I used to be really bad about completing games. I’d abandon at least 50% of the games I played for most of my life. There were a few reasons for this. Part of it is how often I used to have to emulate back in the day. It’s just so easy to turn away from a game when you haven’t invested anything in it and when hundreds of other games are waiting for you at any point.
Another is that I hadn’t discovered the wonders of game hopping yet. When I got my Xbox Series X in 2021 and started playing around with quick resume, in addition to almost exclusively buying digital games at that point, it really changed everything for me. Suddenly, stopping one game and booting up another wasn’t a hassle anymore. It was instantaneous. If I feel myself getting frustrated with a game or tired of it, I just move on to a different game for the time being. Because of this, I’m never sick of gaming, and I finish more games than ever before. Sometimes, it’s a much slower process, obviously, but it works great for me. Game hopping rules!
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t abandon games anymore. There seem to be multiple good games coming out every week these days. It’s almost impossible to keep up. I still want to finish every game I play, even if I don’t love it, but sometimes, I just can’t do it. Sometimes, I enjoy a game and still don’t finish it for one reason or another as well.
I’ve officially made the decision to end my time with four different games over the past few months. I hadn’t really written much about several of these, so grouping them together for a gaming roundup made sense. Here are some brief thoughts on all of them.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Fantasy Life i is definitely the most hyped “cozy” game this year. It comes from a big-time developer (Level-5), and it has a giant world with tons of stuff to do it in it. There’s a main story path, an open world area, and a town you can build up. There are also 14 different “lives” (I’m going to call them jobs from this point forward because the “lives” designation annoys me). Each of these jobs have their own skill tree, and you can switch between them at will. There are combat jobs, gathering jobs, and crafting jobs. So you can go heavy on just woodcutting for a while if you really want to as an example. You can also switch at will, so you can fight some foes, mine some ore, and then blacksmith if you wish.
The open world also has sections that you can level up to make stronger as you go along. Essentially, there is a lot of “numbers go up” type of stuff going on. If you like that feeling of a level up, I can assure you that you will get a lot of it here.
I’m definitely someone who likes to see the numbers go up. Cozy games often don’t need as many standard RPG elements since your progress is so tangible with building up farms/houses/whatever, but I love it when they actually lean into it a bit more. So Fantasy Life i seemed like an easy pick for me to play.
For about 8 hours, I was very into this game. I had a few issues, but I was enamored with all there was to do.
But then I suddenly just hit a point where it just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.
First off, the main story is just not great. Yes, it’s not exactly a game where I’d expect a great story, but there seems to be way too much effort put into it for how bad it is. I think kids will get a kick out of the poop jokes (and maybe some adults, too), but it wasn’t for me. I slowly started to wear out on the main story from a gameplay perspective too, as it became clear the further I went that the only use for it was mostly to introduce every area in the game. When the main story introduced the open world, for example, I was excited to see what they would do with it. But the main story just kind of abandons it and goes in other directions after that intro.
The game’s combat is OK, but it wore out its welcome for me quickly. The way the game assigns different combat roles as “jobs” holds things back a fair bit. I think it would have been more fun if I could swap between using different weapons a little easier. You also don’t have a lot of options within each combat job, so there’s mostly a lot of button mashing with each encounter. I’d say the combat is better than what you will find in most cozy games, but this game also can be pretty combat heavy, so even though it’s good for the genre, I didn’t think it was good enough. I kind of felt the same about the non-combat jobs, too. A lot of them are a little too similar and aren’t as interesting to perform as you’d hope.
I also felt like the progress on getting new things for my town was kind of slow. All of the leveling up just kind of felt like empty calories to me. I was leveling up to get stronger in combat or get stronger gear, but combat isn’t that hard and wasn’t that great, so I wasn’t feeling all that rewarded. The things I had found to build up the town more hadn’t really paid off at all to that point either, so that also wasn’t quite doing it for me.
I still think Fantasy Life i is a really incredible game in a lot of ways, and I understand why so many people love it. Maybe if I powered through, I would have made some progress, and things would have turned for me. But the game can be a real timesink if you really want to dive into it, and I felt like the odds were that it wasn’t going to turn around for me, so I stopped. I was absolutely addicted for a little bit, so I’d still give the game a 7/10, but I was hopeful that this would be closer to an 8.5 or even a 9 when I was really into it, so it’s definitely disappointing that I ended up here with it, even though 7 isn’t a bad score. There is a lot of good stuff here, but there’s an old school JRPG grind to it that wore me out.
The Siege and the Sandfox
The Siege and the Sandfox is a stealth and platforming Metroidvania. I’m a huge Metroidvania guy, and this game had some pretty good critic reviews and a unique premise, so I had to try it out.
The biggest strength of the game for me was the parkour style platforming. You get a fairly decent array of platforming abilities, and the game throws some fun scenarios at you where you have to string them all together. It looks very cool, and they are satisfying to pull off.
The stealth elements of the game don’t fare quite as well. There’s a reason that stealth is a lot more prominent in 3D games than 2D games. There’s always going to be inherently a little less depth to the proceedings with the 2D format. But Siege and the Sandfox barely even tried to make their stealth interesting. You have next to no abilities beyond taking out lights and hiding in crates and such. There is also an indicator for how much noise you are making to monitor. Beyond that, expect to spend a lot of time just waiting around for enemies to walk past. Once in a while, if enemies get alerted and their patterns become off, it became almost impossible to get past certain areas without alerting them again because of the lack of tools. There is also no hiding bodies mechanic. It’s almost shocking how barebones it is. Of course, there can still be exciting moments, but I really wished there was more to it.
