Film Review: A Minecraft Movie

Getting squared away for the chicken jockey

From eighth grade to freshman year of college I was an avid Minecraft player. I still associate the word ‘hoe’ with the farming implement far more than its current meaning of sex worker specifically because of all the hours I spent building overly convoluted wheat farms as well as automated beef farms using netherrack as a gigantic grill. I was also a fan of monumental architecture and scheming against my friends and having labyrinthine politics that irritated my sister. As such, A Minecraft Movie was a homecoming for me, like seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade.

I admit I went into the theater wanting to see some chaos, the flying popcorn and the live chicken in the theater. The worst of what I saw was some teenagers yelling along to the memetic lines, about Steve and chicken jockeys, but nothing truly anarchic (or physically harmful, as befell one showing in Rhode Island). But it did feel right, being in a movie such as this with younger folks (as of writing I am 28, not the flower of youth but not decrepit either), looking upon this bonanza with the eyes of children in all their ability to see the newness and excitement in everything.

A Minecraft Movie is not high cinema, but nobody expected it to be. It is very colorful, filled with jokes that are allusions to the game or to memes or are otherwise very goofy, and very, very quippy. It has two actors who are clearly what the studio is hoping will draw in viewers not familiar with the game. It is filled to the brim with CGI, as was inevitable given the nature of what it is adapting. It has a frankly forgettable villain, as well as side characters who are never really given the time to really shine like those of Jack Black and Jason Momoa do. There are moments designed to go viral, as they have.

But despite all of that I can’t call this movie a bad one. The end result is legitimately very funny; I guffawed several times, such as when Jason Momoa takes a look at the world of MineCraft and declares that the party is now in Wyoming (the town in the real world where these characters are from is in Idaho - making it the second time in recent memory a video game adaptation has selected a town in that region of the United States to introduce the real world to the game, following Green Hills, Montana, in the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movies). The action scenes take advantage of the setting, and make it thrilling. The setting itself is rendered lushly, a blocky world nevertheless inhabited. It is a movie that, despite all the cubes, feels plausible within its particular constraints.

In terms of the nitty-gritty thematic aspects, there is one throughline that I find to be very interesting. Much of this movie is about escape; everyone in this movie is fleeing something, usually in Idaho. Steve, Jack Black’s rendition of the original player character in the game, is fleeing the drudgery of white collar life. Jason Momoa’s character is escaping the implosion of his career and the loss of his livelihood. The two children who serve as surrogates for the young audience are escaping the loss of their mother, and the last of the humans is escaping the drudgery of the gig economy. Like many movies involving portals to other worlds, the film’s narrative ultimately endorses returning to the real world, to stop avoiding your problems and to make something of your life.

This was the basic plot of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and many other movies like it. This acquires a new valence, however, when you consider that the film is of course based on an escapist video game. For me, and for many other people like me, that world of cubes was a welcome escape from reality. As Ursula K. Le Guin famously said (and as been quoted endlessly thereafter):

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

Speaking as someone who came to Minecraft during a period of my life when my health, my sanity, and my dignity were being sacrificed on the altar of good grades and college admissions and with a walloping dose of tiger parenting to boot, I can’t help but feel a little bit betrayed here. Lord knows that many people, younger and older, have found a place to escape in that land of blocks, to be heroes or artists or simply have a place to see their friends. That is something good, something admirable, something fortunate to have existed, and I don’t like this idea that escapism must be rejected wholesale. It reeks of the glorified overwork and burnout of LinkedIn, the ‘hustle culture’ which is ultimately self-immolation.

Furthermore there is a certain implication here, a very capitalist implication at that, that bases human worth on productivity. What about the people who, for one reason or another, cannot accomplish great things in the real world, or only can at great cost. What does this philosophy say about the impoverished or the time-impoverished, the disabled, or the people who, for one reason or another, cannot be bent into tools for productivity? This philosophy would condemn them for going to a place, if only on a hard drive, where they can find contentment and actualization. It is a message with the ethos of a labor camp, and it has irritated me in every film I have seen it in.

Can we blame the kid who is mocked at his school for wanting to escape? Can we blame the woman whose every waking moment is sacrificed to the gig economy? The message, digging down into it (no pun intended) is a very puritan one, a sense that idle hands are the devil’s work. But they’re not doing nothing in the land of blocks; they are building, creating, bonding. That is what human beings are supposed to do, evolutionarily, not grinding away to make other people richer. As much as this film tries to make this message sound like hardheaded realism, it only ever makes the real world sound like a panopticon. The truth is, not everyone can succeed if they put their mind to it, and that is the ultimate fallacy of the film’s ending.

A Minecraft Movie ends up feeling like it loves the aesthetic of the game and the emotions evoked by the game, but not the purpose of playing the game. This is in opposition to the recent Jumanji movies, which deeply understood the human desire for escape. Here, I think it wasn’t so much a conscious decision to do so as much as it was bolting on the expected ending and calling it a day. It wasn’t something I noticed in the theater, but after ruminating on it afterward. The movie itself is entertaining on a surface level, but breaking it down the whole thing feels cynical in a way most blockbusters don’t.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Videogame Review: Civilization VII

The newest edition of the classic 4x franchise videogame arrives... but not without significant problems

One more turn.

That has been the promise and hope and goal of the Civilization games since the very first one in 1991. And Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time. As you can see, it’s right on the box for that first game. I played that first game, picking it up a couple of years after its release, and not terribly long before Colonization, and Civilization II.

I haven’t looked back since. I’ve played nearly every iteration of it ever since.¹ If I look at my Steam statistics, my #1 game played is Civilization VI. My #2 game is... Civilization V.

I’ve had a lot of fun playing the Civilization games. Cleaning up nuclear waste with Roman legions in Civ 3. Endless network games with my best friend Scott at his house. He had two computers, both set up with Civ 4. And when I would visit, we would play for hours. He always played Germany, always. I rotated civilizations (Rome was common but I liked to play a variety). He was frankly a better strategy player than I was, and beat me more often than I beat him. Endless games of Civ 5 and 6, solo and sometimes with PBEM games, also created emergent narratives. Fights against the perfidious Dutch. Launching nukes as Egypt to keep America from winning the Space Race. And on and on. And that doesn’t even get into the spinoffs.²

But with each of those Civs, the game changed, and now we can start to turn toward the real value of this piece in Civ 7. Sometimes the changes were radical and surprising. The punitive happiness mechanic in Civ 3 that was meant to try and reduce city spam, but often led to frustration. The stacks of doom mechanics in Civ 4. The big change in Civ 5 to a hex-based map and one unit per tile, plus the advent of religion. Civ 6 introduced districts, new civs, and late in its design, new game modes (zombies! and heroes! and barbarians that are there for more than being killed!). There have always been changes and updates, new mechanics, new ideas.

