Harold Halibut Review – Lost In Its Own Deep Sea
Harold Halibut puts you in the shoes of a lowly maintenance worker aboard a spaceship submerged underwater. To the residents aboard the ship, Harold is a rather charming, lovable, even dopey fellow who is endearing for his simplicity and his complacency in doing his job. Harold is tasked with removing graffiti, cleaning, and fixing machines, and when the work is done, his day ends, he goes to sleep, he wakes up–rinse, repeat. That’s the surface of Harold, but tucked out of sight from people’s view, is a character who is deceivingly introspective, often documenting his life through scribbled images in a notepad, or expressing himself through playful theatrics when he’s alone, like singing and performing operatically while mopping up a filter system. This is a side of the character only we, the player, get to see. As a character, Harold is complex, even if he doesn’t entirely understand how. He attempts to question and explore his curiosity and his own existence within the confines of a spaceship he was born and raised on, but he’s not always capable of understanding exactly what he’s looking for.
Harold Halibut, the game, is much like its titular character: It’s charming and lovable on the surface for its unique handmade aesthetic and charmingly simple gameplay. But just beneath that uncomplicated layer is a story that attempts to ask questions about introspection and self-worth, even if the game doesn’t always feel equipped to answer them or understand its strongest suits.
Harold Halibut does an incredible job in exploring its many themes and concepts by putting a magnifying glass on its setting. The FEDORA is a spaceship that was designed to leave Earth during the Cold War and set forth on a 200-year journey to seek a new planet to live on, but the new world it found was devoid of any landmass. With nowhere to go, the FEDORA crashes onto the planet, plunging its occupants into the watery depths, which they’ve learned to colonize. Meanwhile, Harold’s mentor and resident scientist, Mareaux, attempts to find a power source to launch the ship back into space to find a more suitable planet to live on.
In the meantime, as Harold, you interweave through the lives of the FEDORA’s inhabitants, the ship’s politics, and its inner workings. It’s a monotonous process that involves checking off Harold’s tasks on his PDA-like device, as you move through his day-to-day life in the quirky retro-future spaceship. But Harold’s life takes an abrupt turn after discovering a humanoid fish-like being has boarded the ship, creating a whole new perspective on the planet they’ve, in fact, been sharing all these years. It’s in this moment that Harold’s seemingly monotonous life is turned on its head, inspiring curiosity in what lies beyond the only world he’s ever known.
Harold Halibut is striking in its visuals because it’s entirely handmade. Characters, articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, teapots, mugs, floorboards, and everything else was handmade in our real world and digitally scanned into the 3D game. Its visuals instantly distinguish Harold Halibut as one of the most visually interesting games of the year. But while it’s easy to get swept up in the awe of its look, the strongest characteristic of the game is the world itself and the characters within it.
Harold Halibut is entirely focused on exploration, conversational choices, and the occasional challenge-free minigame. At its core, Harold Halibut is focused on the world and the characters that inhabit it, which, story aside, is where the game is at its best. While you may play as Harold, it’s the characters you interact with who give the game a sense of intimacy and, over time, a feeling of density that shows there’s actually a lot going on–these are the game’s biggest achievement.
Across my 18 hours, I met nearly two dozen characters, each with their own story to unpack, and I loved all of them. More than the discovery of an alien species, or the urgency to find a power source for the ship, my biggest motivation was to get to know each and every person aboard the FEDORA. Whether it was the comical musings of the sports store owner Slippie, or the by-the-book Major who enforces the ship’s laws, each character is multifaceted, with deep personalities to learn, explore, and oftentimes see challenged.
While most of the time spent with these characters is completely optional, the game’s most important and consequential moments, both hilarious and heart-wrenching, start and end with the citizens of FEDORA. The conversations can feel inconsequential in the grand scheme of the game’s plot, but are invaluable to making this handmade world feel alive and lived in.
With the abundance of characters also comes a desperate need to keep track of them. Early in my time with the game, before I had become well acquainted with the cast of characters, I was often confused with who was who and where they were located. The game’s lack of waypoints was to its benefit, however, as this kept me engaged in using the ship’s signs to navigate its many sectors, but also better learn and remember these characters, as I would with people in real life. However, those early stages also created unnecessary friction by causing me to bumble around and waste time. This could have been alleviated with the addition of an in-game glossary to remind me who is who that could have existed in Harold’s PDA.
