Games you missed out on in November 2023

The best way I can describe Jusant is the vibes of Ico and the metaphor of climbing a mountain to overcome adversity that Celeste has. You play as a person with a frog-like companion that must climb a mountain. You don’t know why you have to do that but you keep climbing anyway. As you go you learn the story of the people who used to live on the mountain, and how the receding of the tides affected them. This can be found in notes, letters and diaries, and are completely skippable if you don’t pay attention.

The climbing challenges become increasingly difficult as you ascend, and you will need every tool and rope in your belt in order to overcome them. As you climb you realize that you don’t actually know what is at the top of the mountain, and what will happen when you get there. It’s a story better experienced than explained, and that is why I encourage you to just play Jusant for yourself.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: Xbox Series S

To start off: I am so happy Konami finally decided to make this collection. The Metal Gear Solid series is one of the most celebrated in all of gaming, and whether it’s a straight port, remaster, or a full remake, the series should be preserved and be playable on as many devices as possible. Having said that, for a collection of PS2 games running at 720p on Nintendo Switch, the Master Collection Vol. 1 is a pretty big disappointment.

There are a few nice features, for example, you can emulate PS1 save data so the encounter with Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid plays out the exact way you want it to. Likewise, it’s great to have the MSX’s Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 playable. But then we move on to MGS2 and MGS3, both of which run below the framerate of the PS2 originals, along with stuttering.

The Nintendo Switch should’ve been the ideal platform to play this collection on, but instead, the ball has been dropped. PS5, Xbox, and PC players should have a slightly better experience, but Switch players should probably look elsewhere for the classic PS2 Metal Gear Solid games.

Score: 6/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch

This is not a bad game. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is, in my opinion, a very bad game, launched in an incredibly bad state. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, however, is actually pretty good.

I’ll admit, I only decided to jump into All-Star Brawl 2 to mock it. The original game launched with several stages unable to run at a consistent 60fps, and in some cases, came with full-screen flicker, constantly. It was more than distracting: it shouldn’t have been launched in that state. In a game so bereft of content, it still would’ve been preferable for those stages to be released in a post-launch update than the way they were. I’m a mega-critic of the original game, and despite that, I think All-Star Brawl 2 is pretty fun.

It all started when I saw Ren & Stimpy, childhood favorites of mine, animated in shockingly beautiful detail. Every attack looked great, the idle animation looked fantastic, and that carries over to almost the entire cast. Plenty has been brought over from the original game, but essential improvements have been made everywhere. The Campaign and Arcade modes aren’t much to get excited about – they exist, and are fine if you want to waste time or adjust to the mechanics – but this is a game designed for fun with friends.

I wouldn’t take it too seriously, but wavedashing with friends and abusing a few silly moves will make for a fun evening. Despite everything, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is worth playing.

Score: 6/10

Version tested: PS5

The Troop is an intense turn-based tactics game set in WW2, allowing the player to take control of various Allied and Axis forces in the French theater after the landings at Normandy. Mechanics like reduced accuracy right after moving ensure that a well-structured and methodical plan is the best solution for any situation, but contributes to the intensity of each scenario as well. Sure, you could move and fire in the same turn to possibly take out that enemy tank right then and there – but your accuracy will be reduced if you fire immediately and you’ll reveal your position. In the end, this move could mean that your tank is the one to get taken off the board. Combat in The Troop can be deadly – one wrong move with an infantry squad and it may not be able to survive the turn, stumbling into view of several forces that can unleash a crossfire on it. If you are someone who makes rash decisions and can’t abide waiting, The Troop isn’t for you.

If you’re into the little details, though, like maximizing your hit chances by playing the long game, adjusting the fire arcs of your individual tank turrets, anticipating the routes enemies may take to advance to their target, then you’ll find a meaty meal in The Troop, which features a solid tutorial, skirmishes, a narrative campaign, and – the crown jewel of it, in my view – a series of custom campaigns that play out over a series of missions you need to complete with a persistent force. You’ll start out with your full regiment of troops, including infantry, tanks, artillery, and more, and will have to deal with each of these missions with exactly these troops – every unit you lose is one you won’t have access to anymore in the upcoming missions. This really drives up the value of each and every unit, thus making every decision – and sacrifice – in combat all the weightier. The AI is pretty solid, which is necessary since the game only offers single-player content.

