Games you missed out on in February 2024

I’m a long-time fan of the Spirit Hunter series, with Death Mark 2 actually being the third game. These games stand out among murder mystery visual novels for their chilling sound design and grotesque scenes. The man who was turned into a beehive from the original will forever be burned into my retina. Both of these are still here, but something is missing. The original Death Mark focused on famous Japanese ghost stories; the follow-up NG was based on common children’s tales, making it even more creepy. Death Mark 2 focuses solely on the story of The Departed. One big bad, with a number of smaller cases attached.

There were a number of structural points that I preferred in the first two games. Ghost stories are never known to be long, so the broken-down structure of the previous games was stronger. Instead of finding out more about The Departed little by little, most of the revelations come at the end. There are also side-scrolling exploration sections for the first time, which end up stretching out the game’s length with backtracking. This is so you can find all the Eerie Teeth and gain points to level up, but I could have done without an RPG system in my murder mystery.

Despite some of the innovations lacking, the hallmarks of the series are still very much here. Excellent characters, creepy visuals and sound design, a gripping story, and a hard-to-solve mystery with branching paths and multiple endings. I would recommend the other games in the series more, but Death Mark 2 is still very much worth your time.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch

I’m all for difficult 2D platformers. Meatboy, Celeste, Spelunky, I love them all, so I had high hopes that Telmari would be for me.

The first thing that will strike you with Telmari is the overwhelming similarities to Celeste. The music evokes the same vibe, the main character has ginger hair and wears pale blue, and even the “dialogue” noise is similar to Celeste. It seems to have been done in the name of parody, but the game never actually makes any jokes about it – and if you’re not doing anything satirical with it, then you’re just ripping it off.

Gameplay-wise, the ideas are all there. The main gimmick is firing arrows into walls to use them as launch pads around increasingly difficult platforming scenarios, which is a fun idea. However, the execution is full of holes that make it an unpolished chore to play. For one thing, when you die, the level doesn’t reset – instead, your character is thrown back to the start. It’s not game-breaking, but it means that when you respawn, the cycles of enemies and platforms will be thrown off, meaning there’s no consistency between attempts, and it shows a lack of care in level design.

On top of that, controlling the main character just doesn’t feel good. The fact that they can barely jump is fine, given the core mechanics, but it doesn’t have the precision it needs to complete some of the game’s challenges.

For example, if you want to fire an arrow diagonally up or down, you have to tilt the movement stick in that direction, forcing your character to also move forward – there is no way to aim while stationary. This is a fundamental failing of control design that makes so many things a lot harder than they need to be. By all means, have a way to aim and move at once, but there needs to be a stationary option too, especially when the character moves as fast as they do.

If Telmari had any level of polish, then it’d be a fun, if simplistic, platformer, but that level of care hasn’t been put in. The result is a game that fails at its core purpose and is a mere echo of far better games.

Score: 4/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

Ultros can overwhelm the players with its vibrant psychedelic look, and by telling you so little about how you should traverse the environment. Through exploration, you learn more and more about the mysterious world, only for it to be ripped away from you. Every time you reach a goal in Ultros, you are sent back to the beginning without your upgrades. But the world keeps growing, the seeds you sow pave the path forward, and the organic chains you make remain linked.

It’s an innovative new way of creating a metroidvania, and while this may be disorientating for some, it’s a refreshing difference in what can be a stale genre. The platforming is not that difficult but the environment is filled with tricky plant-based puzzles that need to be solved. The combat also challenges you by asking you to use different techniques to down each enemy in order to get the best spoils. While most rooms are not too difficult to traverse, some bosses and areas can be quite challenging, but you can negate this with the difficulty in the options.

Even after 15 hours and finishing the main story I didn’t feel like I fully understood Ultros, and that is what was most exciting about it. With pathways undiscovered and new upgrades as yet unused, the main game feels like a long tutorial for how to explore the world at your own pace afterward. Ultros is definitely a step forward for the genre, and I hope it encourages others to push boundaries and expectations in the future.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PS5

You can probably already tell from the title that Sympathy Kiss is an otome visual novel, but this mashing together of two random words doesn’t tell you about the story. Sympathy Kiss is a slice of life, meaning the life of our protagonist could be that of any player if men that charming and attractive actually existed. You won’t find any fantasy, historical, or supernatural theme here. Akari just works in an office, making a news app.

The slice of life separates it, as does the way your suitors are presented. There are eight dateable men, though many of these romance options are hidden. This means that stories are short, sweet and self-contained, which I saw as a strong point in my busy app manager life. There is always some point of drama involved, but many of these are mundane; one is a dad, one has a significant age gap, one is a bit of a drifter, and this sort of tension fits perfectly in a slice of life. There are also no bad endings. You can thrive at work, thrive in love, or thrive in both making happy endings all around.

