Review – Stately Play

Review: SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

May 1, 2019 Tanner Hendrickson 1

Switch This is a very hard review to write. It’s one thing to be let down by a game you’re excited for but quite another when it’s so excruciatingly close to being great… but ends up only okay. By any measure, SteamWorld Quest should be extremely my jam—it’s a deckbuilding RPG, it’s on the Switch, and it’s the latest game in one of the low-key best game series in recent memory. (Go play SteamWorld Heist right now, if you haven’t.) But there’s a stack of little imperfections that compounded and held me back from enjoying the game as much as I thought I would. It’s like the uncanny valley effect—the game is so close to being great that all the little flaws became much more glaring. However, with some small tweaks, I think Image & Form could turn things around. My fingers are crossed, because I really wanted to love this game.

Rev-ewe: Baba Is You

March 15, 2019 Tanner Hendrickson 1

PC/Mac/Linux, Switch There’s been a noticeable uptick in quality spatial puzzle games in the past five years. Games like Stephen’s Sausage Roll, Snakebird, Jelly no Puzzle, and A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build all take the classic Sokoban formula of moving/changing objects to their designated zones/states and put in their own little wrinkles, exploring the possibility spaces created by these tweaks to the formula. I like to call them “SokoButs”, as in “Sokobon, but…” because it’s fun to create microgenres and nobody has claimed this one yet. Feel free to use it, because I sure will. I attribute this recent boom at least partially to the release of PuzzleScript, a free toolset for designing SokoButs, in 2013. PuzzleScript streamlines the game design process via a simple markup for defining the rules that govern a SokoBut’s core systems. Baba Is You is a new SokoBut from Arvi Teikari, and its “but…” is huge: each puzzle’s rules are physical objects within the puzzle. By pushing around nouns, verbs, and adjectives, you rewrite the logic of the game in real time. Basically, it’s PuzzleScript: The Game. Baba Is You is an entirely new kind of logic puzzle, and it’s the best puzzle game I’ve played in a very long time.