This sound mechanical core is somewhat let down by its coating: The visuals aren’t exactly appealing, even though they do their job from the bird’s eye view you’ll be in most of the time. Animations, too, have been sacrificed to the budget gods and are rather lacking across the board. Infantry doesn’t ever climb over fences or use doors to get into houses, instead just incorporeally gliding through obstacles and walls like a squad of ghosts. At least the close-up shots of tanks firing look pretty good.

The Troop is a fantastic offering for fans of old-school tabletop wargames that can overlook the lack of eye candy and instead find fulfillment in its intense, methodical combat.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

Episode 2 Hibiscus and Butterfly released earlier this year, but now both episodes are being sold together in a physical double pack which I picked up. This is the best way to play Coffee Talk as Episode 2 isn’t a full sequel but more a continuation of the first game. Some things carry over between the two games and it was especially fun playing them back-to-back so you can remember all of the stories and drink choices.

Much like VA-11 HALL-A, the main gameplay here is in making hot drinks for your customers and listening to their stories. However, Coffee Talk has secret endings and a lot of the story changes based on decisions you make, improving the overall package for me. The menu is also based on different drinks from around the world which can help you improve your drinking repertoire.

Each game features a tight well put together story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. A cozy game for fans of narrative games, cozy indie vibes, and those who just love coffee.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch

I’ve always been a sucker for games where you run a shop, especially if the combat side of the game is centered around gathering resources for that shop. Moonlighter is an all-time favorite of mine for this very reason, and it made me immediately sit up and pay attention when I first saw Cuisineer.

Cuisineer is a worthy entry into this – admittedly niche – genre, though I wouldn’t quite put it among the very best. The roguelike dungeon-crawling side of the game is fun, if a little shallow. Enemies are a little spongey for my liking, but I still have fun going back every couple of days to gather ingredients, and while one dungeon can get samey after a while, new ones open up at a nice pace to keep you going.

Running your restaurant is a lot of fun too, although it takes a little while to get to the point where it’s challenging enough to be engaging. It has that great loop that management games like this should have though, where the more successful you become, the more customers you get and the harder your job becomes. Plus, there are lots of characters to interact with around town, and their quests allow you to set out with clear goals in mind, rather than just gathering whatever you stumble across.

It could do with a bit more depth, but Cuisineer is still one that I keep coming back to thanks to the decent combat sections and the fun and frantic management gameplay.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

One of the few games from this month’s Nintendo Indie World stream that caught my eye, Backpack Hero is a roguelike deckbuilder that tickles my brain in just the right way.

It may not look like a deckbuilder, but you’ll quickly realize it plays just like one. Instead of being cards in a deck, you’re putting items in your backpack that all have different effects and uses in combat. As you level up, rather than getting stronger items, you get to add more slots to your backpack so you can cram more stuff into it.

The singular gimmick is used to its fullest, with a huge array of items that all have different behaviors. Some will buff weapons directly adjacent to it, some will only apply buffs to an item directly below it, and so on. With a huge string of different starting item sets you’re always thinking differently about how to build your bag. In one run I was maximizing my armor, so I had to create big spaces of 2x2 items and buffs to place near them; then in the next, I focused on bows and arrows, which require empty spaces to their right to increase their damage, forcing me to take less stuff to maximize my offense.

This loop kept me gripped for ages with Backpack Hero, making puzzles into careful puzzles to solve, and even simple things like post-battle loot requiring extra thought. Plus, the story mode has a fun – if simple – town-building mode that introduces a fun resource management aspect and pushes you to try new item sets in your runs.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

This certainly was a trip down nostalgia lane. Keeping the original’s style and feel intact, the Definitive Edition offers faithfully created visual upgrades as well as some gameplay modernizations, making the title more accessible. That doesn’t mean the game can compete with modern-day triple-A titles – a bit of make-up won’t hide the fact that this title is over 20 years old. You’ll feel those years in other areas, too, such as the very classic campaign presentation with its scrolling walls of text, the fact that units can only turn in eight directions, which makes movement look very weird at times, and some bugs that apparently withstood Firefly’s extermination attempts. Your units still get stuck on damaged parts of castle walls and they still ignore enemies slaughtering their family two meters away from them. And you know what, the peasants deserve to be massacred, because their pathfinding AI is making some really questionable decisions at times.