However, the inclusion of some of otome’s more worn-out tropes made it fall a little flat. There is the bad boy who stalks and drugs you and changes his ways through the power of love. I get that it’s a fantasy, but I think these storylines should be put to bed, along with some other bombastic but less problematic ones. A lesser point is that Akari doesn’t have a face, something I always found creepy. I want sweet romantic stories in my slice of life without feeling someone’s life is at risk.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch

This is essentially the game version of 1984 meets Gattaca, where you are born into a corporate nation and given your job role at birth. Working as a lab technician, you sort samples by day, and by night - use your computer to pay bills, buy items for your pod, and play games to put money back into the company. The process is strikingly similar to Papers, Please, as soon a rebel group gives you tasks to disrupt the status quo.

As a Lucas Pope fangirl, the idea instantly gripped me, but I had a number of gripes the longer I played. The controls could be a bit finicky, leading to more mistakes, and I found it difficult to keep up with working enough to not be taken out, while also completing espionage tasks. I often found it difficult to understand what I was doing, and contradicting messages meant I was never sure what was expected of me.

The moral choices didn’t really stick. In Papers, Please, you are helping your family, the women being trafficked, and the citizens generally. In Corponation, you are only helping yourself. There are multiple endings, but the ending I reached had a twist that felt so obvious I didn’t realize it was meant to be a secret. There are just too many hints given throughout to make it feel clever, and like many other aspects of the game, it struggles with balance. A glimpse of a good game can be seen here, but it couldn’t quite stick the landing.

Score: 6/10

Version tested: PC (Steam Deck)

I’m a sucker for games that put twists on traditional card games, and Balatro might be the best in that genre. It’s the kind of game that doesn’t seem too deep when you first start a run, but then you quickly become overwhelmed by all the different systems and how they interact.

All you have to do in each “battle” is create a Poker hand of up to five cards from your hand of eight. The better the hand, the higher you score, and you have to score a certain amount within a limited number of hands to win. Seems simple enough, but it quickly gets ridiculous in exactly the way any deck-builder should.

You can buy Joker cards, which add powerful effects to your hands, like making them worth more base points or adding multipliers – which is how you get to the really high scores. On top of that, there are a whole bunch of different modifiers you can add to your cards, altering their rank, suit, effect, or chance of being drawn from the deck – and really, that’s just skimming the surface of every system in Balatro. Plus, it has the mark of any truly great deck-builder in that I keep seeing clips online of people doing ridiculous combos that I could never hope to understand

Despite all of the playable cards being the standard 52-card pack, the extra systems surrounding it create a gameplay loop just as – if not more – complex, addictive, and downright joyous as Slay the Spire, and I don’t say that lightly.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

I’ve hated the idea of driving at night since I was a kid, and some ill-advised teacher told horror stories at Halloween about people hiding in or under your car and committing terrible crimes. Pacific Drive is a nightmare scenario for me, then. You’re alone, in a car, often at night, and always with the threat of a horrible death nearby. And I loved it.

Pacific Drive puts you behind the wheel of a fantastic old station wagon that I wish I owned, and drops you into a bizarre landscape warped by hush-hush scientific experiments with one task: Make it out alive. You won’t, though. Not at first, anyway, and not the 30th time either. Pacific Drive is a roguelike that sends you back to the beginning after a failed run, armed with knowledge, car upgrades, and a small sense of dread about what you might encounter next. A pervasive sense of unease mixed with excitement is your passenger during all of Pacific Drive, the kind you get from a good horror movie. You know something awful is undoubtedly just around the corner, and it is, and you jump anyway and do it all over again.

Pacific Drive could easily veer into schlocky territory like so many “alien coverup” and horror stories do, and it is kinda schlocky – in a good way, though. The alien story, at its core, is dark and weird enough that overlooking some of the sillier aspects is easy, and the real draw is the driving, anyway. Having you sit behind the wheel is a clever touch. It makes the experience more intimate than your usual first-person game by adding just enough of something real and mundane in the middle of the cosmic chaos unfolding around you, and even gives you a strange sense of companionship as you build up your car – your little shelter and only hope for survival – and eventually make progress.

Eventually does some heavy lifting there. Pacific Drive gives you an almost overwhelming number of ways to customize your car. It’s a smart way to keep the loop interesting each time, but even aside from the decision paralysis that comes from actually kitting out your car, there’s no way to plan for every circumstance. Say you’re building with an eye toward surviving an offroad excursion. If you end up arriving after dark without the right headlights, you can’t see anything anyway, so all that planning goes out the window. It’s equally possible to plan for night drives and get blindsided by anomalies you didn’t expect.

