I figured this morning I would talk about a couple of things that I have been doing. I am not entirely certain how I stumbled across this game but I have been playing The Touryst on the Switch. Trying to solve a puzzle or two before bed time has sorta become my new going to sleep ritual. This is from Shin’en which are the folks behind games like the Iridium series on the GBA and Fast MX… so they are a studio that seems to be able to get lower end hardware to do absolutely phenomenal things. The Touryst is no difference in that the executable itself is insanely small and the load times are so snappy that you never feel like you are actually waiting on anything.
The gameplay concept is simple. You are a tourist on vacation on an archipelago of islands, each one containing a shrine that you have to figure out how to unlock. You earn coins by completing tasks and by finding them out in the world. These coins are then spent on upgrading your abilities, to give you access to new areas and perform new abilities like the ability to pull yourself up on a ledge or to dash. These simple abilities combine with visual puzzle solving and some minor platforming in order to craft a world of exploration and discovery that feels like you are always unlocking something interesting around the next turn. I am not terribly far into the game but I am definitely enjoying myself.
What I find the most interesting is that while each shrine ends in a “fight” with its Guardian… none of them actually involve combat. Instead you sorta have to figure out how to deactivate the Guardian through puzzle interactions and moving pieces around in the right way. For example moments after taking the above screenshot the cubes begin to link up and you have to figure out a way to break the lights in order to deactivate them. You can get crushed in the process… at which point the game starts over on the beginning of the screen that you failed on allowing you to rapidly iterate on ideas until you solve the puzzle. It is the perfect sort of bite sized interaction for me and my bedtime gaming, and if you are looking for a fun Switch game to tide you over until Animal Crossing, then I highly suggest checking it out.
The other thing that I partook of last night was finally buckling down and finishing Mars War Logs, another in the line of games by Spiders that I have been exploring. I’ve talked at length about the experience of playing a game by this studio but at this moment I have now played through Greedfall, Technomancer and Mars War Logs and they all have a lot of similarities. The biggest part is that they are a company with really interesting ideas that outstretch the technical and design abilities of the team involved. If you can handle an awful lot of quirk and oddity in your games, then the experience might be extremely enjoyable. I mean playing through Mars War Logs was no more kludgy than playing through Witcher 2 for example and suffered from a lot of the same design problems.
I was actually way closer to the end of the game than I realized in Mars War Logs, because in about an hour of game play I managed to get to the credit roll. I have no interest in playing down an alternate path, because I feel like I made the choices that make sense the most for me. Problems aside I found it an extremely enjoyable play through and the truth is I am going to play anything that Spiders releases in the future after having played through three of their games. They do something really compelling to me and I am not entirely certain I can put my finger on it. The best of these was absolutely Greedfall and there has been a clear improvement in quality between the games as they sorta try and tackle the problems they keep running into. They seem to release a game roughly every two years so since Greedfall was a 2019 release, maybe we will see something new in 2021.
