Baud Attitude

It’s safe to say that I’ve gotten more use out of my Switch recently than usual.  I just wrapped up my 12th game in a row with Qureate’s Prison Princess, an escape-the-room sort of puzzle adventure game with cute girls in revealing outfits, that might have been great if the designers hadn’t decided to stick timers on the puzzles.  That is the end of my comments on Prison Princess.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the Switch hardware, as it feels like a system that tries to be both a console and a portable and doesn’t manage either very well.  It’s either an underpowered console or an pocket-unfriendly-sized portable with $60 $70 games.

Also I am still salty that they ditched StreetPass because I loved carrying my 3DS everywhere and seeing the green light come on.

HOWEVER.

There are a ton of them out there, like over a hundred million of the things, and it has mostly-standard controllers, and it’s powerful enough to run Xbox 360-era games in handheld mode while only costing a couple hundred bucks if you buy the doesn’t-actually-“Switch” version.

That many potential customers, and a robust eShop that finally has a mostly-modern account system, means that it’s an easy place to publish the most niche of niche games and you (probably) won’t have to worry about the sorts of ham-fisted content moderation policies that Sony has become known for lately.

With all of that added up, it’s turned into a pretty impressive way to play lower-spec games, or stuff that would otherwise be locked on decaying legacy hardware, or things that just make more SENSE on a system that turns on in seconds and doesn’t need a TV.  It’s perfect for the visual novels and weird food stall management games and unexpected revivals of forgotten titles that I have been playing recently, or to boot up the Arcade Archives release of Moon Patrol for when I want a heady hit of pre-teen nostalgia.

Though, to go back to being a bit of a downer, it rather feels like Nintendo is kind of coasting on the success of the system and letting the hardware stagnant. Like, they COULD go through all the trouble of hardware R&D and then publish a new Mario Kart for a new system, or they could just sit back and count the money rolling in for the one they already have and where the development costs were spent years ago.

I was certain there would be a new Switch for 2022 when Splatoon 3 came out, then absolutely positive they wouldn’t launch a new Zelda game in 2023 without one, and now I have no idea whether they’ll bother before the system turns 10 in 2027.

They probably won’t wait until 2027.  That would be just nuts.  And it’s not like I NEED a more powerful system to emulate Moon Patrol on.  Right?

I haven’t played many hidden object games in the last few years, but I recently stumbled across the eighth entry in Sunward Games’ The Secret Order series on the Switch eShop, and since I’d played the first six games I figured I may as well see what Sarah Pennington has been up to.  Not sure how I missed #7, but maybe I’ll track that down later.

For the uninitiated, Sarah has been living a very odd life since the events of the first game, where she was a perfectly ordinary person living a perfectly ordinary life until she was saved from an assassination attempt by her nephew from the future.  She’s been to the past (a few times), to the Amazon, ancient Egypt, etc, etc, lots of various exotic locales where the problems of the day can be solved by rummaging through piles of junk to find random things and solving logic puzzles, and this installation in the series has her going back to, well, uh…

Look, it’s right in the title.

Anyway, the last time she was in the Buried Kingdom she made friends with a baby dragon and restored the proper ruler and all was well, which naturally couldn’t last.

Look, the plots in these things are usually pretty flimsy.  Bad guys are bad, good guys are good, it’s all about the art and the puzzles.

And this game IS pretty, with lots of the colorful environments you tend to get in any HOG and some very detailed characters.

Yes, you talk to a skeleton who is also a harp.  Which is pretty metal.

Admittedly, compared to Live2D or E-Mote, the actual character animations are pretty stiff and unremarkable.  It would be interesting to see Sunward combining an animation system like that with their more detailed characters.

The art style extends to some of the weird things you have to pick up and carry around until you’ve found the right place to use them to solve a puzzle, after which time you typically discard them without a thought towards future purpose.

Well, you use this thing twice, because it’s an axe on one side and a hammer on the other.  Unique tool, indeed.

And for some reason the developers put a mimic in the game?  You carry this around until you find a rope that needs something heavy on it to serve as a counterweight, then the mimic gloms onto the rope for you.  I’m actually OK with using this once and never again.

Unfortunately, while the art is top notch and the story had just enough weirdness to it to be interesting, the game as a whole is a bit of a letdown.

First, while this is a hidden object game, I had a heck of a time actually solving hidden object scenes on the tiny Switch screen.

I wound up needing to switch the game into “tile match” mode most of the time.  This lets you play a round of concentration to clear the hidden object scenes, and that was kind of a disappointment.  One of the big draws to any HOG is that it scratches the same itch as looking for “Nina” in a Hirschfield drawing or spending more time looking for the bunny on a Playboy cover than you do ogling the cover model, and playing a HOG as not-a-HOG doesn’t give you nearly the same feeling of being clever.

There is something about being told that you need to find a “bow” in a scene and needing to figure out whether you are looking for a projectile weapon, a violin bow, or a hair ornament, and whether it will be right out in the open or maybe just barely visible as an object in a painting, and I didn’t really get to enjoy that because it was frustratingly difficult to find things on the Switch’s screen and the virtual pointer didn’t really allow for precision clicking.  Some sort of zoom or magnification setting would have been really helpful here, or letting you use the touch screen to select things rather than forcing the use of the joycons.

I realize that I have just seriously dated myself with the earlier references.  Fortunately, the average HOG enjoyer is probably old enough to get them.

Second, it’s super short.  Like, you can make any hidden object game shorter if you abuse the “where do I need to go” button and fast travel, much less the hint button and puzzle skips, but this is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short.  There aren’t very many hidden object scenes at all, and few puzzles that aren’t a matter of just using every item in your inventory on them until one of them works.

This is published by Artifex Mundi, who tends to have pretty steep discounts on their eShop games when they go on sale, so I suspect I paid closer to $3 than the $15 list price they ask for this. At $3 it’s a good deal for about 3 hours of light puzzle solving.  At full price I would have been upset.

Maybe I should figure out which game was #7 and give it a go.  I suspect if I actually play it on the TV instead of in handheld mode I will have much less to grouse about.

It has been a very – VERY – long time since I have played a traditional adventure game, the kind where you wander through some sort of fantastical setting picking up every loose object you can find and trying to apply them to puzzles that make sense only in the game designer’s twisted logic.

To be honest, the last one I played may have come on floppy disks.

I’ve played a ton of “Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure” games in the intervening years, of course, but those tend to be very friendly and point out which locations still have stuff to find and where you might be able to use the latest thing you’ve just collected.  Many of them also have fast travel to avoid annoying backtracking.

Sense is not as nice about this.  It’s not as obviously-designed to sell hint books as the Sierra adventure games of yore, but there is an awful lot of needing to slowly walk back and forth, going into rooms you’ve already seen a ton of times, to find exactly the right spot to use the thing you’ve just picked up or to find the thing that you have walked past a dozen times that your character has finally realized is worth collecting.

So why’s it worth playing, then?

Well, apart from the blatant pandering to baser instincts displayed by the main character, it’s a really atmospheric horror game set in the sort of cyberpunk future that we used to envision 40 years ago.  Well, sorta.  Your character LIVES in 2083, but 90% of the game takes place in a haunted apartment complex that was sealed up in 1983 after things went horribly wrong.  Your only glimpses of 2083 come at the very start and end of the game, and in one tiny segment where you actually go outside to get between wings of the building.

I would not want to live in this 2083, but I’ve always associated the cyberpunk genre as “tech + decay” and this particular version of Future Seattle is beautifully realized for that aesthetic.

So, with a virtual setting of 1983, the tech inside the apartments themselves is… well, sparse and extremely analog.

Saving is done by finding betamax tapes and then betamax VCRs where you can record your progress, for example.  This is Survival Horror for Gen X Nerds.

With most of the game taking place in a very run-down and falling-apart 1983 apartment complex, I could understand some serious disappointment if you read the game’s title and expected to be jacking in to cyberspace and pulling off some William Gibson hijinks.  In fact, the main character is just trying to meet someone for a first date – hence the flimsy justification for the dressed-to-kill outfit – and has to go into the bathroom to calm her nerves while she waits for her date to show up.  When she comes out, everything has gone all to heck and suddenly she has a whole lot of ghosts to deal with while trying to escape the apartments she’s become mysteriously stuck in.

Some of these ghosts are simply mischievous – I loved the one that would steal items from your inventory and, ahem, spirit them away to its lair – some are actually friendly and some are downright malevolent.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a way to lay them all to rest.   Each purification comes with a little comic-panel-style cutscene, and some of them are quite emotional.

The developer cites Fatal Frame as an inspiration, and while there’s no camera-related combat it definitely has some of the same feeling of wandering through the aftermath of Something Bad Happened and trying to piece it together from environmental clues.  There’s a lot of examining items and journal reading in your future.

It also has a related easter egg that gave me a huge grin when I examined a camera I found in one of the rooms.

I would also like to mention that the music and sound design are top notch.  Those are a big part of making an effective horror game, and I felt this nailed both.

The actual experience of playing the game, as I kind of alluded to earlier, is… well, clunky.  Setting the sometimes-obtuse puzzles aside, there’s a number of occasions where you can be doing things entirely out of sequence and the game does not adapt well.

For example, you don’t actually encounter many downright hostile ghosts until you’re about halfway through the game, and your character needs to learn how to exorcise them.  Straightforward, right?

Except you can skip the bit where you learn how to perform exorcisms and then suddenly find yourself in a cutscene where you are sealing away a ghost like you finally remembered that Exorcism 201 course you took back in community college.  I suppose it’s better than a painful death scene, but maybe locking the character out of the conflict until they’ve gone through the story justification to get there would have been better.

