My first post on this blog turned out to be fairly popular, so I thought I’d continue with a look at some more games I played and completed in 2023. All in all, I finished 23 games and I covered my top 10 last year. So I’ll cover ten more, in two halves.
Unlike last week’s top 10, these will be in no particular order. Let’s go!
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (Xbox One)
I’d picked up the Assassin’s Creed Ezio Collection back in 2022 and played through Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood then, but after that I suffered my usual case of Assassin’s Burnout (no, not a hypothetical street racing crossover, as awesome as that would be) and didn’t kick off Revelations properly until the summer of 2023!
Revelations is definitely the weakest of the trilogy in my view, almost a mission pack for Brotherhood. The Constantinople setting is nice, though, and bombs expand the kinds of objectives you can complete - being able to set traps, smoke bombs or wide-area poison clouds brought a lot of variety to missions, even though they do mean Ezio’s arsenal of gear now takes two weapon wheels to display! Revelations is also a fair bit buggier than its predecessors, and several of its achievements (on Xbox) didn’t work correctly, which was a little frustrating. But despite all this, the core Assassin’s Gameplay is still as solid as ever, and perhaps it feels a little churlish to complain about too much variety in one’s assassination toolkit…
Glass Masquerade Origins (PC)
Whenever I wanted to relax after a hard day, I’d turn to Glass Masquerade. It’s a cosy jigsaw-puzzle kind of game: fit pieces of stained glass together to form intricate pieces of art, but with no real clues to go on other than the colours and the shape of the edges. Each puzzle is themed after a different country and features artwork depicting traditional vistas or monuments, and characters from folklore. The pieces “click” together nicely and there’s that all-important sense of completion as you finish each one. And it’s supremely laid-back: there’s a timer, but you’re never rushed and there’s no challenge mode for the sake of it. Just a warm cup of hot chocolate of a game.
Cloudpunk (Xbox One)
I didn’t quite know what to expect from Cloudpunk when I started it. You’re a delivery driver in a futuristic megacity, piloting a flying car around motorways in the sky - yes, it’s rather Blade Runnery, and there’s all kinds of cyber-augmented folks running around to really get you nostalgic for the good old days of replicant-hunting. None of that in this game: in fact there’s no combat of any kind, it’s not that sort of game. It’s a (mostly) chilled out story-driven adventure where the only game-related difficulty comes in the form of very occasional timed delivery missions. The story - and it’s fully voice-acted throughout - is the point here, and I became quite captivated by the “ordinary night” of driver Rania, her robot dog Camus, and their gruff yet affectionate mission-control handler, which of course turns out to be anything but ordinary.
The game’s rendered in a voxel style, significantly more detailed than, say, Minecraft, but still retaining a kind of basic charm that works for vehicles and buildings. It does look rather strange on human characters, though, and running around on foot with your blocky representation of a person is a bit jarring in contrast to the lovely cyberpunk artwork used for text boxes.
Rainbow Islands (Master System)
Returning to the Master System Challenge thanks to the legendary efforts of @8BitBoyUK, the one I attempted most thoroughly after The Jungle Book was Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2. An excellent port, matching the NES version’s graphics while being considerably smoother to play than the versions on the 8-bit micros, it’s an arcade style classic that’s often overlooked in favour of the original Bubble Bobble. In terms of gameplay, you make your way up vertically-scrolling stages with the help of rainbows, which you can use as makeshift platforms; they’re also your primary weapon, and I don’t know about you but I’ve always found clonking enemies on the head with falling arches to be quite satisfying!
As usual with these challenges, when they involve games I played as a kid, I tend to discover all of the hidden areas and mechanics that just passed me by 30 or so years ago - for Rainbow Islands I finally understood what all of the items do, and how to get special power-ups from the cutscenes in between the stages!
Heavenly Sword (PS3)
After picking up a subscription to PlayStation Plus on Black Friday, I decided to try out what was formerly known as “PlayStation Now” - cloud streaming of PS3 games on my PS4. To my surprise the service surpassed my expectations and the game I chose to try out - 2007’s Heavenly Sword - was perfectly playable with little to no input lag or other problems. Maybe this tech has finally matured?
Anyway, Heavenly Sword itself is an impressive-looking early PS3 title. It’s stuck with a bit of “awkward middle child syndrome” - somewhere between the action games that had evolved on the PlayStation 2, where each level was self-contained and the game railroaded you through its story in a linear fashion, and the cinematic open-world exploration-combat games that came of age on the PS3 and grew to define the PS4 era. Taking control of morose prophecy-child warrior Nariko, and wielding the titular Heavenly Sword, the game sees you hack and slash your way through the armies of the evil King Bohan; you move from one stage to the next fighting waves of bad guys with a fairly robust combo system often reminiscent of Dynasty Warriors.
But it’s the cutscenes that really shine here, and (one suspects) what the game seems to focus on. The story was co-written by Rhianna Pratchett and directed by Andy Serkis, who also plays King Bohan (to scenery-chewing perfection) in motion-capture cinematics which still hold up today and almost serve as the template for later smash hits like Uncharted and the Tomb Raider reboot. Although the game is very short - it can be completed in less than 6 hours - its high production values and place in the PS3’s history make it one I’d recommend you try out, whether it’s with a physical disc or streamed from the cloud.
Five more games to come - watch this space!
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