Each character is as distinct in their looks as they are their views on life–even with the shared perspective of living in the confines of a small colony underwater. It’s their stories that gives the FEDORA believability and lends the game a prevailing heart and soul that overshadows all of the game’s other plotlines. But its achievement of creating a rich cast of characters also gives rise to struggles in properly exploring them under the weight of its other story ambitions.
Aside from the thoughts and feelings of its very broad cast of characters is an abundance of ideas and narratives driving the main plot. These range from unpacking a corporation’s ulterior motives, to a secret society lurking in the shadows, to the urgency to locate a power source for the FEDORA. And while they are no doubt necessary to tell an overarching story, they feel like ideas that are too big for the dollhouse-sized nature of Harold Halibut.
As Harold’s world aboard a spaceship begins to collide with the alien world he’s been living on, he makes friends with the planet’s inhabitants, which are known as the Flumuylum. The fish-like humanoids’ philosophies are a complete contrast to that of humans, though also pretty much what you’d imagine what it would be like if fish were humans: a species that simply floats along through life, existing and observing, giving little to no meaning to anything. This mentality crashes head-on with Harold’s everyday existence: a life that boils down to routinely taking orders and doing what other people expect of him, often in service of the ship’s corporation-based ethos and in adherence to arbitrary rules like having a curfew or paying for its water tube transportation system. The duality between Harold’s and the Flumuylum’s lives are juxtaposed for several hours in the game, until Harold is forced into a crash course in existentialism towards the latter half of the game, causing him to question whether or not he was ever in control of his own life. The scene was a tonal whiplash as the game made a hard turn to answer questions that it had only just begun to ask, and in doing so, felt more clunky than enlightening.
Harold’s abrupt journey of introspection is sandwiched on top of and between the stories and ideologies of other characters, as well as the game’s overarching plots and conspiracies. No one idea or theme felt like it had the breathing room it needed or deserved, which means they can feel more like fleeting concerns instead of food for thought. For example, one scene hints at themes of the industrialization, pollution, and consumption of animal products by the human race, only to never refer to it again, or even set up a satisfying throughline for its purpose in the first place.
In trying to weave its characters, story, and themes together, I found its focus to become muddled. With such an emphasis on all its characters, and by making them an integral part of the game’s core experience, Harold ends up being the only character that has a substantial narrative arc–he sees his world through the lens of a mere errand boy but has his world turned upside down, creating a perspective that gives his life more meaning by the end. But in spending the time to do this, the game, in turn, leaves many threads for the other characters I had grown attached to feeling unfulfilled. By the time the climatic end unfolds, I was less interested in the conspiracies behind the events that transpired and more focused on the growth of the characters.
Harold Halibut is at its strongest when intimately exploring its characters, their inner workings, and their relationships with one another. But in attempting to build towards a dramatic conclusion, many of the hours spent fostering relationships with the characters took a backseat to plotlines that were less interesting.
To quote one of the game’s own characters, Buddy the mailman, “each person aboard this ship is a world their own.” In a story about a man trapped on a ship, who is trying to understand himself better, their lives and perspectives should be the most important stories to tell for Harold’s journey. Harold Halibut’s world and the people that inhabit it were literally crafted by people that cared about him and his story. And while that story struggles under the weight of its ambitions, the human touches on every part of it are evident. Those are the heart and soul of the game, and they imprinted on me too.
Children Of The Sun Review – One Shot
It only takes a single bullet to burn down an empire. That’s the ethos behind Children of the Sun, an excellent supernatural puzzle-shooter from solo developer René Rother and publisher Devolver Digital. Like many of the games in Devolver’s vast library, Children of the Sun is wonderfully stylish, violent, and built on a unique gameplay hook; think Sniper Elite mixed with Superhot and you’re on the right track without quite telling the whole story.
You play as a protagonist known simply as The Girl, a one-woman wrecking crew waging a vengeful war against the eponymous cult that ruined her life. As one cultist after another is turned to mincemeat behind the vindictive crosshairs of your sniper rifle, you gradually make your way up the food chain until coming face-to-scope with your true target: The Leader. While embarking on this blood-soaked killing spree, hand-drawn flashbacks reveal tidbits about the atrocities committed by this mysterious cult and The Girl’s reasons for seeking revenge.
Now Playing: Children Of The Sun GameSpot Video Review
There’s no dialogue during these cutscenes; instead, the narrative is intentionally minimalist, bombarding you with unnerving memories that are both terse and chaotic. This scattershot approach makes it difficult to glean all of the available information–perhaps deliberately so–which means you might feel lost and slightly detached from the story at times. It’s all complemented by a discordant soundscape of ambient white noise that matches the game’s striking art style–composed of deep purples and vivid yellows–and gritty, surreal tone. The game’s arresting aesthetic paints a picture of a brutal world of saturated filth, where cultists defile seedy motels, gloomy forests, and derelict apartment buildings, spreading their deceitful disease like plague-infested rats.
For as evocative as Children of the Sun’s story, visuals, and music are, it’s the innovative gameplay where it truly shines. At the beginning of each level, you’re able to move The Girl either left or right on a predetermined path. Sometimes, you can navigate around a level in a full 360-degree circle, while other times, you may only be able to move a few yards before being impeded by a fallen tree or steep riverbank. From here, you can get a lay of the land, mark enemies, and determine the best position to fire from. Once you’ve aimed down the scope and pulled the trigger, the camera snaps to the crown of the bullet as it hurtles through the air. Blood spatter and disintegrated flesh usually follow, but the catch is that this is the only shot you’ll fire for the duration of the level.
The Girl’s backstory pulls from a classic fiction trope where a young girl discovers she has latent supernatural powers once she reaches puberty. Each time a bullet is propelled through a cultist’s skull, time slows down to a crawl, and The Girl’s psychic abilities let you take control of the round and re-aim, allowing a single bullet to cleave through an entire enemy compound in one fell swoop.
Initially, you can only move the bullet in a straight line from one enemy to the next, ping-ponging between them like a murderous pinball machine, and this makes your first shot the most crucial. From that initial point of impact, you need to chart a course through every other enemy until none are left alive. This is easier said than done, of course. While some enemies remain stationary, others are walking around, circling the entire map in a car, and sitting out of view of your initial vantage point. Considering all of this, you might have to finish a level by ensuring that the penultimate kill provides a clear sightline of the final cultist, who was hidden until now. There are wrong ways to do this, but there isn’t a definitive right way, so experimentation is incentivized and rewarded.
Children of the Sun is wonderfully stylish, violent, and built on a unique gameplay hook; think Sniper Elite mixed with Superhot and you’re on the right track without quite telling the whole story
As you progress through the story and more enemy types are introduced, you’re given additional powers to counteract the likes of shielded and armored cultists and the increasingly elaborate environments they’re inhabiting. The first of these powers lets you take direct control and gently curve bullets like James McAvoy in the 2008 film Wanted. This is useful for firing over walls and bending the shot so it lurches downwards and hits the cultist on the other side, or simply tweaking the bullet’s trajectory to guarantee it lands on-target.
Another ability reveals enemy weak points, which, when destroyed in a hail of slow-motion blood, grant you the power to redirect the bullet in mid-flight. Using this, you can fire past a shield-wielding enemy and then spin the bullet around to nail them in the back of the head, entirely negating their bullet-proof protection. Other times, you might use this technique to escape a building and re-enter it elsewhere or fire into the sky to provide a better view of the area and uncover a previously elusive enemy.
Armored cultists, meanwhile, provide an altogether different challenge. The only way to penetrate their thick armor is by using a power shot–achieved by holding down the trigger for the duration of the bullet’s flight. These shots necessitate a large enough distance between targets to build up the requisite velocity needed to blow through armor, so figuring out how to remove these enemies is a unique problem. Doing so is always a thrill, though, as you get the gratification of seeing the bullet reach supersonic speeds before blasting through the cultist’s now-useless defense.
Finding a solution to each level’s grisly puzzle is immensely satisfying, especially when trial and error is abundant. Your first few attempts might revolve around tentatively exploring to find where all of the cultists are located and then figuring out the best way to carve through each one. You can sometimes use the environment to your advantage, too, shooting vehicles’ fuel caps and gas canisters to eliminate multiple enemies in one vehement explosion. You could blow up a car just to attain a better angle or snipe a pigeon flying overhead to gain a bird’s eye view of the area. I wish there were more opportunities for environmental kills besides destroying vehicles and explosive barrels, but restricting how you can interact with the world around you adds to the challenge and sense of achievement when you emerge victorious.
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At around three hours in length, Children of the Sun is a relatively brief experience. Usually, this would be a blessing in disguise for a game that doesn’t diversify from its core conceit too often, yet I still found myself desperate for more. Fortunately, replayability is rife, as the game’s scoring system encourages you to go back and replay previous levels to achieve a better rating. Headshots are scored differently from leg wounds, just as you earn more points for better timing and efficiency, while leaderboards create a sense of competition. Completing a level also reveals an excellent snapshot of the flight path of your bullet, which the game makes easy to share on social media for some extra fulfillment.
Children of the Sun’s unconventional approach to sniping is consistently thrilling and wholly satisfying. It might be full of gruesome blood spatter and cracked skulls, but it’s also the thinking person’s shooter–more of a delightfully macabre puzzle game than anything else. It’s admittedly short, and the game’s longevity will largely depend on how hard you fall for its inventive and bloody puzzles. That shouldn’t be a problem when it’s so difficult not to. And even if it’s relatively one-note, Children of the Sun plays that note with such morbid aplomb that it’s easy to recommend.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Review – Fire Away
I spent many a weekend afternoon playing the first two Battlefront games back in 2004 and 2005, my friends and I sinking hundreds of hours into our repeated efforts to conquer the galaxy, recreate battles from the Star Wars movies, and theorize why the video game version of General Grievous was so much stronger than his movie counterpart. Heck, my hope that we’d one day see a Clone Wars animated series that focused on exploring the clones’ individuality was born from Battlefront 2’s wonderfully narrated 501st Journal. Now that I think about it, much of my love for Star Wars can be traced back to the first two Battlefront games. But that doesn’t change that their dated mechanics and the unbalanced nature of their unrewarding tug-of-war matches don’t hold up two decades later. And Aspyr Media does not address these issues in Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, a collected pack of the two games, leaving them feeling like relics of a bygone era that aren’t worth playing in this shape today.
Pandemic Studios’ Battlefront and Battlefront 2 (not to be confused with EA DICE’s 2015 Battlefront and 2017 Battlefront 2) are both shooters that focus on Star Wars’ Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War periods, seeing you step into the boots of ordinary soldiers who participate in the conflicts. Mechanically, both games play very similarly to one another, though Battlefront 2 adds to the first with space battles, playable heroes (who are notable characters from the Star Wars movies like Yoda and Darth Vader), and a more story-driven campaign that ties into Revenge of the Sith.
Each army features four standard soldier archetypes. You’ve got your assault rifle-wielding standard trooper, long-range sniper user, heavy-hitting rocket launcher demolitionist, and a support soldier who excels at short-range combat and fixing up vehicles. Beyond those four, each army has additional special units–the Republic Clone Army has the jetpack-equipped Jet Trooper, for example, while the CIS has the roly-poly Droideka. Because the main units all handle the same for the most part, you don’t have to learn entirely new mechanics for each class, while the more specialized troopers add a bit of distinct flair to each army. I like it–it makes it easy to pick up both games while also ensuring the gameplay doesn’t grow stale quickly.
The collection includes six maps that were added as post-launch content to both games (one for Battlefront and five for Battlefront 2) as well as two playable heroes in Battlefront 2 who were previously Xbox-only DLC (Kit Fisto and Asajj Ventress). Beyond that, there are some changes to the gameplay, such as to Hero Assault, a Battlefront 2 game mode that sees all the playable Star Wars heroes face off against the villains. In the original Battlefront 2, this mode could only be played on the game’s Tatooine map, but the Battlefront Collection makes the mode available on all ground-based maps. In addition, the collection adds cross-gen multiplayer support (but no cross-play, unfortunately) and increases the number of players per match to 32v32.
It’s those improvements that irk me, as they’re evidence that Aspyr Media did make efforts to change and improve aspects of the original games. And that’s good! Great, even. But this decision throws what wasn’t adjusted into stark contrast and highlights how outdated Battlefront and Battlefront 2’s gameplay is. It locks the Battlefront Collection into this weird space where it’s neither a good remaster nor a completely accurate preservation of the original games.
