Vertical Force (Virtual Boy)

 Vertical Force is one of those rare games for a console with a big gimmick that not only exists to shoehorn in the use of that gimmick, but is also just a decent game that happens to do so. In this case, it's a vertically-scrolling shooting game, that utilises the Virtual Boy's 3D gimmick to give the stages two layers. But it otherwise does just play like a pretty decent shooting game.

 

Specifically, since it came from Hudson Soft, it plays very much like a title from the Star Soldier series, other than the layers thing. And even that could be considered to beuilding upon the weird thing in the original Star Soldier where you would sometimes fly underneath bits of scenery if you approached them from certain angles. But now you've got a button to shoot and a button to move in and out of the screen (or since the game is top-down, to increase or decrease your altitude).

 

They really did a good job of working the gimmick into the game and using it in interesting ways, too. The second and third stages are especally full of fun little moments that use it. In the second stage, there's these whirlpool things that can suck you down to the lower level if you fly over them at the top level, and the third stage has lots of big rock formations that you need to fly over and under. Unfortunately, it does also feel like the rest of the game was left a little neglected.

 

It's very barebones and featureless for a 1995 console game, and especially if you consider it a part of the Star Soldier series, as even the PC Engine entries from years earlier had things like high score tables that saved (Vertical Force doesn't have high scores at all), Caravan modes, and so on. Vertical Force just has the main game, and that's not a particularly difficult one: on my second play I managed to get to the penultimate boss, and I think I'd be able to clear the game on a single credit without much more practice. (Though Ihaven't been able to replicate that success since, so maybe it was a fluke?). It's only four relatively short stages and a final boss that gets its own stage.

 

So, Vertical Force is a decent enough shooting game, that's also a little short and definitely too easy to be a long term interest, especially with the lack of high score tables. But if you want to play every Star Soldier game, this is definitely one of those in all but name (the default weapon even powers up in the same patterns), and also I'm going to assume that anyone playing Virtual Boy games in 2024 is doing so via emulation, so you're not going to feel like you've got much to lose.

Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Mega Drive)

 Games on SEGA consoles that star Disney's main mascot characters have a great reputation, and they deserve it. Quackshot, World and Castle of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper, and others are all widely-beloved classics that radiate quality from the moment you turn them on. There are some lesser titles, though, that aren't so fondly remembered: Fantasia, for example was hated when it came out, and only comes up in discussions of terrible Mega Drive games nowadays. Goofy's Hysterical History Tour has it even worse: it was released without anyone even noticing, and Idoubt that any of those few that remember it do so fondly.

 

It starts out pretty much as soon as you turn the game on: for some reason, it has its own slightly different, slightly cheaper-looking versions of the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Enterprises Ltd." and SEGA logo screens. And the title screen has that strange, intangible look of cheapness that a lot of (but defintiely not all) US-developed Mega Drive games have to them, especially ones aimed at kids. Things briefly start to look up once you actually start playing, though, as Goofy himself has a pretty decently animted walk cycle, and the extending arm device with which he's armed is pretty interesting too, and actually brought to mind better games, like Bionic Commando or  The Magical Quest starring Micky Mouse. 

 

That's about the sum of the positive things I have to say about this game, though. The longer you play, the less fun you'll have. There are enemies every where, and they're all insane damage sponges. You're constantly having to make leaps of faith, being expected to just jump off of cliffs into the void, and hoping there'll be something to land on when you get there. Or you've got to jump down onto a tiny little platform that can only just be seen when you crouch (and of course, you can't jump straight from crouching). There are apparently several epochs on Goofy's eponymous tour, but after about an hour of playing (and I would have given up long before that without save states), and after finishing at least seven or eight surprisingly long stages, there was no end in sight for the prehistoric age, with its one background image and one tileset.

 

The thing that finally made me give up on the game, though, was a sequence of jumps that made heavy use of the extending arm I praised only a couple of paragraphs ago. The thing is that by default, pressing B makes Goofy extend the arm diagonally upwards in the direction he's facing. If you press left or right while presing B, it'll stretch out horizontally instead. All sounds normal so far, right? Unfortunately, the sequence in question wants you to jump and grab platforms above and  to the right. So, you have to press C and right to make the jump, holding them long enough to get close to the platform, then let go of both and press B on its own to stretch the arm towards it. But instinctively, you'll still be pressing right when you press B, and the arm will stretch out horizontally, causing you to fall onto the spikes below. There's a few of these jumps in a row, all identical, and if you fail one, you either start again, or you lose your last bit of health on the spikes below and got back to the start of the stage.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but Goofy's Hysterical History Tour isn't worth your time. It's boring, frustrating, and ugly. One final example of how it's a shoddy producation as well as a terrible game, though: like most platform games, you can hold up to pan the camera upwards and see what's above you. But Goofy has no accompanying animation for this! He doesn't even turn his eyes upwards, he just stands there as the camera pans. So to re-iterate: game's awful, don't bother.

U.P.P. (Playstation)

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on what UPP stands for. But I did find out that apparently, when it was released, the big selling points for UPP were the attack animations and the voice cast. Though I've never been into sriyuu fandom, so I can't really comment on that, I can say that the attack animations do look really great. The characters appear onscreen casting their spells in big, screen-filling animations. Well animated and high resolution, you could be tricked into thinking this was a PC-FX game or something.

 

But I should really get onto describing the game in which these attacks are taking place, shouldn't I? It's a typical match three coloured blocks falling stuff puzzle game. Except that the blocks are floating upwards towards the top of your well instead of falling to the bottom. For the sake of convenience, just remember that if I describe falling or gravity for the rest of this review, imagine I did so upside-down. Anyway, the mechanics of the actual colour matching are as generic as can be: you put three or more of the same colour in a row, and they disappear. The combat aspect, though, is similar to the Hanagumi Taisen Columns games, in that rather than sending junk blocks over to your opponent's well by making chains, you instead fill up a meter, and can use the meter at your leisure to perform a character-specific attack.

 

These attacks are pretty varied, too! From simple things like filling up the bottom of your opponent's well, sticking all the blocks in your opponent's well together so they don't fall when those below them are erased, and so on. The final boss in single player mode has an especially harsh one: a few random blocks in your well will temporarily be turned into skulls. Erase three skulls over the course of the match, and you immediately lose! Unfortunately, as interesting as these attacks are, and as impressive as the animations that accompany them are, they also provide the game with its biggest negative.

 

The problem is that the pace is so slow! My favourite puzzle game series is Magical Drop, in which matches are often over in a couple of seconds, making UPP's matches feel glacial in comparison. The meter-building gameplay is slow enough (even though it never feels as such in the aforementioned Columns games. maybe the meters just fill faster in those games?), but the much-lauded animations cause everything to stop for ten to twenty seconds while they play. That's longer than an entire Magical Drop match, for a purely cosmetic element!

 

UPP isn't a bad game, and I think it's worth playing at least once, just for how good it looks. But I don't think it's a puzzle game anyone will be going back to for years and years, and I especially don't think it's one that you'll get a lot of fun out of through playing against human opponents, either. Most of all, though, and I think I've said this about puzzle games a few times before: I can't imagine anyone ever choosing this over Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo or Money Idol Exchanger or Landmaker or any of the other greats of the genre.

Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits - Bushido Retsuden (Neo Geo CD)

 Back when I was about eleven or twelve, I'd started to become a bit obsessed with fighting game lore, specifically the Street Fighter and Rival Schools games. I was also still in my post-Final Fantasy VII RPG phase, so naturally, I wished "if only there were RPGs to flesh out the stories of my favourite fighting games". Of course, back then, I had no idea about things like Gamest Mooks full of insane amounts of lore for arcade games in general, not just fighting games (and I still think that if some publisher had translated those tomes back then, western arcades would have stayed healthy just a little longer). And though I wouldn't play any SNK fighting games until the advent of the Dreamcast a few years later, I did somehow become aware of this game, whose title has since been translated as "Samurai Shodown - Tales of the Bushido" (though among many English-speaking fans, it had colloquially been known as simply "Samurai Shodown RPG" for a long time).

 

Despite having no knowledge of the Samurai Shodown series, its plot, or its characters, just the existence of an RPG based on a fighting game series was enticing to me. Unfortunately, there was no English version at all back then, nor would there be until only a few months ago at the time of my writing this review! So when this fantranslation came out, it was something of a holy grail being found after decades of waiting. I don't play RPGs as much as I used to, so it didn't excite me as much now as it would have then, but it's still pretty exciting. And having now played a few hours of it, it's not a disappointment!

