By William Chandler

This piece is pretty self explanatory thanks to my extreme talent for making stupidly long and elaborate titles for my articles because I have a shit sense of humor, so let’s just jump right in.

Please note that I only played these for about two hours each so far.

Child of Light: Yo, this game is mad pretty, so props to the Ubi Art engine for making an attractive Ubisoft game that is actually well optimized on PC. Like, the art style is so beautiful and the music is so absurdly calming and emotionally charged that I immediately found myself falling under its charm. So, in order to maintain my facade of critical professionalism I had to immediately find something wrong with it. The story is under the guise of a children’s tale which apparently means all of the dialogue has to rhyme and that is whack as fuck. It just makes every character cringe worthy instead of charming. Also, there are only two difficulty settings and the Casual one is so easy that i may as well be watching someone else stream the game on Twitch with the amount of interaction that I have with it, but the Expert one is a little harder than I wanted because it means I actually have to try and that is just unacceptable.

Murdered: Soul Suspect: The fact that the title of this game is a pun straight up rocked my world. Like, the protagonist was murdered and is investigating his own shit as a ghost, so he’s like a Soul with suspects but it also means like Sole Suspect like you only have a single suspect in your case and that’s fucking hilarious. The game is decidedly alright.

Risk of Rain: The constantly changing difficulty of this game really hurt my feelings. I did pretty well on the first level and really enjoyed how the game forces you to adapt extremely quickly to its mechanics lest you get your shit stomped in. So, I beat the first level of the game in a single thirty minute session that involved me wildly running around and flailing my arms in an attempt to not be railed by flying jellyfish and clapping robots. I was actually having a pretty good time learning the mechanics and my character’s capabilities on the fly. However, near the end of the level I noticed that the difficulty meter at the top of the screen had shifted to “very hard” and when I transitioned to the next level it stayed that way. The absurd desecration of my body that occurred at the hands of these much stronger adversaries forced me to quit the game and stare at my wall for several moments in a futile attempt to stop the tears from flowing.

Maybe I’ll do a Part 2 of this at some point.