(The tl;dr video companion for this article):

Life is terrifying shit show, and in this way, not too dissimilar to the act of accidentally making eye contact with a person in a mascot outfit.


A deeply unnerving experience

Putting life’s overwhelmingly negative qualities aside and zooming out a bit, this past week has been a glorious return to form, where writing about games is concerned, for after a hiatus during the first half of September, I came out guns a blazing, and putting my scribing chops to the test. This has involved starting a cornucopia of titles, all varied in their genre and style of gameplay, just as an extra little challenge to push my range a bit, in attempting to get my writing mojo flowing again. The only downside to all of this has been burning the candle at both ends, as the amount of free time and…well, sleep I’ve had to sacrifice is not in the least bit negligible, and I’m at that point in the exhaustion process where even caffeine is barely doing the trick.


That kind of tired where every minute feels like a skin crawling eternity

In spite of all that, I do have a new game I’d like to talk about, though I think this article is going to jump around a little bit and discuss a few titles I’ve been fooling around with and have had on my mind as of late, as the new game I want to talk about has left me…err, a bit sparse on explicitly shareable details, which will make a lot more sense when we finally get around to discussing it later. I suppose I take this moment now to say a final goodbye to Mario Kart Tour (MKT), as the app was officially taken offline this morning at midnight, as was foretold by the powers that be. I honestly think the games immediate absence from my life has kind of fucked me up a little bit, as I had made it a habit to play the god damn thing everyday, even making sure I would get an online win in the process. Such a fine little satisfying ego boost has now henceforth vanished from my life, and my regular habituations have been thrown into complete disarray. In attempting to ease the pain of heartache left in MKT’s wake, I decided to fill the blue shell sized hole in my heart by playing Mario Kart World (MKW) instead, which is the equivalent of sucking on an ice cube as a substitute for not having access to ice cream which one wants to indulge in.


Fittingly, my go to driver in MKT was the Ice Cream Mii, just to give literal form to my very real analogical yearnings

I wrote a bevy of articles about MKW late last year, the ass end of which bled into the beginning of this year, and my deconstructionism on the matter of breaking down the metaphysics of MKW were extensive as they were as objective as possible, and with the majority of my life having always had a Mario Kart at the ready for which to always obsessively fawn over, I can safely say, between my experience with the entire series, and now with more time away from World, and thus returning to the scene of the crime, I can safely say I feel as if MKW is very probably the worst console Mario Kart by a wide gulf. World is such an awkward, clumsy, clusterfuck made up of the worst design decisions imaginable, in an attempt to flatten out the skill curve of the metagame, almost all sense of proper tension and hardened skill has nearly vanished in the process, so how long I may remain delusional about how appropriately World will be a successful surrogate for Tour’s untimely demise remains to be seen…but it ain’t looking good.


When I said Tour left a blue shell sized hole in my heart that needed filling, I think I failed to elaborate just how many blue shells I was talking, here…

I think all of this has related to throwing my vibe straight off for the greater part of today, as I’ve been off a baseline of reasonable focus and remarkably low energy where my mood concerned, which does not excite me in the slightest, especially with how much harder it makes getting an article written by midnight ends up being. C’est la fucking via I suppose. The next game I figured I would mention, involves The Prince of Persia, The Lost Crown, which came out about two years ago, and seemingly under performed come release date time. The Switch 2 recently just had a free game trial for it, so I thought I would give it a whirl, as I’ve enjoyed many a title from the franchise overall, and I finally wanted to lay to rest whether or not this game was undeserving of more critical praise when it first came out, as I feel as if the crowd reaction to it was quite muted after the fact.


If the over the top parries in Lost Crown are anything to go by, however, you’d think everyone would have been loud as fuck about this game

Truth be told; The Lost Crown is unfortunately, an extraordinarily by the numbers Metroidvania, in that it follows all of the rigidly classic formula the genre is known for, but not an ounce more of creative effort in bringing any new ideas to the table in the process. So, on the one hand, you have a perfectly competent title, one of which will keep you motivated to uncovering more of the bombastic moveset and hidden secrets scattered about the map, as one would expect from any run of the mill Metroidvania. The downside to this is, the experience is so bog standard, the whole thing ends up feeling rather flat as a result, with the game being wholly good, but nothing out of the ordinary in the slightest. Even though I know the Prince of Persia game that came out last year, “The Rogue Prince of Persia”, was more characteristically speaking a roguelike, so the two games kind of do two different things and in some ways are an apples and oranges kind of scenario. So while a direct comparison would not be so proper, I find it an effortless declaration that the Rogue experience felt far more compelling to me than Crown did, so it doesn’t look like the gaming public made that much of a boo boo in the first place, by not going batshit crazy about the quality of Crown when it first launched, as the whole thing is perfectly passable as a middle of the road standard for the genre, but little else, I’m afraid.