But even without that observation, it’s clear that what was once great gameplay for a console shooter has lost its luster after 20 years. Battlefront 2 fares a tad better than the original game, given how it was able to make improvements to the first Battlefront’s mechanics back in 2005–soldiers can sprint, the details of characters are sharper so it’s easier to discern targets from further away, and maps are larger so firefights are more spread out. Plus, Battlefront 2 just has a more compelling campaign. Even if the story is no longer part of the Star Wars canon, witnessing the rise of the 501st Legion during the Clone Wars and subsequent transformation into Vader’s Fist during the Galactic Civil War is still a compelling viewpoint for the Clone Troopers’ view of the Star Wars movies, strengthened by the chilling narration of actor Temuera Morrison (Attack of the Clones’ Jango Fett, The Book of Boba Fett’s Boba Fett). His monologue of the troopers’ silence as they march into the Jedi Temple to execute Order 66 is still one of my favorite moments from any Star Wars story, and 20 years later, it hasn’t lost its impact.
Even if the story is still interesting to experience, however, the act of playing through it isn’t all that fun. Movements are sluggish and aiming isn’t precise, promoting the use of soldiers armed with automatic weapons over the others. The other classes are serviceable, but the gameplay clearly pushes you away from them, making every firefight feel increasingly the same. There’s no incentive to branch out and master the other classes–victory is achieved by whittling down the other team first, so killing as many people as fast as you can is ideal, and that’s just easier with an assault rifle or minigun than a sniper rifle or pistol.
Battles in the offline campaign and online multiplayer also suffer from imbalance–once one side takes the lead, they almost always win. It’s clear there’s meant to be some sort of tug-of-war element to each match, as each side fights over command posts, but it rarely plays out that way. Your side can only spawn from command posts your side has captured, so once one side has more command posts than the other, it’s easier for that side to pressure the losing side as the number of places where the losing side can spawn shrinks. This creates a slog where it becomes quite clear about halfway through a match which side is going to take the win, and you’re just left playing out the rest of the time to witness a conclusion that you saw coming. Heroes alleviate this a bit in Battlefront 2. If a player does well enough before being killed, they can spawn as their army’s hero for that map, and certain heroes can change the tide in an instant (especially the villains on the CIS and Empire, who are all around stronger than the good guys for the Republic and Rebellion). This would be a great counterbalance to the uneven nature of Battlefront 2 if heroes could be summoned more regularly but, as is, they’re just too tricky to unlock if you’re on the losing end of a battle. It’s hard to do well when the enemy is closing in around you. This issue is even worse in the original Battlefront, which doesn’t have playable heroes.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of each match isn’t all that fun either. Firearms aren’t very precise, relying on a generous auto-aim feature that feels like it’s rewarding me for pointing my gun roughly in the right direction instead of actually landing a precise shot. When I was a kid, I was always just happy that my friends and I won, but now as I see the “victory” message splash across the screen, all I can wonder is how it happened. I can’t point to what in my performance led to my team winning as opposed to losing, leaving little opportunity to think back and improve. There’s an uncomfortable amount of luck associated with victory–more than I want in a shooter.
The space battles in Battlefront 2 don’t feel much better. It’s telling that the campaign still lets you skip them outright if you want, like an admission that they aren’t very fun (which is true). Though the concept of manning a starship and flying out to meet the enemy, whittling away at their capital ships or flying into their hangar to sabotage their systems from the inside is initially thrilling, it very quickly loses its appeal once you realize all matches play out pretty much the same. There’s next to no variety to Battlefront 2’s different space maps, so your strategy for one tends to work on all of them–you don’t have to adapt, leaving the gameplay feeling stagnant. Plus, the starships in Battlefront 2 don’t handle very well, making it frustratingly tricky to maneuver through dogfights.
The biggest detriment against the Battlefront Classic Collection is that we’ve had more Star Wars games since their release that all improved upon what Battlefront and Battlefront 2 did. EA DICE’s two Battlefront games have sharper shooting mechanics that better reward precision and huge battlefields that prevent one side from quickly surrounding and destroying the other. 2020’s Squadron’s aerial dogfights are huge improvements over Battlefront 2’s space battles, with more responsive controls and greater variety to the maps. Sure, Battlefront Collection brings these elements together, but not in a way that’s strong enough to make this a more compelling experience than what’s already out there.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is ultimately just disappointing. It’s unclear whether it wants to be a remaster or a collection that preserves two major games from Star Wars’ history, but in both instances, it fails. This is neither an accurate representation of what Battlefront and Battlefront 2 were, nor does it make enough adjustments to bring two decades-old games into the modern era. The result is a collection that’s not really fun to play, and well worth skipping.
Open Roads Review – Quick Trip
I once read in a very profound article published in a very prestigious magazine (okay, it was a TikTok) that “daddy issues” make artists while “mommy issues” make writers. I can’t attest to the science–or lack thereof–behind this statement, but as a writer born into a long line of guarded women who wielded pens as weapons, I can absolutely relate.
As such, I have a particular fondness for mother-daughter stories and the catharsis they can offer. When I heard the team behind Gone Home would be tackling the subject in their upcoming game Open Roads, I braced for a beautiful cross-country journey that would inevitably hit too close to home. However, while Open Roads has moments of relatability that are powered by solid dialogue, charming characters, and nostalgia, I was ultimately left underwhelmed by the walk-and-click exploration game. With a runtime too short to truly pull players in and an abrupt ending that leaves things feeling hastily resolved, Open Roads feels more like a pit stop than an adventure.
That’s not to say the game’s premise isn’t interesting. Open Roads begins shortly after the death of the Devine family matriarch, Helen, and follows her daughter Opal and her granddaughter Tess as they cope with loss and what to do next. Throughout the entirety of the game, we play as Tess, a 16-year-old high school student who is every bit as strong-willed, cheeky, and hopeful as most 16-year-old girls are. On top of her grandmother’s death, Tess is also processing her parents’ recent separation and the loss of her home, as she and her mother lived with Helen but were not given the house upon her death.
While cleaning out her grandmother’s home, Tess and Opal stumble upon a suitcase buried within the attic walls and find what appears to be evidence of Helen’s secret life and a passionate love affair. With a week to go until the house is sold and an empty agenda, the pair set off on a series of short trips to get to the bottom of Helen’s mysterious life.
At each of the game’s handful of locations, you walk around as Tess and interact with objects from different time periods ranging primarily from the late ’60s to the early 2000s–the time the game is set in–that are sure to be familiar to many American millennials. Occasionally you’ll be able to pocket the items to use later, adding a slight puzzle element to what is otherwise a game driven by simple exploration, though these moments are few and far between. Certain items will also prompt you to call for your mom, who will chime in, add context, or mull over your findings with you. All this makes for straight-forward gameplay that can, unfortunately, start to feel a bit dull as the game goes on.
Outside of exploring the game’s dusty abodes and dimly lit motels, Tess spends most of her time riding shotgun in her mom’s late-’90s sedan. There, she’ll have the chance to cycle through mostly static-filled radio stations, chat with her mom, or use her trusty flip phone to text her father or best friend. Yet for a game titled Open Roads, your time spent on the road is extremely brief and only happens a handful of times, which ultimately takes away from the road-trip experience and doesn’t help to break up its repetitive gameplay.
This is a recurring issue, as the game in its entirety is too brief to effectively address everything it sets up or fully establish a deep sense of relatability and emotional connection. This is a shame considering the underlying plot is interesting and the game’s characters are very endearing. Though Kaitlyn Dever and Keri Russell might be known for their live-action careers, the pair bring a lot of personality to Tess and Opal respectively. Even Helen, who has no speaking parts and appears in the game only through grainy photographs, has a lot of personality. In fact, her vivaciousness is a frequent subject of discussion between Tess and Opal, who both exhibit her more free-spirited behavior, albeit in different ways. This is another aspect of the game I really enjoyed, as it’s all too often that mothers are written as protective, worrisome, uptight, and relatively flat–Open Roads avoids falling into that trap.
However, I also think Open Roads pivots a bit too far away from this mother-daughter tension. Sure, Tess and Opal do have their spats and Opal frequently expresses frustration towards some of her late mother’s actions, but for a pair going through grief, divorce, major life transitions, and betrayal, there’s a lack of drama that turns into a lack of evolution and catharsis. Between its overall brevity and hesitation to dig into messiness–humanness, even–Open Roads puts up a bit of a wall between the player and its story. As a result, I found I liked its characters, but I didn’t feel much towards them. While they were relatable enough, I didn’t find myself in them.
Sure, not all mother-daughter relationships are contentious or imitate Lady Bird, but in shying away from the emotional, you lose, well, emotions. For example, even with all the big plot points unraveling around them, the most impactful conversation in the game, to me, was the one Tess and Opal have after Tess accidentally leaves her phone at the hotel and demands they go back. As an adult, you’re able to see the situation rationally: It makes sense to finish up the drive and grab the phone on the way back–it’ll only be a night without it, after all. But Tess’s dialogue options are limited and a bit more intense than usual–she needs her phone. And despite being 30 years old, I still felt that desperation.
It’s clear that Open Roads wants to have meaningful conversations about generational trauma, the oft-dismissed complexity of mothers, and how humans have different ways of showing love, a fact that can lead to pain when misunderstood, and I wanted to have them too. Yet it doesn’t offer the time or vulnerability to dig into these interesting topics. And while some of its story beats are unique, or offer at least a slight variation on ones we’ve perhaps seen before, all of these stories end somewhat abruptly and without much fanfare or introspection.
Where the game does succeed in storytelling, however, is in its environments. Presumably thanks to the studio’s pedigree and history of working on exploration games like Gone Home and Tacoma, you can tell there is an understanding of how to make locations nostalgic without pandering, interesting but not overwhelming, and immersive but not disjointed. Though I’m slowly discovering that a lot of first-person exploration games make me a bit nauseous (definitely a “me” problem here, so I don’t fault Open Roads), I really enjoyed walking around the environments the studio created. There were so many objects and pieces of decor that reminded me of the ones I grew up with, and it was interesting to note how these objects–and the memories attached to them–moved me more deeply than a lot of the game’s conversations.
At every location, there were little reminders–be it newspaper clippings, a Blockbuster copy of Clueless, or a CorningWare-style casserole dish–of the time that had passed. Sure, this sense of place is aided by some of Tess and Opal’s conversations–I particularly loved the one in which Tess admits to her less-computer-inclined mother that her idea of a wild Friday night consists of pizza rolls and The Sims, because same–but a heavy amount of lifting is done by the artistry and detail put into creating these locations.
I also really enjoyed Open Roads’ character art, which feels inspired by the animated films ’90s kids grew up watching. The style stands out against the more realistic-looking environments and works well with the game’s voice acting, though the lack of proper lip-syncing did feel awkward at times. More awkward, however, was the game’s sound, which felt almost incomplete. I had expected to hear songs and sounds that would take me back to 2003, yet they were noticeably absent. While I wasn’t expecting to hear “Stacy’s Mom” or “Hey Ya!” pop on the radio, having multiple radios and TVs that you could interact with that did effectively nothing was a bit of a letdown.
It’s unfortunate that “letdown” and “underwhelmed” are words I’ve used multiple times when talking about Open Roads because there’s still so much about the game that works. The overall narrative touches on some meaningful topics, there’s a fair amount of intrigue, plenty of well-crafted dialogue, some interesting characters, and a lot of heart. Yet most things fall frustratingly short or are cut off far too early, making the whole experience slightly lackluster. Despite being a game about a mother-daughter road trip, the game doesn’t go too far and that relationship is left only slightly altered rather than meaningfully examined and changed.
Pepper Grinder Review – Short And Spicy
It only takes a glance to understand Pepper Grinder’s inventive gimmick. A small girl named Pepper–a pirate by trade–wields a drill named Grinder that’s roughly the size of her entire body. The gear allows her to grind through soft surfaces with ease, complete with the ability to launch out of the surface with a leap. That might have been enough to carry the game by itself, but what’s most surprising about Pepper Grinder is its sheer variety. Though it’s short, that brevity helps to make the campaign a no-filler thrill ride that continuously pushes the boundaries of its central mechanic.
It turns out Grinder is a pretty versatile tool, even regarding its most basic function. You can burrow through the ground, which immediately feels natural and smooth. At the same time, you can’t simply turn on a dime with an instant about-face like a typical platformer–you have to handle turns by curving an arc out of your drilling path. Additionally, when you pop out of the surface of the dirt, you won’t gain much distance unless you jump just before breaking through. Those little touches give the core mechanic a sense of finesse, imitating the feeling of a playful dolphin–or at least, a dolphin video game like the classic Ecco.
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Once you get the hang of it, drilling through soil and leaping out of the surface in a perfect arc, only to catch another piece of soft ground in the distance and continue your digging, feels thrilling and acrobatic. The drillable surfaces are nicely differentiated from hard environmental pieces, so you quickly learn to read a level and see the path through it, evoking a feeling similar to performing a great run in Tony Hawk. Collectibles like gems are scattered strategically throughout the stages to both subtly guide your eye along the path, while also sometimes setting traps for your greed.
Aside from being a traversal tool, Grinder is also your primary and often only weapon. It’s not enough to simply run into most enemies with a spinning drill, though–they often have their own specific approach to defeat them, like beetles with a hard upper carapace who need to be stabbed from the underside by burrowing underground. The main enemies, a breed of vicious narwhal-like creatures with horns on their head, are just as capable of hurting you with a head-on collision as you are of hurting them. None of the regular enemies are terribly tough by themselves, but they introduce new ways of approaching stages and obstacles as you need to get around them or through them to continue on your path.
A platformer with a standout hook like this one probably could have coasted on it, but Pepper Grinder doesn’t rest on its laurels. Instead, it consistently introduces new elements to master. These either integrate with your balletic burrowing or provide a change of pace from it. Grabbing a key with your drill will make it turn a lock, and you can use the kinetic energy to power machines. You’ll also shoot from cannons, drill holes into the bottoms of ships to make them take on water, carve through skyscrapers to make them collapse as you traverse through, and even pilot a giant mech. What appears at first to be a simple tool gives way to constant delightful little surprises.
A series of boss battles ramp up the difficulty nicely, taking the skills you’ve learned and putting them to the test. The first is relatively straightforward, as you dodge projectiles by moving through the soil and wait for the opportune moment to attack from the underside, while the second severely limits the amount of soft ground available and challenges you to leap high into the air to do damage. They progress from there, including one tough encounter with another human-like character that has roughly your size and agility. All this leads to a final boss encounter that is one of the most tense and difficult retro platformer bosses I’ve seen in a long time, which felt satisfying to overcome.
And on top of all this, Pepper Grinder carries itself with a cute, pixel-punk personality. Pepper’s diminutive sprite artwork has a charm to it, like how she revs up her trusty drill threateningly when coming face-to-face with a boss, or how she raises her pirate flag to declare victory in an area. The enemies can sometimes be seen doing their own pirate duties before you crash their party. And though story sequences are few and far between, they were just enough to explain what was going on with mimed, dialogue-free action. A short story sequence just before the final boss even made me laugh out loud.
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At such a breakneck pace of new ideas, Pepper Grinder doesn’t last very long, which is to its credit. I finished the campaign in roughly four hours, which is a relatively short playtime. Every stage also has a time-trial option, and there are still collectibles and cosmetics to unlock like stickers and hairstyles. The most important collectibles are Skull Coins, a limited resource–five per stage–that can be used to unlock special bonus stages in each of the four worlds. These are used to further explore gameplay concepts that had been introduced in the main stages. The first one, for example, takes the cannon mechanic to its logical conclusion with an entire stage built around ping-ponging from cannon to cannon, which felt pleasanlty reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country’s famous barrel stages.
Perhaps because of its brevity, I enjoyed every minute, and I appreciate the rare instance of a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Rather than slog through filler stages to pad its length, Pepper Grinder is bursting with new ideas for exactly as long as it can sustain that momentum. There’s something admirable about approaching its length with that level of confidence. I would have loved to play even more, if it could have sustained that pace, but this felt like a conscious choice to let the best ideas shine.
Pepper Grinder is here for a good time, not for a long time. Every piece, from the core drilling mechanic itself to the various ways it manifests with cannons and mechs and more, feels meticulously engineered to teach you a new concept, wring the fun out of it, and then move on to the next. That sense of propulsion makes every moment fun and engaging. It’s a great little gem of a game which, like its heroine, may be small in size but makes every bit count.
