Last Week's Games: Rayman Legends, Crash Bandicoot, Papers Please, Legend of Grimrock

They're all adorable, but there's something a little... off.

I’ve had a go with a few different games in the last week or so. One game I’ve played quite a bit but forgot to mention in last week’s blog was Rayman: Legends, a terrific platformer on the Switch. I’ve got a couple of versions of the original game but games have improved in their development since then and I’m enjoying 2D platformers with more modern conveniences! There’s not much to it in principle; you traverse fantastic environments as Rayman or one of his variations, hitting bad guys, collecting Lums and rescuing Teensies (the latter two being cutesie creatures that make squeaky noises.) There’s a lot of levels so you can keep going for a while. I’ve not played all the Rayman games, but this game appears to dispense with the “Go to this part of the map and play this level” modular system started by the earlier Mario games. Instead, the levels are selected by jumping in to paintings, more of which are unlocked as you progress. There’s also not (as far as I can see) any real progression in terms of your abilities; everything you can do, you can do from the start of the game. The progression in the game aside from beating the levels is collecting all the unlockables, which is usually achieved by, again, collecting Lums and rescuing Teensies. This might seem like a grind, but Rayman is one of those games where you can easily put it down and come back to it later without having missed much. I’m having a great time with it at the moment, and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so!

Make the mask noise. I dare you.

I also carried on with Crash Bandicoot on the PS4; I’ve found myself enjoying this game more as it’s gone on! I got to the end of the game and beat it, but I don’t want to say too much about it at this point because I want to save my main remarks about the game for the review; anything I have to add to it will probably go on next week’s blog, or the week after.

Is he legit?

On my laptop I played Papers Please, because there’s nothing at all funny about coming home from work and playing a video game about going to work. If you don’t know, it’s a game where you are the inspector for the border of a fictional country which, given the volatile political situation it represents, is probably eastern European. You have to check people’s passports for inconsistencies, allow them through if you don’t find any, and deny them entry if you do. At the same time you need to be making enough money every day to feed and heat your family. It’s a bleak game, and I’ve only unlocked three out of the twenty possible endings so far and none of them have been good, but there’s something about the core gameplay loop that is fascinating and keeps me coming back to the game years after I originally bought it.

No. No no no no no no no. No.

I also had a go with Legend of Grimrock, a relatively modern update of the old-style dungeon crawler games where you had a party of four people and you had to go through the dungeon and, in this case, escape. It’s a good game; it’s a nice mix of puzzles, combat, resource and inventory management, and spellcasting from pressing the correct combination of symbols. The interface is a bit wonky but this fits in with the style of the game and forces you to concentrate on what you’re doing. I began a new play-through and got to the third level of the dungeon, where I had to call time because the spiders were making me very jumpy. The giant spiders in Legend of Grimrock are absolutely horrible, due I guess to the fact that the movement in the game looks very mechanical and inhuman, and also because I’m playing on a laptop I don’t have the option to sit further away from the screen. Usually I know they’re coming but when one suddenly appears and you’re not expecting it, I panic and completely mess it up! I’ll get through it – I’ve done it before – but this isn’t a pleasant level to play!