 

You start the game by picking one of six characters, and one of two storylines. I went with Cham Cham, and the second storyline, which is about a bunch of demons trying to resurrect their leader by collecting negative human emotions in seven ancient bells around the world. Shortly after you start playing, you also get to pick a second character to join your poarty, though unfortunately, it turns out that you're only picking them for their mechanical use, and they don't actually get to join in any dialogue scenes. I guess the number of possible combinations there would have made for an insane amount of extra writing for the devs, though. I went with Nakoruru, which turned out to make for a somewhat complimentary team: Cham Cham focuses on attacking groups of enemies, and Nakoruru does powerful attacks against single enemies, plus she has a healing spell.

 

You're given the unusualy option of having to use special move inputs from the actual fighting games to use specials in battle, but I opted not to, because I'm not super-familiar with the SS series, plus the battles are turn-based anyway, so it's just a bit of a gimmick more than anything. If they'd used a Final Fantasy-style active time battle system or something similar, I can see how skipping menus would have been useful. What's slightly unusual is that your normal attacks do very little damage, and you're expected to use specials more often than not. All of your specials consume SP, which complicates matters further. For example, Cham Cham has a useful attack that damages every enemy, but it also uses a lot of SP, and her pool isn't that big, so until she's levelled up a few times, she can only use that attack maybe four or five times before needing to replenish. In contrast, Nakoruru's specials are all single-target, but they use very little SP, and she has tons of it to spare anyway. Not being able to just mindlessly select the attack option like in most older RPGs is something you'll get used to quickly, and it does make things a lot more interesting.

 

This being an SNK game from the nineties, the graphics are also worthy of note. As you might expect, the game contains an absurd bounty of beautiful, detailed pixel art. The characters all look great, and full of life, the backgrounds are similarly lived-in and packed with detail, and there's even lots of weird and cool monster sprites to fight in battle. I'm pretty sure it's all been made bespoke for this game, too, with no recycling from its parent series. Even the battle sprites for your characters are specially drawn to a smaller scale than the fighting games, but still as detailed and interesting as everything else. The music and sound effects are exactly as you'd expect from a Samurai Shodown game, too: traditional, quiet, and subdued.

 

If you're at all interested in the Samurai Shodown series and its lore, or in games from the nineties golden age of RPGs, I definitely recommend giving this a try. Like I said, I've been playing it for a few hours now, and it's yet to wear out its welcome, even despite its relatively slow pace. I'll definitely be continuing to play it for a few weeks, at least, if not all the way to the end of the story.

Formula 1 Sensation (NES)

 Only a few weeks after Royal Stone really showed off the potential of the Game Gear, I'm writing about another game that makes its aged eight bit host hardware look amazing. Though I was initially turned off by its psuedo-realisms, F-1 Sensation's amazing graphics kept me playing, and I'm glad they did, as it turns out that the game's a lot more fun than my initial reaction made out. I'd go as far as to say that it looks as good as Final Lap Twin on the PC Engine (probably my favourite racing game on that console, and also impressive on its hardware for its speed and use of split screen multiplayer).

 

But yeah, there were a few things that almost turned me away, reminding me of games I've really disliked in the past, like the Mega Drive's Super Monaco GP, for example. There's no option to drive with an automatic transmission, you have to do a qualifying lap before each race to determine your starting position, and you have to keep track of the condition of some of your car's parts (specifically the engine, tire, and wing. Though it seems to mainly be the tires that are the problem), and go into the pits to have them changed when the condition meters get low.

 

However, these things that I'd originally perceived as negatives all turned out to be incredibly minor! THe qualifying laps aren't as boring as I'd expected, and they actually give a nice chance to figure out the hardest corners and easiest straights on the course. The gear shifting, oddly, doesn't really seem to matter at all: you have four gears, though unlike in most games, you can pretty much shift into the third gear straight away and then into fourth a couple of seconds later. The acceleration pentaly for skipping gears is almost non-existent! And finally, entering the pit comes with a cute little animation of your crew changing your car's parts, only takes a few seconds, and oddly, doesn't seem to affect your race position too much, if at all. In fact, there were a couple of times where I entered the pit while in first place, and it seemed like my lead had increased when I left the pit.