Outside of some sweet and terrifically theatrical parrying on display, Lost Crown is rather pedestrian in most other ways. Again….fun..but maybe only just so due to the bar being set so high for this genre now a days

The final game, and the newest one of the bunch I wanted to mention, is most definitely an odd ball indie title, I’d say almost a micro-experience from what I saw during my preview, called Tamashika, which is more or less what I’d call a “flow state game”, as there is almost nothing else to do in the game but the one thing it has going on, and that’s running down hallways, and shooting and stabbing bad guys.


Variations of what this screenshot is showing represents about 90% of the gameplay Tamashika has to offer

For having put an hour into this title for my preview, I know shockingly little about the experience, in spite of maybe even beating it in that small amount of time (the fact I don’t even know if I beat the damn thing should help to reinforce how obscurantist this game is, in telegraphing any sense of relatively important information to the player). To that point, I kind of wanted to remain blind in my write up as a result of the astonishingly cryptic nature of said title, and opted not to do any extra research on the matter for the time being, as I feel as if Tamashika enjoys how obtuse it is at any given moment, so finding more information about the game itself, almost feels inherently betraying of what the game is going for.


Like I said: there is a whole lot of (gestures at screenshot) this kind of thing going on, specifically, over and over again

With that said, you pretty much go right from the main menu, jumping directly into the action, so there isn’t even story to latch onto here. It seems as if the main character is interacting or utilizing virtual reality on some level, as whether or not this is purely for recreation’s sake, or if there is a more nefarious fascistic plot point behind it, again, is not known, cause this game goes out of its way to be as mum as possible about anything involving explaining itself. Being a flow state game, your task is a repetitive one, as you run and gun (and stab) your way through a series of trippy hallways, as the whole thing feels like a fever dream of sorts, as both the visuals, the audio design, and the absurdity of your interaction with the enemies are all kind of disorienting and will keep you as arms length away from understanding, as it will paradoxically have you locked in the entire time while playing the game.

“The tutorial” is one of the only times the game is ever explicit

This is the part where I have to level with you, as I think one would have to be an extraordinarily specific kind of person to want to play this game, as it takes quick reflexes, a lot of repetitive trial and error, and nearly no variety in gameplay to speak of. One of the few “hooks” the game has, is for some enemies, you will have to parry the bullets and or knives they are utilizing against you, and timing is key in being able to parry them successfully, and this will take some time to get use to the timing windows involved before you start to “get it”. The game is unforgiving in this regard, as a failed parry means being “warped” all the way back to the beginning of the level. As the game progresses, the games longer and harder levels do thankfully have a few checkpoints scattered that you will warp to before going all the way back to the beginning, but as is the case with a lot of difficult games these days: it’s baseball rules, which means unless you’re lucky enough to pick up a randomly rare heart that an enemy drops, it will only take three different fuck ups for you to have to start the whole level over again.


Get ready for a lot of restarts…cause you’re going to be eating a lot of shit on a regular basis, random hearts be damned

I can’t emphasize enough that you’ll struggle with understanding the timing window related to when the game wants you to parry, so you will likely have to repeat the first 30 seconds of the game several times before it finally clicks for you. It would be akin to really sucking at platformers, and continually dying on the first goomba in the original Super Mario Bros a couple dozen times before you figured out how to avoid him. Speaking to that truth is why I don’t think many people will have the constitution to get down on this game, as its extremely reptetitive nature is truly mimicking difficulty levels from a bygone era, and if one does not posses anger management abilities, a high tolerance for failure, and some kind of obsessive compulsive streak of mastering absurdist challenges, you will likely bounce off this game within five minutes tops.


While this shared insight is technically helpful, in actuality, it is nearly as useful as the advice given in baseball as “be the ball”: an abstraction that swiftly vanishes when some mother fucker who’s being paid millions of dollars to huck a projectile at you at 100 miles an hour suddenly becomes a pertinent relevancy

Don’t get me wrong: Tamashika has a novel charm about it, as it throws off vibes one might get from a flash game during the height of popularity for the offbeat site Newgrounds back in the early aughts, as its minimalist design methodologies, combined with its hard edged difficulty curbing is the sort of bread and butter for any traditional hardcore gamers of that era, but that type of player is cut from a different cloth, and are certainly a rarity now a days, which relegates this games demographic to a narrow margin of people. However, I will happily take a unique, experimental and or offbeat indie game than a tried and true play it safe AAA forumlated experience any day of the week, so Tamashika is a-okay in my book, but it is definitely not going to be the favored cup of tea by the majority of the gaming public.


To all whom it may concern: there is at least one anime girl present, if that does anything for you

And with that, I retire to my editors suite, to see if I can’t cobble together something interesting from this smattering of riff raff I’ve amassed this day. Thanks for stopping by.

~Pashford