Fully Ramblomatic
8m 42s
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Full Transcript
And so, with the hazmat suit-wearing disposal technician of time now consigning 2025 to its well-deserved place in the incinerator of history, the only thing left to do is scrub out the last of the carpet stains and waft away a few lingering stench clouds. Meaning, my now-annual "games I never got around to reviewing" video. Not so many this year, because most of the really interesting stuff got covered in my other review series, Yahtzee Tries, in which I stream indie games and give them little mini-reviews. It's a series I'm very fond of making because I collect emails from people telling me their games get better after the first hour. Oh, those are just the best. I like to print them out and scatter them from the tops of tall buildings, dreaming with eyes agleam and chin on fists that maybe, just maybe, the winds will carry them to someone who gives a shit. But I digress. PowerWash Simulator is like a set of bagpipes stuffed with feces: I play the shit out of it. But it's hard to justify that professionally; it's fundamentally reverse coloring in. It's more something I do to zone out and unwind than something I seek when I want to appreciate gameplay design. And I was dubious about what a sequel could offer to the classic formula of pointing at every part of a thing until the thing is no longer covered in shit. Unless they made it open world or something and let you ensure your future employment by hijacking sewage tankers. And sure enough, PowerWash Simulator 2 isn't much more than a collection of new levels with a few gameplay tweaks, none of which couldn't have simply been patched into the first game with all the other bonus levels. Now there's a circular tool for floors, and you get soap for free in case you want to realize your whimsical fantasy of pretending your van is made from clouds. Oh, and you have a home base now where you spend your power washing income on new furniture to put around a big, empty room. Oh, I see. Profiling, is it? I like cleaning games; you assume I like doll houses as well? I'm offended. Maybe I only like power washing because I want to imagine what life would be like if I had superhuman urinating powers. You may recall me hinting that I'd played through Revenge of the Savage Planet way back in May but opted to drop its review in favor of Promise Mascot Agency, and now I'm struggling to recall my time with it, I have fresh understanding of why I didn't think it was worth talking about. I remember it feeling like more of what the first game offered except in third person and with less tight environment design. And I remember it having a home base with a big, empty room and a catalog of freely placeable furniture, and thinking, "Oh, for fuck's sake. What is it with games giving me a room to furnish as a side activity? Is it because of today's economy and that home ownership is now on par with space adventuring, fantasy-wise? A new third-person narrative adventure by Double Fine whose entire appeal sort of rests on the reaction to the core premise, that you play as a sentient lighthouse that ambulates on little, scuttley crab legs. That reaction being a resounding, "Oew-kay." I mean, it gets my attention but does illustrate that perhaps diversity can go too far when we have to start including inanimate objects. The other selling point of Keeper is the fantastic visual design. You scuttle your way through beautiful environments that are like the third-stage Pokémon evolution of a Jim Henson fantasy movie full of gigantic, grandiose monsters that are also huge islands or moving hills, like the monster designer and the environment designer were conjoined twins. That aside, here's the main problem: the game's completely boring as shit. All you do is press forwards until something stops you then do a puzzle based around figuring out what specific way you need to shine a light on something to proceed, usually with an immediately obvious solution. So couldn't recommend, frankly; if I wanted to play a game about roleplaying a piece of nautical infrastructure, I'd go back to PowerWash Simulator and pretend I'm a fucking bilge pump. I'm fond of a gameplay experience that's outwardly simple but turns out to have hidden depths that just keep going until you start to think it's got no bottom, like a disappointing lap dancer. Shit like Undertale and Stanley Parable, and I found something like that in Date Everything. A game set entirely in one small apartment, but the gimmick is it's a visual novel dating sim where you have the power to point to literally anything and anthropomorphize it into a person you can talk to and ultimately seduce. And I mean anything. The chairs, the tables, the drinks cabinet, the floor, the ceiling, the light switches, your nightmares, the dust, the concept of failure—they're all characters with dialogue trees and multiple-episode story arcs. I found it rather absorbing for a while but petered off when I felt like the game wasn't really going anywhere. The eventual goal seems to be to track down every dateable character, and after exhausting the stories of the obvious ones, all they could do was sit there in clouds of silent resentment, watching me try to fruitlessly chat up the skirting boards. And I was really hoping for more sauce. Game's a bit inconsistent, there. Things got surprisingly horny while seducing the bed—appropriately, perhaps—but I didn't see a whiff of even implied poontang from romancing the stationery. Wasn't that a weird sentence? Now, I like the Katamari games; they create a wonderful balance of arcade challenge, tidying up, and abusing domestic animals, but I worry there isn't really anywhere new for them to go—not after the first two games were done having you roll up the literal entire fucking universe. And it seems the new one, Once Upon a Katamari, broadly agrees. Because despite a Mario 3-esque map screen and a time travel premise enabling us to abuse domestic animals in fantasy historical settings like a pirate ship and the Wild West, the actual gameplay feels like it's mainly replaying the old hits, culminating in—once again—a level where you make a Katamari big enough to roll up entire continents and then one where you—once again—roll up the entire universe exactly as before. Yawn, heard it, call me when you make a level about rolling up stray pubes on the lower midriff of a '70s Playboy model. Among the few new features is an obligation to find hidden crowns in each level to progress, but I didn't like having to worry about scavenger hunts on top of the moment-to-moment cat brutalization. Also, I feel we could have done more with the exploring history premise. Three of the settings are Stone Age, Dinosaur Age, and Ice Age. That's three entire slots wasted on prehistory. What about a Victorian London level? Or one where we roll up skull fragments on the street outside the Dallas Book Depository? A short first-person horror mystery that plays like a take on Alien Isolation if it had been developed by three dudes in a poverty-stricken former Soviet Eastern European nation with about a hundredth of the budget. You play a gormless IT consultant who shows up at a moon colony to unplug the mainframe and plug it back in again only to find it deserted except for some murderous domestic robots and lots of journal entries in which the author's descent into madness is illustrated by a gradual decline in their punctuation and grammar skills. Our job consists of finding the right computers to touch while stealthing around the robot murderers. The puzzles are a bit obtuse and are more about getting our head around the functions of the hybrid camcorder label-printing device that is our only tool and weapon, but the atmosphere's great, especially if you love Pentiumpunk as an aesthetic; you can practically smell the mold coming out of the seams in the beige paneling of the electronics. I liked the game up until my time in the robot-haunted shopping mall colony thing abruptly ended with me being teleported to the second half of the game in a seemingly unrelated facility to follow a completely different thread of events and avoid the attention of a huge, invisible Prometheus man, and the game felt like it had lost touch with its initial intrigue. Still, it is short, as I say, and illustrates that short concept horror games can be as enriching as any gaming experience while also having much shorter development times—sorry, what was that? THIRTEEN FUCKING YEARS? What the fuck were they doing, braiding their leg hairs?