If the game was just a 2D linear stealth and platforming game, I think it would have been a 7/10 for me. The game has a cool atmosphere, fun platforming, and as lackluster as the stealth is, it was also (mostly) painless. Unfortunately, the game’s biggest flaw is that it decided to be a Metroidvania.
Your main goal is to explore the map and unlock all of your platforming abilities so you can get to the top of the map. The game is very mediocre at giving you direction as to where to go, so you just have to explore and hope for the best. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get pretty deep into an area of the map, and then realize that you don’t have the proper skills to progress any further. The game is pretty damn sparse on its fast travel points, so this leads to a lot of backtracking. Enemies seem to respawn pretty quickly after you leave an area, so you end up having to contend with them again after you just dealt with them when this happens. This makes the backtracking even more annoying than it already would be. Outside of these core abilities, there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit to exploring extra either. There are no side upgrades in the game that make anything easier, so the exploration was never rewarded the way it is in most Metroidvanias.
I think I was something like 85% through the game, when I realized that I had explored in the wrong area, and was going to have to do another really long backtrack, and I was just done. It’s brutal to abandon a game where you are so close to the end, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.
The Siege and the Sandfox is one of many games that felt the need to be a Metroidvania without fully understanding what makes these games fun. I think this developer has some talent, and I think if they take some of the lessons from this game into their next one, they are on the path to making something pretty cool. I did have fun in spots with this game, but I had plenty more frustrations as well. I’d give it a 6/10.
Hell Clock
Getting review codes for games is something I do not take for granted. It’s always really cool to be able to play games early and then provide my thoughts on them.
But sometimes, it has consequences. I’ve encountered some pretty bad bugs in review copies, and bad design decisions often get fixed after feedback from the reviewers themselves. Sadly, Hell Clock is a victim of this for me.
Hell Clock is essentially a mash up of ARPGs and roguelites. So it’s a game about creating great builds, but it also has really fun roguelite progression. Early on, I was very impressed with how robust the progression system was in particular. There are a lot of ways to build up your character here, and every run felt rewarding because of that.
I was able to make a build that got me through the first act of the game and part of the second act. I had a move that dropped a giant bell on my enemies and equipment that also gave me extra skeleton soldiers every time I used that bell. My build felt very cohesive, and it was working. Combat was also very satisfying, with nice enemy variety, satisfying animations and sound design, and chaotic situations.
My main complaints were that I felt like certain moves weren’t useful enough. You get a gun in the game, but you can only shoot it while stationary. I tried really hard to make a build around the gun, but the lack of mobility made it really tough to use guns in any sort of enclosed situation. The game also gets some bad slowdown whenever things get really intense. But beyond that, I was still having a great time with it.
Unfortunately, as I got around halfway through the game, things started to grind to a halt. I ran into bosses that were taking me over 10 minutes to beat, despite the game’s loading screens saying boss encounters should be quick. At this point, the game’s progression was slowing down a bit, so while I was still getting stronger, it seemed like it was going to be a while before I took down some of these bosses faster, and was able to get through the act within the time limit. So I started playing it a little less, but I still had plans to finish it.
While I was taking a break with the game, I got a note from the developers saying that they made a mistake with their balancing. They realized that they had set it up so that only true ARPG sickos would be able to get through everything with the flow they wanted the game to have. I’m definitely no ARPG sicko, but I am used to making builds in plenty of other genres. I had a build that really made sense, but even then, I was also having a hard time progressing with the game the way the developers likely wanted me to. Regardless, the devs were now calling the mode I was in “veteran mode,” and they also made an easier mode that would make more sense for roguelite fans.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to change my current save file to this new mode. I still decided I was going to push through on the “veteran mode” though, as I was still having a really good time with the game, and felt like I could make it through with some persistence.
Sadly, the patch also seemed to nerf my favorite move and gave it a several second cooldown when it had almost no cooldown before. Admittedly, this move seemed way more powerful than anything else for my entire time with the game, but suddenly, I had taken a huge step backward and felt like I needed to rework everything. I just wasn’t up to it at that point. I hate replaying games, so I also had no desire to start a new file on the new difficulty, so I called it quits.
If I started Hell Clock today, I probably would have ended up playing it until completion. I think the combat is fun, and the progression is great. I had the game at an 8.5 for a good chunk of my 13 or so hours with the game until the very end. Sadly, the balancing now has me rating the game as an 8 for my personal experience. However, if you like ARPGs or roguelites, I really think you should give this a go, and I recommend trying out the easier difficulty.
Lynked: Banner of the Spark
We have another roguelite that combines itself with another genre here. Lynked: Banner of the Spark wants to give you a cozy townbuilding experience combined with roguelite progression. You go out on missions, recruit new people to your town, build things up, and improve your character.
I loved the idea so I went ahead and bought it. It had some pretty good reviews at that point as well.
Sadly, after not much more than 3 hours, I just wasn’t feeling it. I’m not going to go into too much detail as I didn’t spend that much time with it, but everything here feels generic as hell. The art style and characters are dull. The combat is very simple, especially for a combat heavy game, and the town building just wasn’t particularly satisfying. The roguelite progression wasn’t really doing it for me either.
The combat, in particular, was disappointing, as I was encountering slowdown everywhere. As I talked about with Fantasy Life i, sometimes if you push through on a game like this, you can reach a point where everything clicks more, but I saw almost no potential for that here. The game is definitely competent enough in plenty of ways, so I’d still give it a 6/10 after my few hours, but I had no desire to push through any further.
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