 

So it turned out that this is the fast, fun, and simple kind of racing game I like the most, despite its realist trappings. There are some negatives, though! Firstly, while it is an incredible looking game for the NES/Famicom, in terms of moving at high speed and making a decent-looking attempt at a scaling effect, it's also constrained by being a Formula 1 game. That is to say: every track looks almost exactly the same, with only a slightly different colour scheme, and different sponsor names on the buildings in the background to differentiate them. Secondly, I feel like every race being five laps long might be a little too much. It means that they're all at least five minutes long, some going over seven minutes. It's just too long to be driving around such sparsely decorated tracks!

 

Those negatives are both pretty minor, though. This is still an excellent game, and though I've only played a few Famicom racing games, I'm yet to have encountered one that comes close to rivalling F-1 Sensation (though if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, the Famicom's not a system in which I have a lot of expertise). I also want to mention that it's part of a small, exclusive club: Famicom/NES games that got released in Europe, but not North America. It wasn't a super popular system here in its heyday, so it's extra strange that a game would get released for it as late as 1993! I guess they were really hoping the popularity of Formula 1 and the NES' status as a budget console by that time would get it some sales from people who were sports fans more than they were videogame fans? Of course, its high quality, lack of language barrier, and late release make it a very rare and sought after title, and there are copies out there listed for close to an entire thousand pounds! Madness.

Jack Bros. (Virtual Boy)

 This is one of the better-known Virtual Boy games, but I'm still considering it obscure, because it's still a Virtual Boy game, and like most of them, it's an exclusive to a console that almost no-one owned and has only fairly recently seemed to have attracted the attention of emulator writers. It also has something of a positive reputation, which I think must be entirely based on the fact that it's a little-known, lesser-played action game starring characters and monsters from the Shn Megami Tensei series.

 

There's been games featured on this blog in recent times that I didn't particularly enjoy for various reasons, games I didn't feel like I could recommend, but I think it's been a long time since I've featured a game here that I've actively disliked as much as I do Jack Bros. It's a maze game in which you have to collect a bunch of keys in each stage to open up the exit (or exits) and go to the next stage. One thing I do like about it is that it utilises the VB's 3D in a nice little way: you get to the next stage by jumping off of the side of the current one, and you can always see the next stage floating in space far below the current one. I also like the use of a combined time limit/health bar. That's something you see in a lot of the old top-down racing games I love, and it's rare to see such a system in a game of another genre (the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars).

 

That's about all I like about it, though. The problems start before you even get to do anything: at the start of every stage, a fairy will appear to deliver a few textboxes of information, that you've either already worked out or could have worked out within a few seconds of play. Things like several variations on "there are enemies on this stage that will attack you", or the revelation, at the start of the eleventh stage, that you can attack by using the right d-pad. I've managed to get over twenty stages into the game, and that fairy was still showing up at the start of each one to deliver some worthless advice.

 

Then you start playing, and the game is just so slow and boring and easy. You waddle around the small mazes, find a few keys, and jump off the side to the next stage. Like you've probably already worked out, it uses twinstick controls, though you can only move and shoot in the four cardinal directions. Even with this in mind, the normal enemies are no threat to you at all, and the bosses only slightly moreso. There are three characters, though only one of them is really viable. Jack Frost has ranged attacks, but they're so slow and weak that he's useless. Jack Skelton does decent damage, but only at melee range. Jack Lantern has fast-firing projectiles that do decent damage, so is better than the other characters in such a way that makes them totally pointless.

 

Like I said back in the first paragraph, I think that all of the goodwill people have towards this game comes from its association to a beloved series. Unfortunately, for the first time in a long time, this is a game that was hard to review simply because playing it was such a tedious chore that I would put off going back to it, and wished I was playing anything else the whole time I was playing it. I'm not writing off the Virtual Boy as a console, though: I've played a few other games that have been better and/or more interesting, and I'll almost definitely cover at least some of them here in the future.