The Definitive Edition comes with many modern comforts like mouse wheel zooming, freely configurable hotkeys, and some neat UI upgrades – the good scribe now shows you in which direction your popularity with the peasants is currently heading, for example. Barracks offer separate rally points for different troop types and, praise the lord, control groups have finally arrived in the game. Gameplay-wise, nothing much has changed: You build your little town, ensure it’s well-supplied with food, and construct fortifications to defend yourself. Units just… well, run into each other and die, I guess. It’s not exactly offering very sophisticated combat.

The title’s brand-new single-player content is a mixed bag: The new campaign is refreshingly challenging and Firefly attempts to mix things up when it comes to mission goals. However, narratively it can’t match the classic story, which at least has some memorable antagonists. Multiplayer is affected by some technical issues as well, making it frustrating to engage with. Overall, Stronghold: Definitive Edition fulfills the promise inherent in its title only in part – while it’s undoubtedly the best way to play the iconic strategy game from 2001 today, I wouldn’t call it definitive.

Score: 7/10

Tested on: PC (Steam)

Everything inside me told me that Spirittea was for me. You play as a new resident in a mountain town and you take care of a bathhouse for spirits á la Spirited Away. However, this is where the Ghibli comparisons end and the Stardew Valley comparisons begin, and sadly it is not a favorable one. The bathhouse simulator is what makes Spirittea unique, however, it is treated like a side note in going around the village and bothering residents. The resident relationship mechanic is a little buggy, not only can you walk through them, but sometimes you can just talk to them endlessly looping their affection, and other times they’ll just say “Sorry but can you stop bothering me”. Either way, reading all the text boxes is tedious.

Balance is a major issue, not just with friendships. The only real improvement you see is in the money you make, which can be used to improve your bathhouse, but there is a point where you can only host so many guests, and you run out of stamina. The thing is, running the bathhouse is really easy, and there seems to be no real synergy to optimize how much money you make. It’s just a grind, there are no upgrades to make your towel rack bigger, or get a washroom to front door towel dispenser, it’s just endless busy work. Needless to say that upgrading your bathhouse locks you out, and you are stuck going around town waiting for a very precise time of day – that you have to trial and error to figure out – for a new spirit to appear.

At the end of the day Spirittea is fine. If you like idle clickers, then there will be something in it for you, watching the numbers go up and the spirits roll in, but it isn’t deep enough. A massive tightening of focus, and improvement on the technical performance would have done wonders.

Score: 5/10

Version tested: Nintendo Switch

Porting strategy games to consoles is always a challenge, be they turn-based or real-time titles. As a primarily PC-focused player, diving into Jagged Alliance 3 on Xbox Series X was jarring at first – playing a game like this with a controller is probably never going to feel completely “right” to me. It doesn’t help that many of the menus in this game are inspired by old internet browsers, evoking the feeling that you’re sitting in front of a PC. However, things got smoother as routine set in, which was greatly assisted by the easy-to-find diagram in the main menu showing the button mapping, just a single button tap away. It meant a lot of tapping in and out of this menu, but after a while I felt more at ease with the controls, which seemed structured pretty logically to me.

I’d love to see some options for UI scaling, though. I play on my Xbox from the same position as I play on PC, so the text size was fine for me, but I feel like reading everything clearly would have been difficult otherwise, even on a big TV. Inventory-scrolling could be quicker as well. Performance-wise the game runs quite smoothly on the console with acceptable load times and light frame drops here and there. Compared to the PC version, some visual detail has been sacrificed.

The writing is full of old action movie stereotypes, which goes for story, characters, and humor, but that’s always been part of the series’ charm and identity – it’s simply not going to be for everyone. In terms of gameplay, Jagged Alliance 3 is a worthy successor to its predecessors: You can expect intense turn-based battles, a great integration between the tactical and strategic layers a la Mount & Blade, great atmosphere, and lots of freedom in how you approach things (and thus replayability). Tutorials are a bit lacking, which makes systems like stealth a bit arcane and forces you into doing some old-fashioned trial and error testing.

Overall, Jagged Alliance 3 is an easy recommendation for tactics fans on consoles as well as on PC, thanks to a very competent port by Haemimont Games.

