Robotnik’s relationship to his family more in the comics or a future game. And the way the third boss was handled is so funny.

It’s good.