The End is Nigh and Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

You know, in this age of fearmongering, populist takeover, increasing class divide and Ed Sheeran cameos on Game of Thrones, a lot of people seem to take comfort in the fact that a mushroom cloud will probably drop soon and burn our eyes out while the radiation agonisingly dissolves us from the inside out. Well, it's a lovely fantasy, millennials, but sadly we're an infuriatingly adaptable bunch and if nuclear firestorm couldn't save us from the Bay City Rollers it's not going to save you from (discreetly Googles current Billboard top 40) Imagine Dragons. You're probably just going to have to tough it out, but in the meantime, there's no harm in a bit of wholesome escapism with Edmund McMillen's new game, The End Is Nigh. Edmund McMillen is a game designer forged in the old 2000's Newgrounds flash game era when everyone was learning that lack of censorship plus extremely low barrier for entry equals an awful lot of super violent poorly drawn cartoon games and animations about poo. McMillen stood out by making such games as Super Meat Boy and the Binding of Isaac, actually quite well designed super violent cartoon games about poo. McMillen's hallmarks besides poo include high difficulty, a simplistic but highly animated art style mainly centred around squashy blobs of flesh, an obvious enthusiasm for retro video games and a grandiose, apocalyptic sort of theme, so the End is Nigh represents all of his squishy blood-leaking poo monsters coming home to roost, so to speak. It begins with a squashy blob of flesh playing retro video games before realising he has to travel out into the grandiose, apocalyptic world to make things highly difficult for himself. The game is a 2D platformer with much of Super Meat Boy about it, except slower-paced and is theoretically an open world as opposed to Meat Boy's level-based structure. In practise, though, each room is an individual challenge and there's not much point in coming back to each one once you have the bandage, I mean, tumour, so it might as well have been level based for all it mattered. Well, I suppose you might want to come back if you get off on watching water balloons full of gravy explode, but there are plenty of places where you can enjoy that particular spectacle, such as every square inch of the fucking game. Hey, look at me, world, I'm about to say that this high difficulty game is too hard. That's right, now you have a whole brain cell dedicated to me saying that and you'll never get it back. Yeah, genius, it's supposed to be hard, but a slower ramp up would be nice. Difficulty curve, not difficulty wall. Not difficulty overhang, slick with eagle jizz. Feels like every time a new element is introduced, it's demonstrated precisely once and then we're immediately called upon to pixel-perfect tootsie jump off it with the exact timing necessary to miss a gargoyle's deadly swinging bellend piercing by one eighth of an inch. And if that's what you want, then I can recommend the End is Nigh, as well as possibly hiring a therapist to work through your self-destructive urges. I like hard games, you know that, but The End Is Nigh just isn't grabbing me and I think it's because I don't get a sense that there'll be any reward for putting myself through the trials. I repeatedly pound my testicles with a hammer because I'm trying to save money on a vasectomy, not just for the sake of it. Super Meat Boy had stuff to unlock, a squashy flesh blob princess to save, a dizzying array of secret extras, a lively air of fun and a varied palette of blood reds and poo browns, and End is Nigh just feels like Super Meat Boy with none of any of that. Your only reward is more, harder challenges. Fucking hell. At least Sisyphus was getting regular exercise. In brief, I don't think The End Is Nigh has enough going on. I turn on, it goes "Hello, everything's gone to shit. I'm shit, you're shit, the world is shit, why don't you come outside and see how shit it is and will continue to be whatever you do." And then I turn off the TV news and play the End is Nigh instead, which gives a very similar vibe, and I don't feel particularly motivated to stick with it. I'm not saying it needs to promise me chocolate buttons and snuggles under a rainbow, just something other than more opportunities to get remorselessly pounded like I'm a turd it's trying to stomp through a shower drain. Moving on, I thought I'd better play something from the opposite end of the open world spectrum as well this week, if only to stave off the voices, and Steam obligingly belched up the rather ungainly titled Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. An open world crafty explorey hoardy timewastey ooh nicey strokey animals game. The vibe I was getting from it was Harvest Moon by way of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - build a farm inside a freely explorable sandbox world, and help lots of people who are all perfectly alright except they're missing five moose scrotums for their husband's sausage factory. Also the art style reminded me of a Playmobil pirate ship I used to have as a kid, especially at the beginning when you're on a pirate ship, although thankfully this one didn't have the springloaded cannons with the projectiles that get lost in the carpet for the guinea pig to one day choke to death on. A ship in an intro sequence to a fantasy exploration game is of course equivalent to a helicopter in the intro of an action game, so naturally it's wrecked for no adequate reason and we're deposited on a beach to start our quest. What was our quest again, Yonder: The Cow Tipper Chronicles? Uhhhhhhhhh. Pick up some stuff. Anything else? Uhhhhhh. Talk to those guys? I talked to those guys, Yonder, and they told me to pick up some stuff. Well there you go, then. I think the key phrase that sums up the Yonder experience is "What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?" It is the final destination for every path you can take. You explore the island, find a hidden ore vein in a cave, mine it for copper, then you have some copper. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Oh look, a place where I can build a bridge if I bring it twenty sticks, ten vines and a tube of Pritt Stick. It leads me to an island with a treasure chest containing a vajazzling kit. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? I think we're supposed to be setting up farms, so we search the land and find the places where farms can be built, and build farms on them. What the fuck am I - WAIT! Now we can find a wild cow, wave a Curly Wurly under its nose and lead it back to the farm to make it your cow. Okay, what the f- tatatatata! Now find an NPC whose face you particularly don't like and you'd like to see go away, feed them the entire contents of your fridge and they'll go off and run your farm for you. There, you see, now you've got free milk coming out of the farm whenever you want it. And, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Look, if you like direction so much maybe we could get you a fucking kaleidoscope. As far as I can tell, Yonder is a game about becoming the island's random crap baron on the off chance that some of the random crap will be required for one of the many fetch quests or crafting recipes that result in you having even more random crap. You can't even sell the random crap because the shops will only exchange it for different random crap, it's like dealing in fucking bitcoins. Honestly, though, Yonder's main fault is a failure to commit. Either do the free exploration scavenger hunt OR the farming sim 'cos they don't mix well. One is about constantly moving on and the other sitting in one place, behind a cow, elbow deep in colon like the sorter at a punctuation factory.