Royal Stone - Hirakareshi Toki no Tobira (Game Gear)

 Back when I was a teenager, one of my friends' bedrooms had no windows, and a bunch of us used to hang out in there, watching anime and playing videogames. The lack of windows is relevant because he had a Game Gear lying around, and we'd sometimes take turns playing through stages of a little turn-based strategy game named Crystal Warriors (which was called Ariel: Crystal Densetsu in Japan), and the Game Gear's screen was bright enough that if someone was playing it, it was possible for someone sat next to them to read comics by its light.

 

Anyway, Royal Stone is the sequel to Crystal Warriors, though it only ever got released in Japan, unfortunately. I can't remember anything about the plot of the first game, so I can't comment on that, but Royal Stone is a true sequel in every other aspect, replicating the original's concepts but in bigger, better, and more sophisticated ways. Crystal Warriors had crudely drawn characters wiggling weapons at each other, Royal Stone has detailed characters full of personality attacking each other in cool little psuedo-3D scenes. Crystal Warrior's towns were crude and all identical, being more like slightly glorified menus than actual places, while Royle Stone's towns are like those you'd see in most 8-bit RPGs. The element system carries over too: Water, Fire, and Wind all have a Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship, while Earth (usually reserved for important characters) is neither strong nor weak against any of the elements.

 

I assume that Ariel was a big hit in Japan, as its clear that this game was a lavish production. It looks better than some contemperanous 16-bit console RPGs, and I feel confident in saying it's the best-looking game of the Game Gear's original lifespan (and the Game Gear is a system with no shortage of great-looking pixel art), not being bettered until 2020's GG Aleste 3. It even has a seperate copyright credit for the character designer (Kugatsuhime, of Monster Maker fame) before the title screen appears, which was pretty rare in general back then, and even moreso for a handheld game. The plot has also had a lot of effort put into it, not just in the writing, but also the presentation. There's various twists that occur, a bunch of different factions warring against each other, a protagonist with a tragic backstory and more. Like I keep saying, it's all so much more than you'd expect from a handheld game in 1995.

 

And as for the presentation of the story, it's mostly pretty standard for this kind of game, with you going around towns and talking to people, and also your enemies taunting you or declaring their intentions at the start of battles. But there's other things too: there's flashbacks that are shown in the game's graphics but with a sepia toned pallete. One particularly impressive example uses the game's battle engine to tell the story of the protagonist's dad getting betrayed and falling in battle. Furthermore, when your party members fall in battle, they're just dead and gone, and they all have a unique line of dialogue to act as their last words. One character uses this to declare his love for the protagonist, something that he never mentions at any other point!

 

Royal Stone is an excellent game, and has impressed me in so many ways the whole time I've been playing it. There was an instance somewhat early on, the first time I lost a couple of characters in battle, where I was ready to give up on the game, thinking my diminshed force might make the game unplayable. But I persevered, and with some slightly better strategy to compensate, I still got through the next few battles and gradually recruited a few new friends. I think that's probably one of the best compliments you can pay a strategy game, isn't it? That you can make up for having a weaker force by just thinking about what you're doing a bit better? Unfortunately, SEGA exhibited some of their trademark wisdom, and decided no-one outside of Japan would be interested in playing what was probably the best handheld strategy/RPG at that time, and so the only way to play it in English is via a fantranslated ROM. But we are lucky enough, at least, to have that available to play, and you definitely should.

Oraga Land Shusai - Best Farmer Shuukakusai (SNES)

 Looking at the character designs in this, I first assumed that it must be a tie-in to one of those family friendly anime that has thousands of episodes, and is of no interest to anyone outside Japan, but if it is, I've been able to find no evidence of it. There's a copyright for a company whose name I didn't recognise called Nitto on the title screen, so I looked them up, thinking it might be a food company, and the characters in the game might be its advertising mascots or something. But Nitto make things like LCD screens and surgical tape. 

 

Anyway, the game itself is listed in various places around the internet as a puzzle game. And at first glance, with the split screen and the grids full of brightly coloured fruits and vegetables it would appear to be a puzzle game. But in my opinion, the way it plays is closer to a sports game. The sport in question being high-speed competitive farming, in which the various characters are trying to harvest crops faster than their opponents.

