The Bad-to-Meh Bunch (10 Mini-reviews)

Every year there's a couple games that come out that I don't get anywhere near finishing, and I typically just count them all the way out of every award on my end of year lists. This year, however, I decided I want to cover as much as possible. So, despite the fact that none of the ten games I'm going to cover here will be getting scores and many of them aren't going to earn a single point from my lists, I feel like spreading the word anyway. So, let's get started with the game that probably is the star of the show here.

Publisher: Quantic Dream

Developer: Red Thread Games

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Hi there. Welcome to the only unbiased review of Dustborn you will ever see in your life! With a reputation from many as the worst game of the year from those who don't like it and a reputation as an unfortunate victim of circumstance from those who didn't play it but want to like it, it's hard to find a review that isn't trying to sell you something. For my part, I decided I needed to have a look for myself. The straightforward take on the game is that it was created by left-leaning people, but when you look at the execution, it legitimately looks like it might be a right-wing conspiracy akin to those fake articles on Facebook claiming that college students want a WW2 movie with Hitler played by a transgender black lesbian. I needed the truth.  So yeah...I am indeed one of the tiny group of people who purchased Dustborn (the all-time high on steam is 83, but there are no figures for other platforms). So...what is the truth?

Well, first things first: Dustborn takes place in an alternate Earth where the United States was divided into different countries after a failed assassination attempt against JFK resulted in his administration creating killer robots. In this elseworld story, there are people who have superpowers relating to their voices, and as in all elseworld stories where superhumans are a minority, these people are regularly hunted down and persecuted. You play as one such superhuman, a woman named Pax whose ability is to elevate negative emotions. Not to be confused with mind control, this power simply causes emotions to run so high that they can sometimes take people over. If a person has sufficient control, then this power doesn't work. The story sees our heroine and her entourage of other outcasts traveling the US on a mission to, if memory serves, "smash the fasch" (because clearly pulling a "Pokemon Go to the polls" maneuver is the right way to get Gen Z to stop watching the TikToks and, I don't know, actually vote) under the guise of being a punk band. Because I only got a couple chapters in, I can't say for certain whether or not the fasch gets suitably smashed, but I don't think I'm missing out on much. So, here's the thing: the world is interesting and many of the characters are actually compelling (Pax herself being chief among them). And on the political level, the straightforward answer is the correct one: this is a game marketed at a progressive audience with one major takeaway when it comes to the superpowers: getting what you want by pushing people's buttons can work, but it only breeds resentment and can never result in lasting, meaningful change. Remember that the powers aren't mind control. People know they're being manipulated, so you can't make them feel or think something they don't already feel or think. It's possible that some people cannot be brought around to your side, but people deserve to be talked to and reasoned with and given a fighting chance. An early example of these ideas in work happens towards the beginning of the game, where one of your party members is having a panic attack. If you choose to have another party member use their power to invoke calmness as a solution, it works. But afterwards, the character who was panicking shakily says "I know why you did it, and thank you....but you really couldn't just talk me down?" It's entirely possible that the themes change as time goes on, but I didn't play long enough to find out...so for my purposes, it's a good message if an unaffecting one given my parenthetical gen Z comments. So that stuff isn't the problem, the problem is that it's just embarrassing on the moment-to-moment level. The biggest example of this is in the songs that your punk band plays. I already have an allergy to songs where people call attention to how "not normal" they are (yes, including "Creep," because Pablo Honey-era Radiohead is overrated), and the band's (and the game's) theme song is the most embarrassing thing I've heard in my life. The lyrics are as follows:

"We're the freaks/We're the outcasts/We look just like you/We're nothing like you

You're past due/We will eclipse you

We're the aliens/We're the refugees/we walk among you/We're right behind you

Your time is past/Your kind won't last

We're the dust-born/This bug is airborne/We're the new porn/Our kind is newborn x2"

Honestly, what does "we're the new porn" even mean? Have you ever heard such a self-satisfied "I'm not like other girls" song in your life? And if you were living in a fascist hellhole that persecuted superhumans hiding in plain sight, would you for one minute believe that these people were not superhumans? Also, these people don't have a drummer, but there's a drummer in the song! It's not really important, but I mean, come on, did these developers even try?

And that's not the end of the embarrassment I felt playing this. For how clearly left-leaning the game is, there are some truly surprising slip-ups to be found. For instance, one character is a slim blonde British they/them who is autism-coded and is actually from Hong Kong. The character itself is not the slip up. And sure, the character is autism-coded the same way all autism-coded characters are done (with consistent comparisons to a robot), but even that isn't the slip-up I'm talking about. This is the cast member who has the power to calm people down. 

Would you like to guess what the power is called?

Gaslighting.

No, I'm not kidding. The cast's one non-binary character's power...is gaslighting. Let's say you're a diversity consultant whose job it is to make sure everything is squeaky clean for Twitter...would you not suggest workshopping that a bit? You could suggest calling the power "chill pill", for example. I mean, seriously. Do you see why a part of me thought this might be a right-wing psy-op? You might as well have a lesbian character whose power is "just haven't had a good enough man" while you're at it! So, even the game's attempts at having a diversity of characters end up making me hold my head in my hands and groan sometimes! 

Beyond even this, there are times when the plot events are wildly inconsistent. There comes a point in chapter 2 where you seek out and find the supernatural remnants of misinformation that drive the plot and lead people to believe that the superhumans are destroying society, and through one embarrassing encounter after the other (with NPCs talking to themselves and then suddenly saying "oh my, what on earth am I talking about? Superhumans aren't bad at all!" out loud), you gradually bring a trailer park of people out of the darkness...but then, literally less than a minute later, the whole trailer park is back up in arms as if nothing had happened because the game needed to introduce Pax's next power. 

To end this section on a positive note, one other thing outside of the world that the game does well is its sense of humor (other than "smash the fasch"). I might not have played for longer than a couple chapters, but there were moments that legitimately made me laugh in my time with it. In a game primarily centered around its story, that kind of thing matters more than one might expect.

So, gameplay. There basically is none and what little is there falters a bit due to unclear signposting. I took some notes while I was playing so I'd remember things in the event that it took me a long time to get to the review. At one point where there was actual gameplay, my note verbatim was "wtf am I supposed to do at the baseball part?" The game does try to incorporate the powers organically into gameplay, but it's so few and far between and not very good in the first place. 

The technical state is better than the gameplay, thankfully. I don't recall any bugs of any kind, nor any texture or asset pop-in, nor framerate drops. It's possible I'm just forgetting since it's been so long, but that's what the ol' memory says, at least. With so much jank in the writing and plot details, there are times where it's hard to remember that none of that is due to problems with technical fidelity.

So, that takes us to the end, and the question on people's minds: is this indeed the worst game of 2024? Let me get this straight: in a year in which Dragon's Dogma 2 and Senua's Saga: Hellblade II came out, some people are calling this the worst one? A year in which Capcom decided to put out an objectively unplayable disaster full of game-breaking bugs that also charges real-world money to restart? A year in which Phil Spencer's naked contempt for consumers resulted in a near full-priced 4-hour nothingburger of a walking simulator that probably cost millions of dollars to make? Come off it! Dustborn is clearly not the worst game of the year, but only inasmuch as The Last of Us: Part 2 wasn't the worst game of 2020 (that honor went to Ghostrunner). It gets off with a pass only because not one, but two objectively worse things came out. 

Disagree with me on this one?

Fine....

Show me your receipt for the game! I'm one of maybe a hundred or so people (only if other platforms are considered) in the entire flipping world who dropped money on it! If I placed a wager on you having not actually bought and played any of it, I'd financially recover from this purchase! I put my money where my mouth is for the sake of integrity...can you say the same?

So, that's my two cents on Dustborn. The reviews in this article are going to get shorter from here, but I figured this one needed a bit more time to explain. 

Publisher: Private Division

Developer: Evening Star

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S

As I've aged, I've grown more and more fond of mascot platformers (see my Astro Bot review), and early in the year, Penny's Big Breakaway seemed to be making waves. I don't see why. While the simplicity of the game's control scheme is legitimately intriguing and some of the maneuvers you can pull are fun, death is far too easy to achieve and there's this overwhelming feeling of "meh" in the level design. Worse than all of that is what passes for combat. Combat isn't the point, but that just means it shouldn't stand out! As it stands, there are little penguin enemies that rush you and grab onto you and if enough of them are on you at a time, you die. But there's no defeating these enemies, and they can follow you through almost anything. As a result, you'll regularly shake these little guys off only for them to catch back up not too long afterwards. Have you ever had a nightmare where you're trying to run from something and you just can't run fast no matter how hard you try? That's the experience of playing Penny's Big Breakaway. 

Publisher: Kepler Interactive

Developer: Ironwood Studios

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Microsoft Windows

Indie games are infested with the roguelike plague and that shows no signs of slowing down. Roguelikes are the laziest kinds of games imaginable, as you don't have to worry about unimportant things like level design...or encounter design...or strategic weapon or power-up placements...or any kind of creative or artistic vision at all. Yes, it's safe to say that I'd rather run into traffic than play a roguelike...but every once in a while one comes out with an intriguing enough hook to make me think "maybe this one will be different." BPM: Bullets per Minute comes to mind from a few years ago, but in 2024, that game was Pacific Drive. The premise is this: your'e some kind of delivery driver or something who takes a wrong turn and has a bunch of bad things happen and ends up inside of an exclusion zone (think Annihilation or any other story about a particular stretch of land where the laws of reality are different). Obviously, your goal is to escape the exclusion zone, but to do that, you need a car...and getting ahold of parts to repair and improve cars is a tall order in this area. So, you set out on various escapades to gradually build up your vehicle to be good enough to escape.

The big draw for me was the car factor. I have this inexplicable love for the concept of a journey where you have to consistently tend to your mode of transportation (which possibly comes from the car chapter of Half-Life 2). That and the supernatural elements. Judging from reviews I was seeing, a lot of the phenomena that occur in this game seemed incredibly interesting. 

However, despite this game having some of the hallmarks of something made for me, it's held back not just by its roguelike elements, but also its survival elements. It's procedurally generated (aka lazy) maps with random layouts and threats peppered with a bunch of overly fiddly crafting and repair mechanics. Pair all of this with a truly abysmal sense of control and plenty of technical jank, and you have one hell of a disappointment.

Publisher: Coatsink

Developer: Bunnyhug

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch

Spoiler alert: Moonglow Bay is the best game in this article. It's still basically meh, but it's the best of the bunch. Everyone who knows me knows I have a thing for games that center around boats and the ocean, which makes games about fishing a pretty guaranteed hit with me. Moonglow Bay is a kind of Animal Crossing-esque fishing/cooking/city management game set in a small Canadian town in which you play as an old person whose partner disappears at sea one day. However, after your daughter shows up one day to work for the town, you start up your own seafood restaurant and begin chasing local folk tales to try and see if there's any hope of finding your partner. In addition to the whole ocean thing, I also have kind of a weakness for stories in which you have an adult child already. Its a layer of wholesomeness that works for me, and it's still rare enough to not be overplayed. But I digress. Moonglow Bay works on a calendar system in which you do as much as you can during the day and go to sleep at night (unless you just don't want to). What you do in a day varies: there are requests from townspeople to eat different types of seafood, an aquarium to bring live specimens to, jobs in town to restore tourism and bring in money, and of course, fishing out on the titular bay. While I can appreciate the little lazy town structure, the moving parts are just too tedious. For a large portion of the game, you have to manually cook each meal yourself with no streamlining of any kind (unless something happens after the point I stopped). That means each individual meal you make requires you to pass as many as five minigames to determine the star quality (meaning selling price). You want to generate as much revenue as possible, so you'll be making a lot of meals and doing these many, many minigames quite often. I do believe that eventually you can make multiple of the same dish in batches, but there's still an awful lot that has to happen. Fishing is similarly a hassle sometimes, as sometimes a single fish can take up to a minute of reeling to pull up. One fish isn't going to be enough for hardly any dishes, so it ends up becoming pretty time-consuming. Then there's the town itself, which is a nightmare to navigate with its oddly-placed camera, unhelpful map markers to turn in quests, and lack of any idea where an NPC is at a given moment. Finally, there's just too much technical jank to be excusable. I had a boss bug out and become unbeatable until I fired up the game two more times, for one thing. Moonglow Bay truly could've been something great, but it's ultimately more like a collection of flaws wrapped up in a visually ugly package. So, while it has more going for it than anything else you're going to read about today, it still isn't great.

Publisher: RainySundayAfternoon

Developer: RainySundayAfternoon

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed for), Linux, MacOS

The big thing to remember with 7Groves is that it's completely free. Essentially, the concept is that you make your way through a dark Dr. Seuss-esque world looking for little emblems to unlock doors. That's all there is to the gameplay...so it's obviously nothing to write home about, but it also isn't the point. The point here is the art direction and the atmosphere, which is legitimately some of the best of 2024. I defy you to not be impressed by these things! However, there doesn't appear to be any kind of saving, you walk too slowly, the lighting is entirely too dark more often than not, and there's this inescapable feeling of tedium as you make your way through the world. Again, totally free, so it's worth taking a look at for the art alone...but you aren't likely to find anything other than that to appreciate. 

Publisher: 3D Realms

Developer: Slipgate Ironworks

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch

Phantom Fury is one of the truly rare games that aims to be the next Half-Life 2...and like all games that try that, it doesn't exactly stick the landing. The game trades Gordon Freeman's mute status for a lady with enough action movie quips to make the entire 1980's cinema scene blush (though there is an option to turn the one-liner frequency down, which I find amusing). That's fine...I guess. However, despite an impressive array of weapon types, the shooting itself feels like it's missing something...specifically a cover system. Not every shooter needs that, but this one definitely did given how accurate enemies tend to be. It isn't bad, it's just not good. Nevertheless, I'd fully intended to finish it...but I couldn't. You see, possibly halfway through the game, I encountered a persistent crash that occurred upon entering a mandatory path in a level. It didn't matter if I restarted, re-installed, or turned the console off and on, nothing took this bug away. So, I was stopped by a bug and couldn't finish it even if I wanted to go back and try again. I'm sorry, but if your game is already pretty meh, being literally unfinishable is even worse. 

Publisher: AVIX, Purple Play LLC

Developer: AVIX

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch

If you know me, it should be pretty obvious why I gave Deep Beyond a shot. It's diving-adjacent, after all! But boy, I tell you, if you thought the writing in Dustborn was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. The argument that absolutely everything these days that is bad is bad because it's written with AI is beyond exhausting at this point, but I'd honestly believe it in the case of Deep Beyond if I didn't already know the game originated in a non-English speaking country. No...come to think of it, I think it's entirely possible that they used AI anyway. Like with Dustborn, I got the sense early on that this was going to be a wild ride, so I started taking notes. Here are the bullet points I came away with:

-A thug steps on the protagonist's diving helmet and breaks it into pieces....I own an old diving helmet that belonged to my grandfather. It's a million years old, and even so, it's impossible to break under ridiculous ocean pressure, much less under the foot of some nobody thug. So this development team doesn't even remotely understand diving.

-After her boat is raided by thugs, the protagonist hears the thugs saying they're going to find her father figure, Howard. Protagonist passes out for a while and awakens some time later. When she awakes, she says "We need to find Howard and make sure he's aware of the danger!" I'm not the only one who thinks that line is weird on ice, right? Like, there's not a lot of urgency behind it?

-When the protagonist shows up to Howard's house, the sign out front says "The Howard's"...where do I even begin with that one? Oh, and Howard is definitely the first name, not the last name. 

-When the protagonist enters Howard's house, everything is thrown around, and she asks aloud, "what happened here?"....you were knocked out by thugs who were looking for the guy, woman! What do you think happened here?

-She walks past her room and says "looks like my room wasn't searched." Girl, your room is one of the only open doors in the entire house, in what universe was your room not searched?!

-She enters Howard's study and asks "what the hell?" Again, what do you think? But there's more to it than that...because the study is the cleanest room in the house in that moment.

-She finds a VHS tape in Howard's study, and at this point I made a prediction: "I bet that contains a video diary of what happened right before she arrived." I was right. Howard was filming a video diary leading up to being kidnapped. This video diary was then somehow converted into a VHS tape and left on the table for everyone to see. So much is wrong with this.

Then there was a puzzle where I had to constantly move between levels of a lighthouse and keep track of a million tiny things with no way to easily recall the details in like a log or something. So yeah, after all of that, I decided I was done entertaining Deep Beyond. There's only so far "so bad it's good" can get you.

Publisher: Plaion

Developer: Critical Hit Games

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Well, after one solitary mission of Nobody Wants to Die, I had a bone to pick with the title because I definitely wanted to. Somebody on that development team is just convinced they made something profound and badass, but it's all so tryhard and cringe that I couldn't help but laugh constantly. This paired with the single biggest collection of linear contextual gadgets and handholding I've ever seen in my life and a confusing evidence board system made it so that I gave up on this one fairly quickly.

Publisher: Fireshine Games

Developer: ColePowered Games

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

It doesn't work. On PS5 there's a game-breaking bug in the tutorial of all things, so how is it supposed to handle the weight of its systems in a full-on procedurally generated context? 0/10. Don't waste your time. Yahtzee Croshaw was full of crap on this one.

Publisher: Greylock Studio

Developer: Greylock Studio

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed For)

Echo Point Nova feels like baby's first game in all the wrong ways. For one thing, it's made in the Unreal engine, which always makes games look like they're made by newbies. For another thing, it looks procedurally generated but isn't...which isn't much better than actually being procedurally generated. For another thing, the movement is all kinds of floaty and unpolished. Then, all the dialogue is presented via static text on screen at various physical locations. Then, there's a minecraft element in which you can mine every piece of the map, which just feels out of place. In a better game with a more talented group of developers, the high-speed action gameplay would legitimately be top tier, as riding on a hoverboard shooting enemies in mid-air while performing tricks is a recipe for success...however, the amateurish context surrounding that gameplay is so amateur hour and so boring that I just couldn't force myself to keep going. 

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for coming!