Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: 99 Spirits

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 112024
 

Now for something completely different, let’s talk about 99 Spirits.

I’ve had this one in my backlog for a long time, probably since around the time of my yokai craze, and I decided the emphasis on spirits and demons made it a good choice to finally play this October.

And what an unusual experience it was.

99 Spirits is part JRPG, part… vocabulary game?

You play a young woman who wields a sacred sword in order to defeat Tsukumogami, inanimate objects that have become yokai or spirits. It has a simple presentation, with a grid-like screen used to explore the hub city and dungeons. Markers on the green indicate shops, conversations, items to pick up, etc., and enemies are marked as well. When you come into contact with an enemy, a battle begins.

Combat controls are fairly simple. On your turn, you choose whether to attack or defend. However, when the enemy attacks, you have a brief window in which you can press the defend button to shield yourself and counterattack. The result is a system that feels a step more active than turn-based combat.

But Tsukumogami can’t be defeated unless you know their true forms, and that’s where the twist to combat comes in. As you attack, you build a gauge that lets you use a special skill to gain clues about the spirit’s identity. Defending, meanwhile, builds a gauge that lets you call out its name – by typing the name of the object it used to be.

For example, you might give you the clues “OO” and “eating.” Using the gauge again might get you “S” and “food.” Then you use the other skill, type in “spoon,” and the spirit takes on its spoon form and can be fought normally.

It’s such a strange combination of ideas… and I love it.

Throughout the game, you can buy or find spirit indexes, which give you a list of Tsukumogami. That simplifies things, since instead of wracking your brain to figure out what word fits the description, there’s a chance you have it on the list. (The spirit index also lets you click the name instead of typing it every time.)

As you progress, you’ll unlock new skills for your sword. Did I mention this game is also partly a monster collecting RPG?

Once you unlock the third skill, you can capture Tsukumogami while fighting them in order to use special skills. These are both field skills, such as using a weapon-type Tsukumogami to cut down a tree blocking you from a bonus area, and combat skills that serve as special abilities in battle.

I would not say the story is especially in-depth, but it’s a fine story about fighting yokai with some cute/funny character interactions alongside more serious moments. It’s not especially spooky despite its subject matter, so we’ll mark this down as one of the more lighthearted games for this year’s celebration.

Overall, it’s a unique blend of ideas that ends up being a lot of fun. My only real criticism is that it’s buggy – the game crashed enough times that I started saving after every few battles, just in case.

There are some secrets I didn’t get on my playthrough, including an alternate ending, but I don’t think I’ll go back through it to try to get everything. I probably won’t get the DLC, either. Nevertheless, I’m happy I finally got around to playing 99 Spirits.

(On a side note, email subscriptions have halted again, so here’s hoping I find a lasting solution.)

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Marginalia

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 092024
 

The next spooky game I decided to play is a short horror game called Marginalia, and after my mixed feelings about Monday’s game you can imagine my horror when the game began by a parked car on a desolate road.

But despite that immediate sense of similarity, it doesn’t have much in common with Desolate Roads at all.

Marginalia is walking sim in its purest form. Although I’ve tagged it as an adventure game here, there are no puzzles or items you need to interact with, nothing but walking in search of the next landmark. Moreover, the story is narrated to you, which makes it feel more like a short story using a game format to build atmosphere.

Fortunately, the story is interesting enough that it works. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it has enough of a hook – a man vanishing in search of a mysterious place called Kestlebrook, and the narrator’s search for him while learning about Kestlebrook from his notes – that I wanted to continue on to hear each new part.

Unfortunately, the world is too big for this sort of experience to feel rewarding. Everything more or less looks the same, so if you get off track, it’s difficult to orient yourself. The major landmarks are lampposts that you can see from a distance, but once you reach one, it can be a while before you see the next – enough that if you get going in the wrong direction by mistake, you could be wandering for a long time.

(It happened to me. I missed the direction I was supposed to head in and walked for about ten minutes with nothing happening before I decided to restart. This is another one of those games with no saves.)

There are also secret landmarks that add an additional layer to the story, but the nature of the map makes exploration feel so unrewarding that I didn’t feel it was worth seeking them out, as much as I would have wanted to.

Marginalia is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and even if there isn’t much interaction, it’s a nice little horror story that I enjoyed. However, a smaller game world with clearer landmarks would have gone a long way toward making it a more enjoyable experience.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Desolate Roads

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 072024
 

Desolate Roads is a short horror game in which you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Now you need to search the desolate roads for something that can help.

It’s structured like a standard survival horror puzzle – down one path you find a chained up gate, down another path you find bolt-cutters that you can’t take yet because they’re stuck in a rusted vise, and so on.

As you explore, you get text messages that slowly shed light on the surrounding events. At other points, fiery phantasms materialize and chase you, with your only recourse being to banish them with the help of the radios in nearby cars.

These are all neat ideas, but unfortunately it ends up feeling tedious instead of scary.

Desolate Roads is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and there are no save points. You really only need a handful of items, which would make it even shorter, so it makes up for this by having it set in a large area that requires a lot of walking to reach any specific spot. These key areas are easy enough to find, being at the end of clear paths, but they require you to spend a lot of time slowly walking to reach them.

That’s probably intentional to build up the atmosphere, but since enemy encounters are scripted, you spend most of the time without anything happening.

Now, my first playthrough resulted in an early death, because I walked in the opposite direction at the start of the game and simply died. On my second playthrough, I went in the right direction and started paying attention to which items were where and figuring out what I’d need to do. I missed the first item, so nothing happened at all as I explored each path, but once I figured out what I’d missed, I was right on track to complete the rest – except the radio mechanic glitched out, so I had no way to survive the first enemy encounter.

By my third playthrough, I more or less knew exactly what item to use where, but I was so tired of trudging down those same roads with nothing happening that the monsters only filled me with the dread that if I failed, I’d have to do this all over again.

As you can see, my specific experience with the game colored my impressions. If I hadn’t spent so much time on my second playthrough only to run into a glitch and need to start over, I might have enjoyed it more. It does have some neat ideas, and the core gameplay isn’t bad.

But there’s just too much time spent on those desolate roads, and the atmosphere isn’t strong enough to keep the tension high.

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