 

How it works is that there are four kinds of vegetables, and you and your opponent are given identical quotas to grow and harvest a certain amount of each one in your field. Your field's got sixteen spaces in it, each able to grow one vegetable at a time (and after the first couple of stages, you'll be required to grow many more than sixteen vegetables to clear a stage). You walk along the edges of the field with left and right on the d-pad, and press up and down to aim at spaces on the field. You press one button to cycle through the four vegetables, another to throw seeds, and a third to run across the field with your hoe to harvest any fully-grown crops.

 

To make things more manic, various creatures (crows, caterpillars, monkeys, human children, and so on) will invade your field, and you've got ot shoo them away, either by running at them with your hoe, or by throwing stones at them with the same button you use to throw seeds. That button can also be used to throw what I assume must be fertiliser or something at already-planted seeds to make them grow faster. So the game boils down to planting seeds, encouraging them to grow, and also frantically fighting off the pests trying to eat your stuff, all while hoping you do it faster than your opponent. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any way at all to affect your opponent's field, so it is completely a pure race to fulfil your quota in time, with no funny business at all. You could theoretically play this game competitively and fairly, if the desire hit you (and if you could find someone willing to be your opponent).

 

Oraga Land Shusai is an interesting game, and definitely a unique one. It's also something you can comfortably and idly play on a handheld while watching TV. It's nothing spectacular, though. If you're curious, give it a try, and if you're not, you won't be missing out on some great unsung classic. It's fine.

Haunted Boynight (MSX)

 This game's also known as Youkai Yashiki and Haunted House. I have no idea where the "Haunted Boynight" name comes from, but that's what it's called in many romsets, and it's a lot more eyecatching than the other, probably more legitimate titles, so that's the one I'll use. It's a surprisingly complicated and ambitious platform game that's not quite a search action game, but a little more complex than a traditional platformer.

 

You play as a boy, going into a haunted house to save your sister, who is apparently a renowned paranormal investigator who went missing there. (At least, that's what a comment on a Youtube playthrough says the plot is, anyway. That video and its comments being pretty much the only source of useful information on this game that I've been able to find). Your only weapon is a flashlight, which damages ghosts when its light hits them, and that's where the first really weird thing comes in. When you start the game, your flashlight is a melee weapon, but if you use it to dispell the wisps in the garden leading up to the house, it'll start shooting a projectile, until you get hit. This also does something to make you stay alive longer, but the way your health and lives work in this game is enough of a mystery that I never fully worked it out.

 

The basic goal of each area is pretty simple: find five paper talismans, whih will then turn into a key that'll allow you into the room where the boss is. You have to find the boss room yourself, of course, and as the game goes on, the stages get bigger and more byzantine in their layout. Therer does tend to be more than five talismans in each stage, though, and your surplus get carried over. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the game is actually a big open world, with more areas getting made accessible with every boss defeat. I'm not totally sure, though, as the only time I went back to a previous stage was by accident. Because there are what look like stone firepits dotted around all the stages, and when the fire's not shooting out of the top of them, you can stand there and press down to get taken away to somewhere else that might be hell or might just be a network of caves under the house? And there are also firepits down ther that'll take you back to the house, not necesserily in the same place you left it, though.

 

Another thing that won't be immediately obvious are the little monk statues standing around in certain places. If you touch them while carrying a rice ball and a depowered flashlight, they'll take the riceball and repower your flashlight. But they also have a second function! Stand in front of them and press down, and a small part of the wall or floor nearby will disappear, opening a new path. This is actually necessary to get into one of the boss rooms! The bosses themselves are the most mysterious of all. They all have one very specific weak point that's not at all obvious, and I only figured out most of them for the four bosses I fought by watching the aforementioned playthrough video. Sometimes the weak point is easy to rerach, and needs to be hit a bunch of times, sometimes it's hard to reach and only needs to be hit once. But again, in almost all cases, it's not something you're likely to figure out on your own. I wonder if all these "secret" things were listed in the manual, or if this is a game that just wanted to extend its playtime through obtusity?

 

To be honest, this isn't a great game. Like I've described, it's mostly about figuring stuff out either through luck or through looking it up online. The first stage does do a good job of creating a ver Japanese haunted house atmosphere, but it's unfortunately a case of severe frontloading, and the following stages just feel like some generic 8-bit microcomputer platformer world. This isn't one you should seek out and play yourself. Maybe just play through the first stage, for the atmosphere, but don't bother going any further.