And so we come to Civ 7. To not bury the lede anymore, it feels like a *double* helping of changes, two games’ worth, in one leap from 6. Going from 6 to 7 feels like the change going from 4 to 6. Many in the Civ community have resented how much they have needed to relearn the game.

I don’t want to get too much in the weeds, but the major change that has caused the most social drama is that the it’s now three games in one. Instead of Building an Empire to Stand the Test of Time, it no longer does allows you to do that. You pick a leader... and then you pick a civilization in the Antiquity Age.³

All well and good, if a bit weird. But after a hundred turns or so of gameplay, the Age comes to an end. Your civilization did not stand the test of time, but the future has been prepared for. Based on the leader you picked, the civilization you picked, and other possible factors, you then transition into the next civilization for the next Age. The game doesn’t make this entirely clear, but there’s definitely a historical time gap involved here, and some of the choices, temporal-wise, are a little hinky. But you then proceed through the Exploration Age, which is a different sort of feel than the Antiquity Age... and then you do it all again, for the Modern Age. Same leader, new civilization. And this time, you’re going for a win condition.

So you wind up building a narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations,⁴ keeping the same leader throughout as sort of a “patron deity,” building on your accomplishments from the previous Age, until you’re in the final Age and try to achieve victory.

In my very first game, I picked Augustus as my leader. I started as Rome, of course, and went about my game. I got to the end of the Antiquity Age, surviving its crisis (basically toward the end of each of the first two Ages, a random game-wide problem hits all the players—plague, religious intolerance, barbarians, etc.). I decided to go for Spain in the Exploration Age. This showed off the new map mechanic: you can’t explore the entire world in the Antiquity Age, even if theoretically possible. The “Distant Lands” (New World) also appear in this age. I sent units over there, conquered, expanded... and for the Modern Age, I picked America. And went on to a victory. I’ve played several other full and partial games since, weaving this story of three civilizations and one Patron Deity. The game from which I’ve put these screenshots is me playing as Catherine the Great. I started with Greece, and then, because I had been so militaristic and had enough horses, transitioned to Mongolia in the Exploration Age.

I do like these beginning-of-Age screens. You can see the leader and the civization they are ruling. So yes, that’s Catherine the Great leading the Mongols (when I was playing Greece, you could see an Acropolis behind her).

So is it any good? Is it one more turn worthy?

Yes and no. There have been a lot of arguments about the release schedule and costs of the game and the DLCs planned. It does feel to me that 2K is trying to milk the cash cow here, and that, I think, hurt the development and release of the base game. The UI and appearance of the main game is severely lacking, as well as explanations of some key concepts. Just to give one example: some civilizations can build unique quarters, combinations of two buildings they can create. But the map doesn’t show where you’ve built one already—and if you don’t build it in the right place, you don’t get it. Whoops. Worse, the game doesn’t explain that if you place one of the buildings in a spot with another building, you’re stuck and can’t complete it. Just which things you do and don’t get when you transition Ages is not documented, either. Sure, some of this is a learning curve, but there’s no documentation in the game for it.

There are other things I notice the more I play. Like the maps: they’re built around your starting location, but that leads to “rectangular sameness” for a lot of maps, and some views lack things like navigable rivers. The story beats are good, especially the ones for individual civilizations, but there isn’t enough variety in them. And the game feels a bit incomplete without a couple of hallmark leaders. There is no Gandhi, of the “our words are backed with nuclear weapons,” for instance. Mongolia is here, but Genghis Khan specifically is not.

Which leads me to the Modern Age and the ending of the game. The game ends in the 1950s, with the victory conditions being project-based: build a thermonuclear device, or a world bank, or a world fair, or launch a manned flight. These win conditions are chronologically set much sooner than in previous Civs. You’re no longer trying to go to Alpha Centauri, and nope, no Giant Death Robots. And that’s sort of fine... except that at the end of the game, when you win, the game awards you leader points for the “Next Age”—one that’s not there at all. I’m frankly baffled by this. Was there going to be a fourth Age and they truncated the game? Is another Age coming in in a paid DLC? Is it just unpolished? Any which way, I’m annoyed.

The game does do things that a certain strain of people might consider “DEI,” and it has taken heat for it. Some don’t like the idea of Harriet Tubman as a leader. (She seems to get all the hate; you don’t need me to tell you why. And yes, in the screenshot above, I just declared war on her, because she's way ahead.) The choice of civilizations and leaders is interesting, but as noted above, we don’t get some classic ones that have been in the game for decades. We do get some interesting ones never seen before in a Civ: Aksum, Buganda, Chola, the Mississippians. The game acknowledges the continuity of some areas of the world by giving us a civilization in India and one in China for each of the three Ages. One time, I played as Confucius ruling the Han-Ming-Qing. That might be a pretty good route for a first-time player, as it’s easy to play without weird mechanics.

So should you buy this game? If you’re a super-fan of Civilization, you already did. If you’re a moderate fan of the franchise, I’m going to tell you no. Not yet. Not until the game is more polished, is on sale, and provides a better experience. If you’re new to the Civ franchise, I frankly think you should start with 6 to get to know what a Civ game is like. Sure, it’s 10 years old, and looks it, but it has a lot more to offer. I still play it.

But I’m not abandoning Civ 7. It’s still One More Turn for me. However, when I see gamer YouTubers say they’re “taking a break from Civ 7,” I get worried. And I wonder whether it will happen to me... and if too many people do, what will happen to the game? In this day and age, it’s way too easy to cut losses and not fix problems. I can hope that Civilization VII addresses its weaknesses. There have been many games that have taken a run at this genre. (Hello, Humankind, you had such potential. So sorry, Ara: History Untold, you were underbaked. Millennia... you just sucked badly.) Civilization IS the game-defining franchise for this genre. If they don’t improve and right the ship... there will be a big void in gaming if Civilization VII itself should not stand the test of time. I want it to succeed, but right now, it is most definitely not succeeding.

Nerd Coefficient: 6.5/10.

Reference: Civilization VII [Firaxis, 2K Games, 2025].

¹ The exception, since you might or might not know, is Civilization Revolution, which was never released for the PC. I didn’t have a Playstation 3 or other compatible device for it. So I do not have a perfect record of Civilization games.

² Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, possibly the best 4x game ever made, for example, had the rocket victory from Civ 2 lead you to colonizing Alpha Centauri, facing planetary threats with all-new leaders and ideologies. And there was a *storyline* behind the “good victory,” coming to terms with a planet that was far more than it seemed. And there were some ideas and mechanics there that have never really seen good use or at any use at all since and I wish they had. (You could raise or lower the land, for example. And underwater cities! And of course this idea of a narrative and factions that had some built-in conflicts from the get-go. One of the expansions had two parts of an alien race crash-land... who hated each other’s guts.)

³ You can also start in the Exploration or even Modern Age if you want.

⁴ This is really contentious, because a would-be Civ-killer, Humankind, had you changing civilizations 10 times over the course of the game. That game had a lot of problems, and detractors of that system hate it in Civ 7. But this all goes back to the “Rhyes and Fall” mod of Civ 3 that has influenced this idea that civilizations don’t have to, and shouldn’t, stand the test of time. It’s been around for over a decade, but now it’s really “canon.” And some people HATE that. But even so, said people never thought that I, as America, founding Boston in 2000 BC and going after Genghis Khan as America in 1000 BC, was historically accurate.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Videogame Review: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The long-awaited fourth installment of the Dragon Age series from Bioware—does it match up to the legacy?

You gotta have dragons, right? It's there, in the title.

What makes a Dragon Age game a Dragon Age game? Is it the mechanics? The plot? The worldbuilding? The characters? Something else entirely?

For me, it's the characters and their relationships, as well as the joy that comes from the branching web of plot decisions and ramifications, that show you a world in which your choices have meaningful consequences for the world, the people around you, and your relationships with those who inhabit it. It's what draws me in, makes me love all three (and a half?) previous iterations of the franchise, and had me so frothingly excited about this one I booked annual leave for launch day and the start of the week after so I could play more hours per day than is healthy for a person (it was great). It's what drives me to have logged around a thousand hours of play time across the series to date, and with no expectation that this number won't grow in the future.

Which isn't to say there aren't issues with each of the previous games, of course. And one of the interesting things about Veilguard is how evidently Bioware has put in the effort to resolve them this time. So I'll start my review there.

Charitably, I might describe the mechanics of Dragon Age: Origins as… clunky. Underdeveloped. More honestly—janky af. It's imperfectly attempting to recreate some of the D&D experience in a video game, and at a time when the tech was not exactly making the job an easy one. We—or at least I—forgive it because it makes up for it with excellent characters, some banger bits of dialogue, an introduction to an enjoyable fantasy world, plenty of lore to dig into, and some very interesting plot moments where the player has the opportunity to impact the direction the world and plot takes… if they do things right. But good lord is the actual gameplay a mess. Do not get me started on the inventory system.

Dragon Age 2 attempted so simplify and pare down a lot of that clunk (to reasonable success) and developed its skill trees into something actually functional. It was not exactly focussed on getting the player that involved in the nitty gritty of fighting, but it had some really cool, stylistic animations of your various characters giving the baddies what for, with occasional big dramatic moments that made your Hawke feel like a badass.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made the big jump into having you actually… doing the combat, rather than clicking to select the enemy and the skill you wanted to use on them. I actually had to get close enough and wave my sword right to hit the guy? Madness! Another marked improvement on the previous games, and with yet again a more developed, more interesting skill tree alongside it, where the choices you make in building what your companions can do feel like they actually have an impact on gameplay.

All the info you need is right at your fingertips on the tab screen in combat; it's easy to be fully involved in what's going on.

Veilguard then feels like the natural development of this thread—moving away from point-and-click D&D simulation into a fully bedded-in action game. I am choosing, moment by moment, what my character is doing and to whom and how. I block, I duck and roll, I parry, I shield. My involvement in the combat is down to me and my timing, my choices, and so feels… well, like I'm actually involved. And when you add in combos with your teammates—also very easy to achieve and clearly signalled in the combat screen—it just gets even better. There's a bit of a learning curve at the start as you get used to it, especially the timings for blocking, ducking and shielding, but the game does tutorial you in pretty well, and it is absolutely delightful the first time you manage to employ the perfect timing with a shield-block and are rewarded by absolutely twatting the opponent in the face. I am utterly, completely convinced that as a pure gameplay experience, Veilguard is hands down the best game in the series and just genuinely, actually fun to simply… play.

It also does a great job in differentiating the character classes by feel. My initial run was as a warrior, which felt suitably tanky, while still being able to dish out damage. Returning as a rogue, whose special attacks rely on the building of momentum (which is lost if you allow yourself to get hit) rather than a warrior's rage, changes how you react to combat. Suddenly, the dodge button is my best friend, rather than the parry. Then again into mage, where I can throw up a barrier and then go long range with staff attacks that really knock the enemy's socks off, but I'm constrained by my mana pool and refill rate. What we don't see is the full differentiation within the subclasses—Inquisition had you choose if you would be sword and shield vs two-hander warrior, for instance. What we get instead is the ability to switch between the two subclasses at any point, even in combat. For warriors, that's hitting X to pull out your two-hander. For mages, dotting between the two-handed staff and the ability to barrier, vs. orb and dagger which allows close combat, stabbing and parrying, at the cost of no shield. For rogues, there's no explicit switch-between at all—at any point, you can right-click and start shooting with your bow, while your default dual-wielding weapons remain in play for close combat. You can optimise your build for the subclass you find yourself most wanting to play, but the flexibility remains at the touch of a button. There's a learning curve to each class that comes with how truly distinct they feel, but once you get into the groove, each one does feel genuinely worthwhile—and enormously fun—to play.

However. As I said above, this is not why I play Dragon Age games. It's great, don't get me wrong, and I hope future installments keep and develop this, because it is extremely well done and satisfying. Moment by moment, there was none of the frustration because I just didn't have the control to win a fight I was involved in, or that combat was just feeling repetitive and dull. I applaud it. But… it's nothing more than a nice bonus to me. The meat of my interest was always going to be elsewhere, in the plot and the characters. Which is where I found things getting a little unstuck.

Which is weird, because a lot of the promo going into Veilguard talked about how they knew fans wanted character focus, so that was going to be where they put their efforts, and they visibly have done that. It just hasn't quite achieved what I, at least, want out of it. To boil it down to fundamentals, Veilguard just feels safe in a way that none of the others have. While the setting and story may be extremely dark, the characters and their interactions, both with each other and with Rook, the protagonist, just lack bite. I don't necessarily even mean conflict, though that could work too. There's just quite a sameness and a safeness to how they all interact, that ignores the vast range of positions and opinions on the core topics of the game that we've seen throughout the previous iterations.

Which also manages to deny the difficulty inherent in some of the factions at play within the story. One of the companions you recruit is a member of the Antivan Crows. This was, I know, something a lot of fans were hoping for, and harks back to Zevran in Origins. But the thing is, Zevran's story is one full of conflict—his position within the Crows is a fraught one, and one that has left lasting and unpleasant marks on him that he details in conversations with the Warden. The Crows are absolutely not an uncontroversial good, in that story, or his story. Which… of course they're not! They're a band of assassins for hire. They literally kill people for a job. Of course they're going to be morally complex at best.

So why then, in Veilguard, are they uncontroversial good guy patriots protecting Treviso, and we're just… not going to examine anything else about them, or about Lucanis (the companion from that faction)'s position within them?

Just some good ol' fashioned patriots, no murders here no sir.

What's extra strange is that we do get this introspection a little bit, but directed only at the Grey Wardens, who took a big hit on the "doing dark shenanigans" front in Inquisition, so that doesn't feel like treading new ground. But it means they were thinking about it, at least to an extent; they just never felt the need to turn that lens onto the Crows. Huh.

And it's that kind of lack of thoughtfulness that makes the game really suffer. Everyone gets along, more or less (I'm not saying there's zero conflict, because that patently isn't true, but it never rises to the levels we've seen in any of the previous games), and no one really critiques the position other people come from, or their background, or engages with any of the longstanding, baked-in societal difficulties that we've seen portrayed in the world so far. For a game that very much centres the elves, their stories and their histories, Veilguard is very light on talking about the impacts the events of the game will have on elves throughout Thedas. There are a couple of specific bits of dialogue (one of which you only get in the literal final mission) that touch on it, but it's not core to the story, when it really really should be to give us that feeling of a real, complex world that has been a key part of the series up to now. This is not a game that could encompass, for instance, a Vivienne or a Sera, two characters whose positions within their factions and peoples in Inquistion are fonts of discussion, argument and interest. There's no Merrill, with a complex view of blood magic that runs contrary to the dominant game view. There's no Alistair or Cullen to give us an insight into a Templar viewpoint. There's barely any Templar involvement at all. Without characters occupying fraught or complex positions, or a voice speaking from the other side of the divide, we end up with fairly unknown and unconsidered bad guys (why are the Venatori up to what they're up to? We never really get to know), and a coherence of vibe from the companions that feels a bit weird at times. Yes, we're all saving the world, but so were we in Origins, and that never stopped Morrigan from bullying Alistair, did it?

To add to this, on the one hand, we get way more party banter than in previous games, and they've added a device where, in the central home hub, you sometimes go into rooms and just find two companions chatting, which is great. And yet… for how long of a game this is, it feels like you don't get proportionally as much romance content as the previous games have given, which is one of the core USPs that Bioware have always had. We jest that it's a dating sim with a fantasy RPG in the background, but… well. Personally, I have always enjoyed the romance content because it adds yet another layer to those deep characterisations. It's part of making these people seem whole and real. And when that gets skimped on? It adds to the same feeling that their lack of bite feeds into.

In other gripes, the early game dialogue is rough, as frankly is the early game plot. You can see the shape of a slightly different game, one with some sort of prologue that has been skipped over now, and so they have to funnel new players quickly into the fun, main bit with enough info to get them invested, while also keeping hold of old players who know all the lore. They have not managed it well. But that evens out once you get into the main substance of things.

There are also times when the whole thing feels a little too linear, a bit too trammelled into the singular shape of the story they want to tell, without the semblance of broad-reaching options that the other games have managed to convey.

But… for all that… there are some moments, some choices, that really do hit and hit good. One of them came out of absolutely nowhere for me and left me fully shooketh, and remains one of the emotional highpoints of my playing experience. The game tells you early that the choices you will make matter, and on the whole, when those choices come up, they very much do. I would, of course, always love more of them, but I'm aware this is a sticking point for many games just in terms of hours of time and dollars of money that go into every branch they make. Where Veilguard does it, I think they do it right.

They also give us some really solid lore drops that are of a great deal of interest to anyone who's played the previous games and is into that sort of thing, things that make you go "OOHHHHHHH" about things previously hinted, or overturn things you thought you knew, sometimes in really fun ways. Unfortunately, there are issues with it as well, generally, more about what's missing than what we see. This is a story that really does centre a bunch of elven stuff, and I would have liked to see more of… well, literally anything else in the world. The chantry and chantry opinion and politics barely figure, even though we touch on a number of really quite important religious issues. For the die-hard elf fans, there is bounty. For the rest of us… a bit of famine. It also, in this elven-centricity, stumbles a little bit into… and here it is hard to critique without treading too close to spoilers… I suppose into the issue of wanting to make things too simple. Too many questions boil down to the same answer, where a multiplicity was one of the things that has long made this a world worth playing in.

Also, for all the people with deeply held opinions about the character creator, long hair and clipping? They got you covered. Like, so much. Also body sliders, which I am quite pleased to see.

I do also have to come back to the point that… it's just gorgeous. They've gone back to DA2-style "strong, coherent visual design" and it works, but expanded out further and with better graphics and more time spent on the game to back it up. I mean, look at this shot from Arlathan and tell me it's not pretty:

Or not enjoy how atmospheric and utterly committed to the bit the Necropolis is:

Or appreciate the atmosphere of a blighted wasteland, full of relics of the past:

So all in all… it's rather a mixed bag.

On the whole, I enjoyed playing it. I had a great time, moment to moment, dedicated some days to an intense amount of gaming, gasped, laughed and felt sad at various appropriate moments, and just generally got into the spirit of things. But there was, when I looked back across it all, and especially when I compared it with the games that had come before, some little spark missing that made it truly magical. What I keep coming back to, more than anything, is that there is no single moment in Veilguard that comes even mildly close to doing what In Your Heart Shall Burn did in Inquisition—i.e. permanently rewrite my brain chemistry and steamroller me on an emotional level. I will never recover from that quest, and I thank Bioware for it. Veilguard… just could never. For all the fixes, for all the improvements, for all the better mechanics, better systems, better graphics, better character creator, they have failed to fully preserve the spirit of the previous games, the thing that made me love them beyond sense and measure. And it's hard not to be sad about that, even when what I've got is still, objectively, a good game.

Nonetheless… I am currently working on both my second and third playthroughs, which is not nothing.

If you're a die-hard Dragon Age fan or a complete newbie, I still think Veilguard is a game worth playing, for all the things it has done well. I hope it succeeds, and I hope the studio can continue to make games set in Thedas, taking on all the improvements they've made here, but one day maybe recapturing that little special something that just hasn't quite made it through here.

The Math

Highlights: absolutely gorgeous graphics, genuinely enjoyable mechanics, lore drops that really dig into some of the background questions fans have been pondering for years.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Microreview [Video Game]: God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla by Santa Monica Studios

Out with the new, in with the old.

Upon receiving a mysterious invite, Kratos and Mimir row their way to the shores of Valhalla. Old characters resurface. Friends who were once foes discuss the possible meaning of the invite and the dangers that await Kratos and Mimir inside of Valhalla. Meanwhile, I’m wondering how Santa Monica Studios got away with releasing this content five days after its announcement and at no cost to the player. That’s right, the story and combat-focused add-on to one of the best games of 2022 and one of the best action games in current memory has free additional content. It’s time to reinstall the game and add this DLC to your download list.

My initial doubts upon hearing that Sony's Santa Monica Studio was releasing a free rogue-lite DLC for God of War Ragnarök were two-fold. One, it’s combat-focused and I wish they would just move on to the story of their next game, and two, it’s free and probably a cheap add-on. Well, I’m glad to say that I was fully proved wrong on the second worry, and completely reassured on the first. Valhalla is a worthy add-on to God of War Ragnarök in every way, from combat to story-telling, this is one of the few pieces of DLC that I’m glad a developer made (I have a thing about single-player DLC: I generally dislike that it exists).

The DLC is both combat and story-focused, ensuring that players returning for either aspect are satisfied (though this is significantly more combat-focused than story). This isn’t some little thank you to the fans for supporting the game, this is a full closure of Kratos’ character arc from the two reboot games, and for other characters as well. Some valkyries make appearances and add to the narrative, along with Mimir and Freya. Kratos’ reflection of self and his past actions are not only observed and resolved here, but they are also a wonderful throwback to the past. While events from Kratos’ past are brought up occasionally and glossed over in the main games (due to Kratos’ reluctance to speak deeply about it), those events are now put on full display and dissected for the character’s growth. Mimir also experiences growth in Valhalla, as do some others that I’ll leave the player to discover and experience. The only thing missing is our favorite boy (I hope he’s doing okay out there).

Valhalla’s systems take inspiration from other rogue-lites, but from 2020’s Hades specifically. If you’re going to be inspired by a story-based rogue-lite, Hades is the one to look to. More story is revealed through each attempt through Valhalla, creating a desire to start one more run for the sake of the narrative. But also, the combat. The combat was wonderful in God of War Ragnarök, and it’s even better here. At the beginning of each run, you focus on a build with a specific weapon of your choosing. From then on, the rest of the run will allow you to focus on that weapon and its upgrades. You are still free to use the other weapons and their runic attacks, but all upgrades and perks will be tied to a specific weapon.

Swapping between weapons is a breeze and creating combos with them is just as, if not even more, satisfying than in the main game. You can choose to increase burn damage with your Blades or have automatic frost awaken at the end of a finisher on your Leviathan Axe. Continuing combos through evasion is a great choice, or adding realm shifts contingent upon other actions creates more opportunity for extra damage. The builds aren't quite as complex as a full rogue-lite like Hades, but it’s still fun to experiment and move through the arenas. While Kratos rides on Zagreus’ coattails, he still pays tribute in a meaningful way that makes this add-on worth someone's time.

Considering the breadth of enemy choices in God of War Ragnarök, Valhalla had a lot to pull from (and it does). Many of the enemies from the main game will make an appearance, and that includes boss battles as well. I cycled through quite a few times and still found enemies I hadn’t seen in the mode before. Kratos also encounters some baddies from his Greek days, adding a bit more nostalgia to an already nostalgic trip down memory lane. The game lasted significantly longer than I anticipated, and I was sad when I realized that I had encountered all the story elements and lines of dialogue that the game had to offer, but that just reinforced how much I enjoyed the game in the first place.

I’ve been playing Valhalla (when I have the time) for the last two months. It shouldn't take anyone who is playing consistently that long to beat it, but it still offers quite a bang for one’s non-existent buck. Santa Monica Studios could have easily charged fifteen to twenty dollars for this DLC and it would have still reviewed well because of the amount of quality content that it provides. It is free to download and accessible to owners of the original game. More than being free, it is an essential add-on to the God of War franchise and a worthy follow-up to God of War Ragnarök. So, if you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for? Have I mentioned that it’s free?

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 8.5/10

Bonus: +1 for giving a great reason to reinstall the game (and for being free). +1 for additonal character arcs. 

Penalties: -1 for absence of father/son dynamic that is a staple of the reboots. -1 for limited random combat arenas.

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Microreview [Video Game]: Inscryption by Daniel Mullins Games

Say cheese and die.

A wooden table lies before you, darkness all around. A door creaks, and from the void peer two eyes. “Another Challenger… It has been ages,” reads the text above. The menacing music reverberates through the room and into your very soul. Your generous host helps coach you through the basics in case you’ve forgotten. He reminds you that sacrifices must be made, and though your beasts’ suffering is real, they will make their way back into your deck. Your host will continue to tell your tale through a series of maps. You have to win battles to advance further toward your destination. If you fail, you die. But don’t worry, your gracious host will stuff you in a room and take a picture for posterity. A lesson to those in the future.

Inscryption is a hybrid roguelite/deck builder/puzzler. Its unique mix evokes elements from Slay the Spire, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and the Zero Escape series. Though not quite as deep on the puzzle segments or as complex as Yu-Gi-Oh!, the game still creates a deep, accessible, and addictive gameplay loop that makes time become a trivial thing. Who needs sleep when one more run might be all you need to get to the next part of the game?

The music isn’t the only menacing part of the game. The atmosphere is top-notch. Leshy’s cabin creates an odd mix of comfort and foreboding. The lingering sense of potential dread is the cherry on top. Seeing Leshy’s eyes follow you around the cabin is nightmare fuel. Thankfully Inscryption isn’t a horror game, it’s just atmospheric and well-thought-out. The atmosphere has a lot to thank the design team for. The graphics are fantastic and serve the narrative and tone of the game in a precise fashion. Daniel Mullins Games achieved what many developers can only dream of, by tying all their gameplay elements together with their art, story, and music, Inscryption does everything it sets out to do and nails just about every aspect.

The embedded narrative trope plays out well here and keeps the player guessing throughout Inscryption’s dozen hours of main story gameplay. As a service to the reader who may not have played this game and may potentially want to try Inscryption, I will avoid mentioning much of anything regarding the story to save the sanctity of the first run for the player. That said, the game handles its flow and pacing with expertise, making the hours melt away as you try to solve what’s going on. Two specific moments in this game are memorable for reasons I won’t mention, but when something can both be brilliant and subvert my expectations, I’m all in. There are tonal shifts that may turn some people off, and certainly, some parts of the game were more enjoyable than others, but this didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story.

The card gameplay is pretty straightforward, getting more complex as more is revealed. You have creatures that you want to summon to the board and do damage directly to your enemy. The first person to tip their enemy’s scale (by having a five-point lead) wins the round. The problem is that your enemy will also try to summon creatures to defeat you, and each creature has different effects and types. These can be used to create combos that can devastate a board (going against an Ant deck in Kaycee’s Mod is a nightmare). Choices must be made, cards can be fused to create more powerful cards, and some cards must be sacrificed. These are some of my favorite parts of each run.

Once you beat the main story, you unlock an extra mode called Kaycee's Mod. This allows the player to truly test their mettle as a rogue-lite strategy card game player. With each difficulty you unlock, you can add modifiers to each run to increase the challenge. While I enjoyed the initial struggle, it eventually became a ridiculous game of luck. It stopped being about which cards you chose and the strategy you played and became a game of whether or not you got offered very few specific cards and beneficial maps. Unlike many other deck-builder roguelites, Inscryption doesn’t give you many opportunities to narrow your deck. Sometimes you’ll find your deck bloated with nothing to do about it. But this a problem for someone playing with a ton of modifiers on, trying to test their skill to the max, so it may not be an everyone problem.

Out of respect for the developer and for the potential player, I’ve been taciturn in regards to the story. If any of the elements of this game seem appealing to you, the reader, and you enjoy a story in your games, do yourself a favor and pick up Inscryption. I’ve played tons of games, and this is a memorable one. Just try to set a reminder to check a clock once in a while, the game can get… distracting.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10

Bonus: +1 for atmosphere and story. +.5 for addicting gameplay. +.5 for REDACTED.

Penalties: -1 for focusing on luck in later challenges. -1 for REDACTED.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Review [Video Game]: Stray Gods

 A decision based story game with a musical twist, and one that manages to charm, despite its shortness.

The first game from new studio Summerfall Studio, co-founded by David Gaider of BioWare fame, Stray Gods is a narrative/choice-based game with a musical twist. You play as Grace, newly-made Muse, as she is pulled into the world of the Greek gods living in secret in her city, and attempts to solve a murder in the one week she's given before the trial that will accuse her of it. It's a short game, heavily focussed on the characters and their interactions and choices, rather than anything approaching an RPG (despite the "roleplaying" in its tagline). Its key distinguishing feature however - and the other part of the tagline - does not mislead. It absolutely is a musical.

Grace's power, she soon discovers, is that she can cause the people around her to burst into song and reveal what's going on in their minds and hearts... and possibly nudge it in the direction she wants it to go. She uses this power to help her solve the murder, as she meets new people who have no reason to tell her the truth about anything, and needs to get them to spill their souls as soon as possible (guitar riffs optional).

Which, frankly, is more justification than you get for the songs in most musicals, so it was nice to get that actual tie in for the premise. But I'll come back to the music in a moment.

In terms of gameplay, it's a pretty short story-based murder mystery plot - probably around 10 hours of gametime in total, if that - I burned through it in only a couple of sessions. That being said, it doesn't feel insubstantial, for all the brevity. The game is divided into three acts, and further into obvious episodes/chapters of events, and each smaller part feels like it pulls its weight in terms of furthering the story or giving you more information about the world or the characters - there's not a lot to it but it squeezes as much as it can out of those parts, and leaves it feeling greater than the sum. I definitely didn't feel shortchanged for my purchasing it.

It's also extremely replayable - at the beginning of the game, you choose a dominant personality trait (charming, badass or clever), and you can choose to follow the conversation choices this leads you to through the story, giving you three different moods to your gameplay, which mostly lead you to similar places, but with very different levels of information, as well as extremely different tones, to take you through the story. I followed mostly blue on my first play, and seeing the information subsequently available on a red play gave me quite a lot of background info that I'd just not had access to, as well as substantially different endings for some of the characters. But you don't have to - it's also possible to mix and match, to find the route through that sits better with how you want to play. But there's a benefit to consistency - which again, we'll come back to when we discuss the music.

There are also four potential romance options, and while they do each tend to synthesise better with one of the personality traits (Persephone is generally found with the badass conversation options), you don't have to bend to that. You have flexibility to pick the route you want, with the person you want, except for a few very specific choices, and those choices are pretty clearly marked out - if you want to romance Apollo, you probably need to take him along to help you through the events of the story, for instance.

The romances are all pretty different in terms of their personalities - you have an angry, vengeful Persephone, who is frankly one of the best iterations of the figure that I've seen in any recent media, a slightly skeevy, mischievous and cunning but also incredibly smooth Pan, your entirely unsubtly pining long-time best friend and all round myth-nerd Freddie, and the saddest boy in the world, Apollo. Who you choose to romance will also affect what information you get, both about the murder and about the world and characters around you, though it doesn't have an enormous impact in terms of what individual scenes you get and the conversations you have, so you don't ever really feel like your romance choice has cut you off from things you might have wanted to know.

No he does not appear to know how to button up a shirt

But you might feel cut off from the music - because each romance option has their own unique song sung with the protagonist, and a reprise at the end of the story if relevant. And it's here that I think there's a lot of the compelling content for each of the threads - the music for the romances is completely different, and sets a lot of the tone for that character's motivations, their feelings and how they relate to your protagonist. Where Apollo's is a much-needed jolt of optimism to chase away his melancholy, Persephone's is far more confrontational and teasing. Who you choose will have an impact - a big one - on the music you get at a few of the key scenes.

But then, so do all your choices. The personality traits aren't just about how you approach conversations in the game - they're also how you approach songs, and form the core of what's so interesting and unique about this game. They each correspond to a broad musical style, and if you want a consistent album of music at the end of it, you want to keep picking your chosen colour and stick with it - broadly speaking, green tends to the melodic and emotional, red to the rock and the beat, and blue to a strangely jaunty selection of songs. And so even at points in the game where you're accessing broadly the same content, by making those choices, it sounds totally different - not just the tune, but the lyrics and sometimes the graphics change to suit the mood of the music.

So if you replay it, you've essentially got three variables to mess around with, to make a whole new piece of media around your story, and that's before you start making a truly individualised medley. Summerfall have, very sensibly, made all three colours available as an individual album, as well as a purple version with the instrumental and less changeable songs, so if you want to spend several hours comparing them and crafting your perfect experience, you very much can.

Is it worth doing that? Well, mostly. There are some absolute banger songs in the game, especially at some of the key dramatic moments - the opening song Adrift is hauntingly beautiful, no matter which route you end up choosing. However, if you're not a particular fan of the type of musical show where the dialogue devolves into speak-singing at every turn, some of the tracks will turn you off completely. There's also something of a mixed bag of vocal abilities amongst the cast. I have absolutely no concerns about Anthony Rapp's voice - frankly, he needed more singing time - but Felicia Day is, while an excellent voice actor, certainly not the strongest voice in the chorus, so to speak. Especially when the voice acting is generally such a strong part of the production - and it really is, there are some very well played dramatic moments, and one character who occasionally gave me chills when they spoke - it feels a shame that the singing just sometimes lets the whole thing down. And this is all coming from someone with... mixed abilities at musical appreciation at best. I suspect someone with a good ear and a lot of musical experience might find more to criticise in the singing.

Erika Ishii's Hermes is an adorable little dork

Likewise, there are some other audio mishaps. Chief among them, the volume is incredibly inconsistent. You might be set perfectly for a song, and then you break for dialogue and suddenly it feels like Pan is shouting at you, then you turn around and he's whispering. It breaks the flow and immersion somewhat to be constantly fiddling with the settings to try to get it right. There are also occasional moments where the audio and subtitles just aren't well aligned.

But... it's easy to forgive these sins, if you're sold on the heart of the story, and especially the characters, as I was. Even the ones who don't get a lot of screentime, like Hermes and Eros, are well done, and their voice actors have put a lot into making them instantly individual, putting what little gametime they have to the fullest use possible. 

Meanwhile Abubakar Salim's Eros is both second saddest boy in the world and an absolute sweetheart

The game keeps the cast pretty small, so you can get as much time with the key characters as possible, and while it sometimes makes "crowd" scenes feel sparsely populated, it was a good choice for the length of game we have.

It also helps that the writers have definitely treated the mythological origins of the story more as a jumping off point than an unchangeable gospel. As well as the badass Persephone we need and deserve, they've definitely been willing to play around with the backstories of some of the other characters as needed to suit the game they're trying to make... all while still giving us occasional flashes of clearly quite in-depth research behind the scenes. This flexibility also carries through in their interpretation of the powers they've given their gods, and gives us a more seamlessly modern looking cast while sidestepping any discussions that might have - in however much good or bad faith - about the "authenticity" to history of their looks. And in playing flexibly with the source material, they give us a finished product that feels far more urban fantasy than anything else, just one with a Greek mythology flavouring.

Compared to the more interesting parts of story and song, the art direction is a much more minimalistic one - the cartoonish style is simple and fades into the background, while being well done at every step. Especially in character design, it really does its job, but the animation is basic, letting you focus instead on the song and story. Everyone is instantly recognisable, but their individuality comes in the base design, rather than in how they move and interact - the game revolves primarily around still shots, rather than dynamic scenes, letting the singing do the talking instead.

All in all, it's a competently built short game, tightly focussed around the innovative musical idea at its core. There are some issues with the execution, especially for those more likely to be turned off by occasionally iffy musical moments, but if you're willing to buy into the story and the heart of the game, it becomes easy to forgive the missteps. And they've fundamentally made a game where it's easy to do just that. In a perfect world, it might be longer, more substantial, more expansive. But what we have is a replayable, relistenable delight, that will leave you humming tunes for days after you've finished playing.

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The Math

Highlights: Genuinely innovative core concept, cute art, high replayability

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Stray Gods [Summerfall Games, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Game Review: Fire Emblem: Engage

 A real change of pace from the previous iteration of the series, and lacking some of the depth of plot and themes, but a fun game nonetheless.

In my opinion, every game needs a dating sim/romance component and a fishing minigame. Fire Emblem: Engage technically has both of these things. Alas, this is not enough a perfect game to make.

For some context, I came into Fire Emblem via Three Houses, and have since played Three Hopes, Engage and about half of Awakening. I am not deeply immersed in the lore, the vibe and the general themes of these games, and am mainly coming into as someone who loved Three Houses.

And... it's not as good a game as Three Houses.

I'll go onto the positives (of which there are plenty) in a moment, but I'm going to start by focussing on how different these two games are, because it is such an interesting contrast for me. Three Houses was intensely replayable, complex, political and deep, and a critical part of all of that, in my opinion, is that much of the tension, the drama and the conflict embedded in the game is prompted, enacted or realised by the human participants. Yes there are magic dragons, of course there are, but the problems you're trying to solve have very human causes. More than anything else, it's a game about a focussed geopolitical situation, in which you are closely involved with much of the power players in the disputes, and can take a role in guiding the situation as it develops. You have a hand in shaping the growth of the nobility of three countries in conflict, and a significant role in how that conflict plays out over the span of years. And this is the sort of very human drama I absolutely adore. Adri goes into more detail about some of what makes Three Houses great here, so I won't bang on about it, but suffice it to say, I found it weighty, thoughtful and complex, as well as a fun opportunity to go hit bad guys with swords.

Enter Fire Emblem: Engage, a very different beast. The conflict here is much more on a grand, mythical scale. You have much fewer choices, your backstory is intense from the get-go and you're pretty much instantly surrounded by people who agree with each other and are very on board with your dramatic, world-saving mission. The Fell Dragon - clue as to his good/evil alignment very much in the name - is the big bad introduced from the very beginning, and your protagonist is set on the path to defeating him instantly. Yes, you visit the countries of the new world you're embedded in, and yes, they have politics, but it is all very solvable in the way of any magical destined protagonist - you are literally holy to many of them, so of course they join your quest without qualms. And this is the heart of my problem with the game. There is very little in the way of human drama, the meaty, substantial stuff that makes me want to spam character interactions to unlock more of their support conversations. Where many of the Three Houses characters have relatively interesting backstories that get teased out in their support conversations with the protagonist and their classmates, in Engage, almost all of them are rendered down to one or two traits, simple silhouettes to the richer oil paintings of the previous game. And so their dialogue, all their character moments, end up feeling samey because they simply do not have that much to talk about, and nothing to have drama about. One of your first friends in the game is Alfred, crown prince of Firene, and despite maxxing out many of his support conversations, I learnt very little about him beyond his enthusiasm for muscles, exercise and particularly running. This is a man destined to lead one of the four nations of the world (and incidentally, a hilariously weedy little boy to be so obsessed with his own henchness).

And this lack of real substance stretches out wider across the game too. Where in Three Houses you have a home base in a monastery, and its rhythms dictate your actions and how you spend your time between missions in a way that requires balance - because you can only do so many things - Engage gives you none of that necessity of choice. You can do everything. And it's optimal to do everything (because much of it gives you small combat boosts or other minor benefits). But because it lacks that necessary economy, and because there is so much of it to get through, it feels like make-work in a way that Three Houses rarely did. There were times when I sat down to play Engage and the entire session was working my way through the various activities of your home base, just so I was ready to go into an encounter in my next session, and that is so dull, even for someone like me, who is prone to completionism and grinding.

It simply lacks the solid core of meaning that I was expecting from having played Three Houses and that was really sad.

However, I said I would talk about positives, and there are definitely plenty of those too.

What is going on with this outfit? We may never know

I say this with fondness - this game is batshit. The lore, the visuals, the styling, the character art, it's all bonkers. It has the silly-o-meter turned way up to eleven at all times, for no discernible reason. Which, if you go in expecting a deep political game, is a disappointing thing. But once you begin to accept what this game actually is and is trying to be, once you let go of those expectations... well it's a heck of a lot of fun. I spent my teenage years watching more Naruto and Bleach than any human really ought to, and Fire Emblem: Engage appeals to the same part of my brain that adored those shows. They are ridiculous, overblown and often nonsensical, even by their own presented logics, but they are intensely, constantly fun and they know themselves to be as ridiculous as they are. If you're willing to let go of your need for logic, sense and... well the basic fundamentals of grown-up story telling, they can be such a joyous ride, and by the time I got to the end, that was what I found with Engage.

My best boy Boucheron

There are also a lot of characters, and so inevitably, there's someone for everyone to love. I thought I'd found my absolute favourite within the first couple of chapters, and then even in the late game, someone came along to challenge that. Are they going to enter the hall of fame of my favourite video game characters of all time? Of course not, Alistair Theirin still exists. And they're not complex enough for that. But again, if you're willing to buy into the silliness, there is something there for almost anyone to love.

It is also, critically, still a Fire Emblem game in the mechanics. I have almost nothing to critique there - maybe the class changing could have been made a little smoother - but much to praise, especially in the return of the attack triangle, and the use of the break mechanic. If you attack an opponent with a weapon that beats theirs in the triangle - sword beats axe beats lance beats sword - then you cause them to "break" and prevent them from counter-attacking, which adds a whole extra dimension to your battle planning.

The use of backup characters is also an interesting addition - fighters with this designation can join in another character's attack from nearby, making positioning around the battlefield even more critical. 

And then, lest you worry I forgot about it, there's the "engage" part. If you've seen any of the trailers for the game, you'll have seen the absolute nostalgia-fest that is a core part of the entire package - you can summon heroes from previous Fire Emblem games and use them to help in the battles in this one. The in-game logic behind why this happens is... scant at best... but let's not examine too closely, because the benefits it brings to gameplay are brilliant. Do you pair up an emblem and a fighter who have similar skills, making them easier to use and boosting what they're already best at over time? Or do you use the emblems to iron out the weaknesses in your fighters? Do they stay with one character, building a strong relationship for better gains as the game goes on? Or do they move around, sharing their skills more widely and building a much more flexible team? The options are many, and it has a clear impact on how and who you play in every encounter. For an uncertain player, the game guides you towards certain emblem/character pairings, but they are by no means mandatory, and a huge part of the fun is in discovering how different pairings match up - some characters cause emblems to use different attacks or weapons, depending on their own skillsets and build.

The Emblems are also just undeniably cool

The emblems also have an economy built into them - you can engage them only for a certain number of turns, and only use their special attack once in that time, before having to refresh either by engaging in combat without them, or positioning yourself around the map to pick up the one-use effect to refill the emblem charge. So again this gives more decision - do you save up their big attacks for the boss of each encounter, or use them to make the journey to get their quicker and smoother?

That being said, the emblems do come with their own part of the busywork of continuing the game, and I got very bored very quickly of having characters polish the emblems' rings (behave) between each encounter. But unlike many other portions of the game, the busywork here at least feels integrated, and you can see the benefits of it in fairly short order, even if it's a little dull in the process.

And lest you think one needs to have played all the previous games to enjoy the emblems, that's absolutely not true. I'm sure it adds an extra dimension to them and their conversations with the protagonist, but even as someone with a limited knowledge of Fire Emblem lore, I found them a fascinating part of the game, even beyond their gameplay benefits. The role they play in the story, both for the protagonist, their allies and their enemies, is what makes the game stand out for me, and it brought a real tactical consideration that might have otherwise been lacking.

And so that's the dichotomy of Engage. In pure gameplay terms, it's incredibly fun and tactical, with a lot of thinking and planning needed to pull off the battles to the player's satisfaction. And if you're willing to drop your expectations and go in taking the very silly anime bullshit storyline on its own terms, it's light, enjoyable and pacey, even if not the most substantial. But as soon as you put any real scrutiny on the plot or characters, they simply cannot bear the weight, and it is very very hard at times not to engage that scrutiny. There are parts of the plot, especially towards the end game, that stretch credulity, and some character decisions that are occasionally baffling. The epilogue particularly had me scratching my head somewhat. The romance aspect, already very much a small part of most Fire Emblem games, is particularly downplayed here, and I think this is a weakness of the game. I wasn't sure for most of it if S-rank supports were even going to happen, if there was a romance component, and so when it eventually showed up, it felt very tacked on. There is also the problem that, if you definitely want to romance someone, you need to spoil yourself by looking up guides before making the critical decisions, as there's a distinct lack of clarity or frankly sense in who is, and is not, available (which I found out to my grave disappointment - I have simply headcanoned the outcome I got to be Not True because it displeased me so).

So if you're in it for people, for meaningful plot and complex dynamics, this isn't the game for you. But if you want a silly romp that will make you feel like a twelve-year-old again, absolutely play it, and you'll have a grand old time in the process. And if you want it purely for the Fire Emblem gameplay and mechanics? You're in major luck, because those, they have absolutely nailed. For me personally, it gets a lower rating because I am above all a characters person, but don't let that put you off if you have other priorities.

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The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting mechanics both old and new, interesting new feature of the emblems, extremely fun

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Fire Emblem: Engage [Nintendo, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea