I promised a list of my top 10 games with a Metacritic score of 76 or under today, but that project ended up being a bit more labor intensive than I anticipated, so that list will now be coming Tuesday.
Instead, here is another gaming round up with some of the things I have new thoughts on. Fun fact, I still have not beaten a video game since I completed Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth on March 20th. I’m hoping I at least knock out one by the end of the month!
Ultros
While I have a few games that I have put “on hiatus” this year and may or may not go back to finish, Ultros is my first complete game abandonment of the year. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. Several people I respect really love this game, but it just did not work for me.
A lot of my problems with Ultros stem from the fact that it is actually a secret roguelite and not just a Metroidvania game, and that it doesn’t have fast travel (at least in the 4-5 hours I put in). Essentially, to progress through the game, you have to reset your progress multiple times as you go. This starts you back from scratch in terms of your abilities each time. You can explore and unlock ways to keep some of these skills between runs, which helps, but it is still a bit of a burden. The combat in the game is already pretty poor by itself, but it gets worse when you keep having to go back to nearly square one with the few extra abilities that you do get to fight with.
The way the game resets means you have to backtrack through the same areas multiple times as you play as well, which became really grating over time. In the first half of the game, Ultros forces you to go back through the exact same path each time you reset in order to get a couple of your basic abilities back. I thought this was super odd decision making, and it got more annoying every time I did it.
This whole process also diminishes the enjoyment of exploration a fair bit. While you can find those aforementioned items that let you keep some skills, unlocking the skill tree as a whole is not fun when you know you are mostly going back to 0 at some point. I also found myself punished if I explored too much and went in the wrong direction. A few times, I realized I went a way I shouldn’t have and had some very long backtracks to get back to where I wanted to go, thanks to the lack of fast travel. One of the several times this happened was when I finally decided that I was done with the game.
If you dig the art and the sort of psychadelic vibe, there is definitely a lot of cool stuff here, though. I never knew what weird thing was waiting for me in each new area, which I view as a good thing. I also did enjoy the standard Metroidvania exploration when I wasn’t going back through areas I had already explored. There is also an interesting gardening mechanic that helps you traverse the map more. Once again, because of all the backtracking, I found this more cumbersome than fun, but it is definitely unlike anything else I’ve seen in this genre.
It’s easy to look at trailers and think that it is is mostly a Metroidvania with a unique aesthetic, but this is actually one of the most bold Metroidvanias I have ever played from a gameplay perspective as well. Some will be enamored by this, and some, like me, will be annoyed by it. I did see the magic in spots, and maybe with a couple of quality of life changes, and with better fundamentals with combat and platforming, I would have been on board for the whole ride. But there was just too much for me personally to overcome to fully enjoy the cool things that are here. I don’t really “review” games that I don’t end up finishing, but I was probably at a 6/10 with Ultros.
Unicorn Overlord
This is my third time blogging about Unicorn Overlord. I have mostly been playing in 20-30 minute stretches when on the go, and I have had almost exclusively great things to say about it. One of my few complaints about the game has been the difficulty and how I haven’t felt super challenged by it.
After talking to a friend on Twitter, I realized that I should… increase the difficulty. Crazy concept, I know. I started this game so long ago that I honestly had forgotten about the difficulty settings in the game. I usually choose normal with these things, but with Unicorn Overlord, the “tactical” mode is a nice difficulty bump over normal without being too overwhelming.
In this mode, I’m still not finding enemies that I can’t overcome. My units and equipment are balanced enough where I can usually beat anyone eventually if I pair things up correctly, and perhaps throw a few of my mage and archer units in as support.
The real challenge here ends up being with the time limit. If you get too bogged down with some of the tougher foes, you can very easily run out of time. The game has special items that let you continue if time expires, which is nice because if this happened on one of the maps that takes an hour, it would be totally devastating. Because enemies are tougher on the tactical setting, it also means I have to manage my units stamina a little more, as if they fight too much, they can no longer move without rest or an item, and that leaves them vulnerable.
Once again, none of this is too overwhelming, and I’m mostly still making it through with only a few slip ups on time limits when I first amped things up. But that small change has caused me to be more engaged with this game than I have been since I started it. I have been increasingly choosing Unicorn Overlord as my main thing to play on certain nights, and while nothing is official yet, it might have just moved up to my current #2 on my game of the year rankings.
Harold Halibut
(This will contain some minor spoilers for the first few chapters of the game)
Harold Halibut is by far one of the most interesting games coming out this year. It is a narrative game that was in development for over a decade and was handcrafted with a claymation design. It is literally unlike any video game I have ever played in terms of its art and design.
After about 4 hours with the game, the wonder with this has started to wear out a little bit, but I still do occasionally stop and think to myself how crazy it is that a game like this exists.
As for the actual game itself, I’m currently deep into the second of six chapters, and I’m in a weird state of not being sure exactly how I feel. At times, I’m enchanted with the world or a specific character. At times, I’m intrigued with a main story development. Just as often I’m a bit bored with the mundane tasks the game keeps having me do.
There is a sequence in Chapter 2 where you discover evidence of some sort of mysterious conspiracy with the main big evil company in the game. From there, the game gives you a task to help someone with a computer in their attempts to combat what this company is doing. You end up being unsuccessful in fixing this computer issue. When you go back to the character you are trying to help, it ended up working right after you left anyway, so it didn’t matter. This little excursion didn’t lead to any real character development or other plot movement either, it was mostly a pointless excuse to maybe get you to have a conversation with a couple of random characters hanging around on the path you go on.
It seems like whenever the plot starts getting real momentum, they grind things to a halt and have you do something that feels useless. I suppose this is setting up the way Harold’s life is. He is kind of a sad guy who doesn’t have much going for him, but I think they’ve set that up just fine without having you trudge through the same corridors over and over.
The game does keep handing out little bits of mystery that have me legitimately interested in what is going to happen next, though. There are also some really cool conversations that randomly pop up that are pretty insightful and have some heartwarming moments. I love the side quest with the postman where you go back and read old, undelivered letters from the past that give you glimpses into the history of the ship you are on in particular. There are a couple of other cool characters that have some meaningful moments with Harold that I enjoyed as well. There are also a few other characters that are mostly weird and talk in circles, and I’ve started to find myself skipping through those conversations as fast as I can.
Usually, 4-5 hours into a game, I have a pretty good idea of how I’m going to end up feeling about it. With Harold Halibut, I truly have no idea. There are some issues here, but if the game gets a bit more focused with the plot as we get further in, it could end up being really special. I could see myself ending up anywhere between a 6.5/10 to a 9/10. Right now, I’d probably give it a 7.
Big Nerd Gaming 
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