Silk (PS4)

 Sometimes when you watch a particularly low budget horror movie or tokusatsu production, it's inspirational: these works stand as proof that it's possible to create interesting, entertaining works on modest budgets. Silk is kind of like that! Common wisdom would tell you that it's impossible to make a large scale RPG/trading sim/resource management game without a large team and the financial backing of a publisher. But here Silk is: claiming to boast the largest explorable world in videogame history, and it all appears to have been made by a solo developer (or at least, a very small team) on a shoestring budget.

 

Silk is an absurdly huge sandbox of a game. You start out by picking out a quest, though you really don't have to follow it if you don't want to, and you set off on your big adventure. THe name comes from the fact that you play as a trading caravan on the silk road, and as such, the aforementioned gigantic open world encompasses huge swathes of Europe, Asia, and Africa! The most basic mission is to get from the Roman empire, over to the Han empire in what is now China, and then back again. I've attempted this a couple of times now, and though I can just about manage the "getting there" part of the journey, my party always ends up starving to death in either the mountains or the desert on the way back. Or murdered by nomads, who for some reason are incredibly hostile to your little band of travellers. Even though technically, you're also nomads. 

 

You get across the world via dungeon crawler-style "blob" movement, being able to face eight directions, and move one big footstep at a time. Which is kind of how the game acieves its huge world claims: there's quite a bit of simplification and abstraction at play here. Distances are approximate, and there's a day/night cycle that goes round every few turns, and when you "enter" towns and other locations where trading is possible, it's all done via a menu. But somehow, this doesn't do anything diminish the sense of scale in the game! So much is done through clever game design that you might not even notice unless you're specifically thinking about it. For example, you start out in the Roman empire, in Europe. There's lots of water for fishing, forests for hunting, and friendly cities for trading, so you're never going to be short on food.

 

Your first big challenge coms when you get to the mountains: they're somewhat maze-like, there are no towns, and there's nowhere to hunt or fish. But unless you get really lost, this isn't a huge area, and once you get out, the Parthian towns on the other side are a little hostile, but they'll quickly warm up to you once you get in there and trade with them a few times. Later, though, you'll get to what the game calls the Sea of Death, which I think is supposed to be the real-life Taklamakan Desert. This place is huge, something like half as wide as all the ground you've covered before reaching it, and there's no woods, no water, and very few settlements. And a lot of the settlements that are there are surrounded and inhabited by the aforementioned very hostile nomads. So, to stand a chance of getting across here, you need to hire a bunch of guards, and also stock up on enough food to feed them for the several weeks it'll take you to get across. While you're in the desert, a little bit of flavour is also added by the unusually large amount of abandonded and ruined caravans you find, which will yield a small amount of silver, wool, and spices when you pass them. It really gets across how treacherous this terrain is, while also giving you something to trade for more food once you get to the other side and have to journey back again.

 

While the game successfully gets across what a grand undertaking a silk road journey is, it still has the low budget charm and appeal that I mentioned back at the start of the review. All the sprites representing locations and obstacles like mountains, sand dunes, and so on all look like they were drawn using felt tip pens, and they haven't been filtered or sharpened up in any way. It creates a look for the game that really makes it very clear that it's a passion project and a work of pure creativity, and not a capitalist product that's been through focus tests and an overly powerful marketing department. 

 

It might sound to some that I'm damning this game with faint praise, but honestly: I'd prefer it if all games were passion projects, and we never had to hear about crunch time or developers being traumatised by having to repeatedly watch real gore videos for reference or playing games that would obviously have been a thousand times better if some bean counter hadn't demanded more potential revenue streams or if some soulless animated corpse in a suit demanded less marketable elements be watered down or removed altogether. I'll be honest and say that Silk isn't really in one of my preferred genres, and it's definitely got its flaws, but it is an incredible achievement, the sense of scale is really awe-inspiring, and it represents a better way for videogames to be in the future. Furthermore, it often goes on sale for an absolute pittance, so if you want to give it a try yourself, it's not like it'll take a big investment to do so. And I definitely recommend that you do.