Score: 8/10

Tested on: Xbox Series X

I skipped Dredge originally as it launched in the middle of ten bigger games early this year. Once the dust settled on those huge triple-A releases, I was able to give it a deeper look. I was immediately charmed by what felt like a blend of Citizen Sleeper and Animal Crossing, in a Lovecraft-inspired world.

I’m not a fish-lover, I can’t even swim, but there’s something about Dredge that immediately sucked me in. Citizen Sleeper was my favorite indie game last year, so I found it comforting to see some of that micro-management here too. All those little actions that bring you to something bigger, or you can just keep playing and chill. It’s an extremely relaxing loop that doesn’t require you to use too much of your brain, and every now and then, I appreciate this kind of experience.

It also reminded me of Animal Crossing, and for a variety of reasons. First of all, you have a debt to extinguish, even though - differently from Mr. Nook’s - it doesn’t stay with you for the entirety of the game. You meet different people, with different personalities, and get to learn more about them.

The early game can be a bit confusing, and I spent several hours doing side missions or completely irrelevant jobs just because I didn’t get what I needed to do to progress. It’s a game about crafting and grinding, so as long as you’re in the loop, it won’t be a problem. My problem was I dropped it halfway for other games I had to work on, and when I got back, I found I wasn’t that interested in getting back in the loop. Not a major issue, but something you should be aware of.

The setting is gorgeous. I loved how the more equipment you get on your boat, the more of it you’re able to see - especially by night, when your field of view is severely limited. The game has added a new frozen biome with The Pale Reach DLC. While we’re still waiting for a bigger expansion to be released in 2024, you get 11 new fish, a crab species and their aberrated counterparts for a tiny price. There’s also the new equipment required to reach the location and catch them. The DLC is more of what you loved, and enough to keep you entertained while we wait for The Iron Rig.

Score: 8/10

Tested on: PC (Steam Deck)

By the time I had Super Crazy Rhythm Castle in-hand, I had completely forgotten what it was supposed to be. As it turns out, it’s a very strange, rather unique rhythm adventure game that’s very unlike anything that came before it. Gameplay is split up between two aspects — exploring and adventuring, and rhythm stages. You’ll explore the eponymous castle, talking to characters (most of whom are very funny) and having a bit of a poke around to see what things are like in this strange new musical land.

Step through a door, though, and you’ll come face to face with a musical stage, and this is where the experience differs massively depending on whether you’re playing alone or with others. Essentially, each stage has Guitar Hero-style rhythm panels, and you have to play these panels to complete certain actions. You might be powering up a computer or activating a weapon to attack a boss. It’s all tied together with a kind of Overcooked-style chaotic balancing act, where you’ll have a bunch of things to do and you have to try and keep up with all of them.

Unfortunately, while the game will definitely let you play solo, I didn’t find it particularly fun to play like this. I found there was often just too much to do, too much to handle, and not enough time to do it all. What’s worse is that the levels don’t really explain… anything, really. You rarely, if ever, get told what you’re supposed to be doing, or how to actually complete the tasks asked of you. I think I failed just about every stage at least once just trying to figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing, and then a few more times because my poor little ADHD brain just couldn’t balance it all alone.

I did end up buying a second PS5 controller – Sony arrogantly doesn’t let you use PS4 controllers for PS5 games – and playing with a second person, and it was a lot better that way. I found myself shouting, laughing, and even enjoying myself, even when we failed the level the first time figuring out what to do. There’s definitely an Overcooked or Moving Out kind of vibe to it, and I appreciate that, but levels are a bit too long, a bit too obtuse, and a bit too frustrating to stick with it. We ended up playing a couple of levels per session and then giving up on the game for the day.

Thankfully, in terms of presentation, there’s little to complain about. It’s got a lovely art style that reminds me a bit of games like Cult of the Lamb – 2D characters in 3D environments – and the music is quite nice, which is good for a rhythm game. I particularly enjoyed the lyrical tracks, and while they won’t really stick in my head for much longer, I enjoyed bopping along to them.

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle is best described as chaotic, mixing rhythm gameplay with Overcooked-style task completion, but it’s really a game you have to play with friends or family. The solo experience is too chaotic and too frustrating to tackle alone. The experience doesn’t change much when playing with friends, but it is a lot more fun to play and laugh along with.

Score: 7/10

Tested on: PS5