There’s also some combat, though it’s blissfully rare, which features you kind of vaguely waving this enchanted sword thing at ghosts and hoping the collision detection goes your way.

And, like every adventure game in history, it is plagued by Single Use Items.  This grate, for example, is something you run into very late in the game.  By this time you have used and thrown away a number of crowbars, knives, and screwdrivers, but when you get to this grate you now need to rummage around until you’ve found a letter opener to get into it.

The last negative thing I’m going to say is this: Sense is available for the Switch, Mac, Linux, Windows, Playstation and Xbox.  If you have any choice at all, do not play it on the Switch like I did.  For a game that doesn’t seem like it should be taxing the system all that much, it suffers some really obvious slowdown throughout.  It was written by a three person team, and I stumbled across a Steam forum post from the developer apologizing for the Switch performance and saying they weren’t able to optimize it further, so at least they tried?

So, would I recommend this game?

Well, hmm.  Yes.  If you are able to get into the setting and atmosphere, you can probably forgive the clunkiness and slow pacing.  There’s a demo version on Steam to check out, which should help seal the deal one way or the other.

So, Japan has a reputation for putting out weird games at times.  And I’m very guilty of pointing at something like Umamusume and saying “look, Japan so wacky!”.

But, really, that’s just girls who are idol singers and also horses.  It’s (cute thing + cute thing + someone’s fetish) and that’s not weird so much as it’s just cashing in on the weak-minded who will trade money for horsegirl .pngs.

Gunma’s Ambition: You and Me are Gunma, now this is a weird game.  It’s the sort of thing that we got on phones back before every game became a f2p micro transaction nightmare, and it fits perfectly with the general vibe of the Switch.

I know nothing about Gunma prefecture.  I’ve only ever heard of it because J-list makes their headquarters there, and also it shows up in an episode of Rail Wars! which is a fine anime about trains and you probably should just leave that statement right there and not google image search it.

Now that I’ve played this game, I went over to Wikipedia to see if it could tell me more, and apparently it’s one of Japan’s few land-locked prefectures and is historically associated with horse (actual horses, not girls who are horses) culture in Japan and there’s not really much more to it.  But someone obviously really likes it, because this game is all about Gunma.  Specifically, you are converting every other prefecture in Japan into Gunma and maybe even picking up some geography and local knowledge along the way.

This probably takes some explanation.

The main playfield of Gunma’s Ambition is on the left side of the screen, where an endless stream of local food and cultural objects falls from the sky.  Any you catch give you points, but you still get a few pity points for ones you miss.  There’s a multiplier zone in the middle and things you catch there are worth more.

On the right, you choose a prefecture to convert into Gunma.  You should probably start with the smaller ones and then work up from there.

After you’ve chosen a prefecture, you can spend points to draw cards from a Daruma.  Each card will either have a city or a prefecture on it, and the population of the place shown on the card will be applied to the prefecture you are converting.  Once you have converted every person in the prefecture to Gunma, it turns blue and you can move on to the next set of victims.

Initially, the stuff you’re trying to catch gives only a few points, and buying cards is pretty cheap as well.  Costs ramp up pretty steadily, though, so you periodically need to spend points in a few …skills?  I don’t know if I’d call them skills.  Stuff that makes the bar fuller faster, because this is a game all about filling bars.

Here I have a 36x multiplier on points, have made the bonus area larger and more valuable, and have increased the size of the little bouncing Gunma that I use to pick up items.

Should I mention that every single time you pick up an item it plays a sound bite of the word “Gunma”?  Gunmagunmagunmagunma, all set to cheery music.  I think this game may be violating some human rights regulations.

By the time you are working to convert Tokyo to Gunma, you have some truly big numbers going on.  While the early game is characterized by needing to be economical and strategic in your choices, this late game is just trying to spend points faster than you can make them and generally failing because your income is bonkers by this point.

Finally, once you convert all of Japan to Gunma, there is a bonus stage which I will not spoil because I wasn’t expecting it and it put the biggest grin on my face.

While you’re gathering food and collecting cards, you fill out a dictionary with little information about towns, prefectures, and cultural specialties of the various regions of Japan.  If you ever wanted to know the official flower, tree, and bird for any given Japanese prefecture, this is your reference guide:

The best thing about Gunma’s Ambition, apart from the way you fill bars and spend points to fill bars better and then fill bigger bars, is that the game is always in motion.  Even while navigating game menus, stuff is still falling and you can use the L and R buttons to move Gunma back and forth to catch it – or just let it fall and you’ll get some points anyway.  Need to take a bathroom break?  When you come back there will be more points to spend.  It’s a very fun energy, and while I still have no idea WHY Gunma, I at least know WHAT Gunma and WHO Gunma.