I’m not actually sure how I feel about that. The setup is frustrating and can even feel like a waste of time, but I also appreciate how it forced me to change my expectations. Pacific Drive expects you to approach it on its own terms, and if you’re willing to do that, you’re in for quite a ride.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PS5

It feels like 3D platformers are particularly difficult to get right. Nintendo is absolutely on top of it, of course – it’s been doing top-notch 3D platforming for decades now – but few others have ever felt as good as Nintendo’s games do. Sonic the Hedgehog is a series that has suffered from this, having spent a couple of decades now pumping out 3D games that are fine but not a whole lot more. The indie space has been getting a lot better at it in recent years, though, and Penny’s Big Breakaway might be the best example yet.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is colorful and charming, packed with retro vibes that make it feel like a long-lost game from the Dreamcast. Why the Dreamcast in particular? I’m not exactly sure, it’s just a vibes thing, but anyone who’s spent some time with the Dreamcast library will know exactly what I mean. From the blocky visuals to the excellent retro soundtrack, it’s nailed the aesthetic perfectly.

In terms of gameplay, there’s really not a lot that is an even comparison to Penny’s Big Breakaway. That’s both good and bad — good because it means that the game is doing something totally unique, and, thus, kind of interesting, but bad because it means there’s a steep learning curve.

The entire game revolves around Penny’s yo-yo, which you can send out in any direction with the right analog stick. You hit things with your yo-yo, you ride on it for a bit of speed, you make it magically hover in the air so you can swing from. You can get by with just pressing the X button to send out the yo-yo, but then you won’t have much control over where it goes, so ideally you’ll be using the right analog stick for everything.

It’s not as immediately intuitive as something like Mario, which immediately clicks with its run, jump, leap, and punch gameplay loop, but there is a certain rhythm to it that, once you’re settled in, feels quite magical. I found that there are two states of Penny’s Big Breakaway gameplay: you’re either a bumbling idiot slowly flinging a yo-yo around and just barely getting past obstacles, or you’re comboing moves together like a god-tier speedrunner. No matter how much time I spent with the game, both of these gameplay states were common in my gameplay, and while that was a little bit frustrating, I can’t fault the game for it.

Level design is solid, too, but I found that it wasn’t always 100% clear what I was supposed to be doing. Sometimes I would be faced with an obstacle with no immediate solution, and would just spend a few moments doing very wrong things before finally stumbling upon the right solution. Perhaps with more familiarity, in future replays, that would be less of a problem, but for a game that feels like it should be played somewhat fast, it’s a big speed bump.

I did experience a few bugs here and there, too, like clipping into the environment or my yo-yo not really interacting with the world, or not being sent out at all. Bugs are far more forgivable in an indie product like this, and they certainly didn’t bother me significantly, but it’s worth mentioning that there are a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is the closest somebody that isn’t Nintendo has gotten to making 3D platforming feel perfect, and that’s a huge achievement in itself. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s hard not to love something that’s made with such passion for retro 3D platforming.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam) 

The Mystery Dungeon series is best known for its Pokémon-flavored spinoffs, but before Pikachu and pals got in on the dungeon-crawling fun, Shiren was the go-to guy delving deep into dungeons. I first fell in love with the Shiren the Wanderer series back in 2008, when the original SNES game was remade for DS, and despite relatively few entries since then, it’s been one of my favorite series ever since.

Anyone who’s played Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games – or the Chocobo Mystery Dungeon game – will have a vague idea of what Shiren is about. You get thrown into a randomly generated, grid-based dungeon with very few resources and have to make your way through the floors. Enemies move when you do, and attack when you do, so you have to be careful with your actions and plan out your movements with what little breathing room you have.

It’s a game that demands a lot of strategy, because if you’re not paying attention, it’s very easy to find yourself in a dire situation. Accidentally walking into a monster-filled room without the right equipment could spell the end of your journey, and if you fall in combat, you have to start all over again. That’s right, unlike the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, Shiren the Wanderer is a full-on roguelike, and a pretty harsh one at that.

It might feel a little harsh at times when dungeoneering in Serpentcoil Island. If you don’t find a weapon on the first couple of floors, realistically you’re probably not going to make it out of the first dungeon. I kind of like this luck-based strategy, because while it can be frustrating to start a new run and be doomed from the get-go, having a run where everything works out is deeply satisfying.

The story in The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is nothing special — you’re essentially on the way to a bigger, more important story and happen to come across an island filled with treasure. As a treasure hunter, you want the treasure, but to get it you’ll need to traverse dangerous dungeons. Once that setup is out of the way, you’ll only get small glimpses of story here and there as you die and start again, but knowing that there are more story beats when you reach key points in the dungeon path is a pretty good motivator.

The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island doesn’t do anything particularly fresh or new for the series, but it looks good, plays well, and has refined the series’ signature gameplay to near perfection. It’s brutal, difficult, and likely tough to adapt to for total newcomers, but once you’ve got the hang of it, you’re hooked for good.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch