This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lords of the Fallen. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Sonic Superstars right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) Zero Punctuation Transcript

Here we bloody go again. Don’t just rip off the title of another, completely unrelated game, Lords of the Fallen, did we learn nothing from Prey 2016? Think of the poor confused audience, you’re going to make them forget all about the previous Lords of the Fallen. “There was a previous Lords of the Fallen, Yahtz?” …well, never mind. I’m sick of complaining about it, anyway. Let’s just add the current year in parentheses to your title with this hot branding iron and we can move on. As I say, Oh No More Lords Of The Fallen has almost nothing in common with its namesake but for the fact that it’s a soulslike with a dark fantasy theme, but I repeat myself. It’s got all the usual soulslike trappings: you’re an immortal dude on a pilgrimage through various doomed lands where the locals have apparently been informed that you’ve been shagging their collective missus, boss fights, checkpoints, free healing potion refills, elevators with buttons in the floor. But wait a sec, I tried to do that thing I always do in Dark Souls where after using a lift I’d send it back and quickly hop off it so I don’t have to wait for it next time, but I couldn’t do that in Lords Of the Fallen because the doors closed too quick for me to hop off. So… zero stars, better luck next time.

Alright, well that summarizes the one part of my notes where I wrote down “BLOODY LIFTS” in block capitals, let’s look at the rest. For the soulslike connoisseur, Lords of the Fallen plays it pretty straight dark fantasy with a dash of that Catholic guilt vibe that Blasphemous does, and just to skip to the weaselly asshole damn with fine praise summary, in the field of offbrand Soulslikes I would describe it as “okay-ish.” Which makes it worth talking about, like discovering a supermarket own-brand knockoff Cola that’s actually halfway drinkable. Obviously it’s not as good as the real stuff but it’s pretty amazing that I tolerated it for as long as I did before using it as toilet cleaner. It’s got an interesting suite of bespoke gimmicks to set it apart; ammo for ranged weapons refills at checkpoints like your mana bar does, for example, and that’s something in itself – a soulslike with a viable bow build that isn’t an optional challenge mode for people who pride themselves on their ability to manage the weekly shopping. Just as well, ‘cos you bloody well need an accurate ranged option.

This game loves ranged enemies. If it can bean you in the temple with an unexpected crossbow bolt just as you’re creeping up for a backstab then that’s the day made as far as Lords of the Fallen’s concerned. It loves plonking them everywhere in concealed elevated spots, similar to the relationship I have with bottles of whiskey I don’t want the wife to know about. Also, the checkpoints are pretty far apart but you can use a consumable to create little mini-checkpoints at designated spots, like when you do a little poo in the woods when you can’t wait for the next rest area. And if you’re anything like me you’ll keep doing this not knowing you’re literally around the corner from the next big checkpoint and get very cross. But the big main unique selling point in Lords of the Fallens is dual world gameplay in a Metroid Prime 2 sort of area. Where you can shift from the living world to the world of the dead either by making an elaborate hand gesture or, you know, getting killed, and the world of the dead has extra paths and treasures but also extra enemies and spooky environment design, although the level of spookiness tends to be inconsistent.

You’ve got a magic flashlight that lets you glimpse the dead world version of the current area in case you want a quick viewing before you commit to a lease, and sometimes it’s a whole alternative appearance evoking Zdzislaw Beksinski throwing a Halloween party in the Warhammer 40k universe, with a gigantic skeleton looming over everything like it’s had a long night and mistaken our current environment for a puke trough. And then sometimes they just selectively smear some skulls and a bit of dryer lint about. And sometimes it just looks exactly the same as the living world but with the lighting saturation turned down a notch. And that communicates what became my broad impression of Lords of the Fallen A Little Bit Further This Time – that there were varying levels of could be arsedness in play. But the dead world does make for an interesting extra factor to consider – simultaneously expanding the exploration potential while giving you a little more wiggle room against the high difficulty; getting killed isn’t an immediate failure but more of a getting bumped down to remedial school where you get one more chance but you’ve got to start applying yourself or the pale faceless dudes with the skinny legs will overtake you in the grade rankings.

But I find these days there’s only one metric by which I can judge soulslikes, and that’s how long I can play them before the soulslike fatigue sets in. And I’d say Lords of the Falling Down did quite a bit better than average. The dual world gimmick gave it a freshness, ironically, since the dead world looks like it smells like the inside of a packet of airline pretzels that was forgotten about in a seat pocket for a year. And the game doesn’t seem to be doing the usual offbrand Soulslike thing of trying to outdo From Software when it comes to unreasonable difficulty, at least not where the boss fights are concerned. Very few visits from the Manus Father of The Abyss twitchy last second lockon spazz-out brigade that took over Elden Ring. I remember defeating this one hearty lad who was guarding the objective in the swampy area and being absolutely astonished that he didn’t have a second phase. ‘Cos he’d only taken, like, four goes and I still had all my teeth. It doesn’t hurt that the game’s generous with NPC support. Half the boss fights there’s just three dudes politely lined up outside like schoolkids waiting for you to pick teams. Frankly it made me suspicious. Yeah, you say you’ll help no strings attached but how do I know you won’t need help moving house next week?

Maybe this will turn off all those twitchy weirdos apparently in the majority who like it when soulslikes get less and less reasonable but I’m hoping to still have working wrists in my old age. So the bosses were fine, it was all the stuff in between that eventually wore me down. I’d say from around the snowy mountain area onwards the game gets more and more cheeky about the gauntlets of enemies it expects you to deal with. There was one particular hillside path that took me through, like, five groups of assholes, multiple of those burly shield men who all need to be carefully danced around unless you want their shields widening your bumhole by a factor of two feet, about three of that one thing who was an early game boss fight who’s clearly bitter about not getting a special health bar anymore, and you can’t just run past them all because the path is narrow and they’re a dogged bunch, especially the dogs. So it was after banging my head against that for an afternoon only to discover it was just a shortcut that didn’t even lead to progress, I soured to Lords of the Ballsack wholeheartedly. Still, it’s definitely a better game than the first Lords of the Ballsack, for what that’s worth. Hey, we walked across a room without breaking our ankles this time. Although we did tread in the cat’s litter box and punted the dog through a wall.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Assassins Creed Mirage. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Lords of the Fallen right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage Zero Punctuation Transcript

If you’re unfamiliar with mirages because you’ve never read a Tintin book or whatever, it’s a phenomenon that appears in the middle of desolate wastelands which seem to be of substance but the moment you get close enough you realise are totally ephemeral. In which case, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage – yes I can see some of you are ahead of me on this one – is the most aptly subtitled entrant into the series until they bring out Assassin’s Creed: Another Bloody Boring Game About Stabbing. So those restless passionate creatives at Ubisoft couldn’t hold it in any longer and just had to spurt out some more Assocreedage after three years of edging, a recurring phenomenon I think of as Assassin’s Creed’s “What the hell do these people want,” breaks. The last one was after AssCreeSyndicate, when they all went “Oh, apparently they don’t want slightly cringey ‘let’s explore a historical time period on the magic school bus’ stabbing adventures anymore, let’s see if they’ll be any more receptive to ‘let’s all steal mummy’s credit card so we don’t have to grind the next five levels in a suboptimal chestpiece’ live servicey stabbing adventures.'” Hence Origins and Odyssey.

But now that audiences regard the phrase “live service” the way a person with severe indigestion regards the phrase “cream slice,” the latest thinking cap session has concluded that we people want the hell out of a return to basics. The prospect of maybe just not making any more AssoCreedence Clearwater Revivals not being conscionable, apparently, but then this series has long ceased to be a collection of individual artworks and is now an underlying force of nature that ebbs into our lives now and again like the tide. AssoCreeMirage feels like not so much a streamlining or refocussing as an attempt to turn back the clock, being most reminiscent of something like Brotherhood or Revelations, the interstitial games between 2 and 3 that warranted neither a new protagonist nor a number all to itself. It’s one measly city with the usual checklist of treasures to find and throats to stab, and it ends with the dude walking into a science fiction room full of LED strip lighting, experiencing an astounding revelation relating to the overarching plot, and then going out again. After which I assume he starts blowing up party balloons. The question is how one reduces scope in a way that feels fresh and not like a step back.

And Ubisoft’s answer to that question is “Sorry did you say something? I was busy putting haystacks under things.” At least Brotherhood and Revelations had Ezio, a main character we might still be invested in. AssCreeMargarine has Basim, a sort of unusually tall wind-up monkey toy. Initially he’s a street thief in 9th century Baghdad who I think we’re supposed to believe is a wayward teenager in much the way of a 29-year-old getting cast in a Jason film, and he’s also a shameless Assassin fanboy. He sees an Assassin working with his regular fence and goes “Ooh ooh pick me pick me, I’d be such a good assassin, I know how to squat in a bush and everything.” But he just can’t catch their eye, until he sneaks into a palace and ends up accidentally stabbing a dude, and that was the display of stabbing initiative they were waiting for, apparently, because he gets signed up with stabbing academy for the fall semester. And for most of the game there’s just not enough strife or doubt in Basim’s character to make him interesting. He joins the Assassins just like he wanted and immediately becomes mentor’s pet. Yes miss no miss can I fetch you some throat lozenges miss I caught Stebbins raiding the tuck shop miss shall I tell him to report to detention.

His only internal struggle is that he has recurring nightmares about a monster, and he could just be eating dodgy kippers for supper. In the end when he goes into the afore-discussed inevitable magic sci-fi room it turns out the dreams are significant, although why wasn’t entirely clear. It’s something to do with memories of a past life as one of those super special before peoples Assassin’s Creed likes so much, and an instance of one of the classic hackneyed surprise twists. I don’t wanna spoil, but it’s one of the following: someone you thought was harmless is actually the big bad, someone you thought was real is actually imaginary, or someone you thought had a vagina actually has a penis. But that’s the very end, and there’s a lot of jugular veins between you and there that need stabbing. As I say, there’s a deliberate return to the Assassin’s Creed basics: you infiltrate strongholds full of patrolling guards to reach objectives, no district liberating, no ship combat, none of whatever that fucking rap battle bollocks in AssCreeValhalla was supposed to be about, just the endless storybook romance between knife and random guards’ throats. The sandbox isn’t even that big compared to past games, so there’s less of a commute between stabbings.

Although it did mean a couple of locations got reused for different missions, and I’d have to clear out a stronghold I’d already cleared out once before. I feel sorry for whatever temp agency the Baghdad harbour employs. And happily there’s no levelling system, so you can stab away without concern for high-level enemies having done enough neck exercise to repel your blade. Well, tell a lie, there is levelling, the game hasn’t entirely cast off the shroud of used toilet paper strips that is the live service model, there’s levelling, equipment crafting, multiple premium currencies and a big fat “go to online store” button permanently visible in the corner of menu like a dog turd on a new rug. Oh, Ubisoft, you tried so hard to keep to your diet, but those cream slices were just too tempting. Thing is, though, you don’t have to worry about any of it. Your hidden blade still instakill stabs whether or not your sword does plus 2.5% stagger damage or your armor is dyed powder blue. And if you get to the point where it does become relevant ‘cos you fucked up stealthing and entered open combat then you’re probably playing it wrong.

‘Cos the open combat suuuuucks. It’s the usual dodge the red attacks parry the non-red attacks, but the addition of a stamina bar, possibly to lure in the Soulslike crowd, is a misstep as it means you’ll be in the middle of a nice flow and Basim will just stop responding to commands like his wind-up key needs turning. There’s the inevitable skill tree as well, doing the usual wrongheaded thing of making the game easier and easier the more you advance in it. Here’s a new upgrade that stabs four dudes at once while also dicing vegetables and conveniently pressing your trousers. It’s like the auto-climbing hookshot from Syndicate: if you’re rewarding the player by letting them not have to engage with the core gameplay as much you’re sort of telling on yourself a bit, there. I do support the rollback of scope as it means Creamy Ass Rage doesn’t outstay its welcome, but frankly it never had much of a welcome. It was a sort of “Oh its you,” situation. It brings nothing to the table to justify its presence. The gameplay’s just more of the usual and the story fires off like the last squirt at an amateur money shot. “So what does Assassin’s Creed need to do to please you, Yahtz? And don’t say piss off and die.” [ long pause ] “Yahtz?” What? You told me not to say it.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Assassin’s Creed Mirage right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, and Remnant 2.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Zero Punctuation Transcript

In the last few weeks I could have been reviewing the Rapture and someone in the comments would still have said “Yeah, yeah, you beheld a great beast with blasphemous names on each of its seven heads, when are you gonna do Armored Core 6?” Half of them going “Ooh it’s by From Software and it’s basically a soulslike with giant robots, you’ll love it.” And the other half going “Ooh it’s by From Software and it’s absolutely nothing like a soulslike, but you keep saying you’re sick of them and it’s got giant robots, you’ll love it.” I did try Armored Core 6 when it came out but bounced off at first, in much the same way the entire giant mecha concept bounces off common sense. I guess that’s kinda why I have trouble getting into giant robot stuff; if it’s trying to take itself seriously I keep getting distracted by nagging thoughts like “Why would you ever rely upon giant robots with laser swords piloted by one dude, rather than use the exact same materials to make, say, five hundred tanks? That could do more than one job at a time, and don’t require centuries of high level robotics research to ensure they don’t fall over?” But the constant requests and the brief gap in the release schedule wore me down. So I went back to AC6.

That’s Armored Core, not Assassin’s Creed. Or Animal Crossing. Or Asheron’s Call. Or Ace Combat. Or Assetto Corsa. Or Astral Chain. Jesus, what is it with video games and AC? Are they trying to subliminally inform the building manager that the central heating needs fixing? And fine, I admit it, once I strapped myself down and forced myself to give it more time, I eventually got into Alice Cooper 6, although not because it’s soulslike. It’s only like Dark Souls in that there’s a focus on one-on-one boss fights, an estus flask-esque healing system, difficult combat that involves a lot of running around in circles, and a choice of endings that comes down to whether or not you want to light yourself on fire. People will call anything “soulslike” these days, it’s never been a well-defined genre at the best of times. Ooh, Sonic the Hedgehog’s a soulslike ‘cos the rings are estus and the checkpoints are bonfires and you can summon a fox with two buttholes as a support NPC. Anyway, in Armored Core 6 you’re a mercenary who’s been brought to a planet full of potentially hugely destructive magic goo that a bunch of corporations are fighting over, a premise that reminded me of Lost Planet a lot in that I didn’t care much about that, either.

Initially the plot felt like little more than a slim excuse for making giant robots smack each other about, and there was a lot about the game I found intimidating on my first shake. Perhaps it was the first mission, in which the game goes “Right, here’s how you move, here’s how you fire your weapons, got all that? Now kill this giant flying robot death monster that wants to destroy you with a ferocity seen only in a desperately undernourished spider trapped in a bell jar with a miniature bacon sandwich.” And obviously I got stomped into a carelessly dismantled Meccano project, but over multiple attempts, I felt out the workings. I soon learned that trying to be clever by hiding amid buildings, moving in and out of range, etc, would result in the boss going “Hm. Interesting. Counterpoint: white hot stream of pitiless death.” But after several tries I managed to sustain consistent damage for long enough to fill the mysterious orange bar under his health, at which point his trousers dropped around his ankles and I did some serious damage to him while he was pulling them back up. Aha, this isn’t giant robot Dark Souls, it’s giant robot Sekiro. Except instead of perfect parrying over and over again you just shoot things a lot with a gun.

The other thing I found intimidating was going into the parts shop, as the game would spread a load of engine parts across the floor with a thousand stats attached and impatiently go “Whaddya want?” Cigarette poking from mouth like an extra in a Billy Joel video. But again, with time I figured out the best approach: construct an in-betweeny all-rounder mechanical evening suit that had decent stats, avoiding the tiny spindly kitchen utensil legs for the super light fast builds and the giant chunky flared trousers for the heavy tanks, and then pile as much raw firepower onto my shoulders as I could without my legs going bandy. After that, I stuck to the strategy of running in circles around the target, holding down all the fire buttons until the pants fall off meter was full, and then speeding in for a one-two laser sword wallop to the perineum. And pursuing this philosophy, I found Anton Chekhov 6 to be a game of very inconsistent difficulty. The regular enemies slow you down as much as the little dotted lines around the doors of an advent calendar, but every now and again there’s an absolute roadblock of a boss fight that I’d have to hammer away at for half an hour.

I appreciate the game intends you to mix up your build to suit the situation as there’s a special option on the game over menu for making a quick pit stop to switch to a nicer head and bigger trousers, but I powerfully couldn’t be arsed to do that. And who needs roomier trousers without an arse. Also sometimes the game’s nice enough to checkpoint you at the start of the boss and sometimes for every attempt you’ve gotta plough through two rooms and a cinematic that wasn’t terribly interesting the first time. And while we’re on the subject, I guess the story’s about as effective as one can get considering every NPC is a faceless voice on a radio, and could conceivably be all the same dude putting on a variety of silly accents, but it was hard to get invested early on before the personalities had properly crystallized. Especially with the mission-based structuring that is always the death of pacing and flow ‘cos the game has to stop every five minutes to ask permission to continue and that tends to put me in a philosophical mood. Do I want to continue? Boy, that’s a hell of a question. I mean, I’d appreciate the rest but if I miss another Thanksgiving I’ll never hear the end of it. Oh, you meant in the game.

Nevertheless, as I say, I did find myself getting into Andrew Carnegie 6, and I think at the end of the day it came down to sheer spectacle. It’s sometimes hard to get a sense of the scale you’re supposed to be at. Sure, you can see little human-sized vehicles and stairwells and occasionally walk down a nine-lane highway like it’s a jogging track, but you could just be a dude in a model village cosplaying as a kitchen island. So to compensate the environments get even crazier with scale, which makes the notion that regular-sized humans use the space even more ridiculous ‘cos there are corridors and ventilation shafts that a person couldn’t walk across without a pack mule and a week’s provisions, but gosh darn it at the end of the day, all gameplay, interface and story niggles aside, it is pretty fun and exciting to flit around an entire ruined city dodging streams of explosions while keeping a bead on a target against the backdrop of a colossal industrial structure that makes you feel like an ant exploring a disused barbecue grille. And hey, five hundred tanks couldn’t do that. Or indeed navigate the Birmingham one-way system.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, and Chrono Trigger.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about The dreadful walk-and-talk, AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

El Paso, Elsewhere and ? Zero Punctuation Transcript

I’ve often noted that retro-style media is always nostalgic for the period roughly twenty years ago, hence 90s-style boomer shooters being in for a while because it makes 35-year-old game designers nostalgic for that time they made a custom level for Doom based on their high school and ended up in Guantanamo Bay. But like a walrus in a food coma rolling down a hill, the nostalgia wave always moves on. And exactly twenty years ago the PC boomer shooters were ceding ground to the rise of the console shooter, and third person shooters such as Max Payne, in which the camera hovered overhead like a fussy mum with an overly stocked first aid kit, slow-motion bullet time combat was pioneered to compensate for the lack of a mouse and console users being generally slower of thought from all the time they spent chewing the paint off of their Wavebirds, and the main character was rather self-indulgently modelled on the game’s lead designer with a look on his face like he was hoping binge eating sour gummies would help his chronic constipation. And now inevitably we have a new retro indie shooter that takes a very obvious and openly acknowledged influence from Max Payne, especially the self indulgent bit.

El Paso Elsewhere, designed by Xalavier Nelson, in which we play paranormal detective James Savage, voiced by Xalavier Nelson, as he bullet-time dual-pistols his way through level after level of monster-haunted labyrinths to the tune of an original hip hop soundtrack. Composed and performed by Xalavier Nelson. And the plot is, James Savage has to save the world by confronting his evil blood-sucking vampire bitch of an ex-girlfriend. And if I were any of Xalavier Nelson’s former partners I’d certainly be narrowing my eyes at this point. Self-indulgent is the word of the day, and that certainly comes across over the fifty-odd levels of James Savage’s angsty monologuing in a voice like a bloke with a blocked nose trying to seduce the microphone in the middle of a noisy building site. The exact method by which his evil ex-girlfriend is attempting to destroy the world is a bit unclear, one might almost think that aspect of the plot was included solely to turn James Savage’s masturbatory airing out of his personal issues into an act of self-sacrificing heroism. So this all might come across as a bit cringeworthy, especially when the self-penned hip hop tracks kick in and we hear lyrics that one might imagine scrawled across the back of Xalavier Nelson’s high school homework diary.

But get past all that and El Paso Elephantine plays like a fun snacky arcade shooter, “arcade” being a nice way of saying “repetitive” but it’s sort of impressive that they squeezed fifty levels out of about four visual themes and ten furniture assets. The Max Payne-style high-octane shooting comes across well enough, complete with slow motion bullet dive, which you’ll swiftly learn is completely pointless ‘cos you can turn slow motion on and off at any time and diving kinda messes with your aim, but hey, it looks cool. It’s one of those games that’s very hard to stop playing once you start. You say “Okay, I’ll quit after this level ‘cos I think my kids got into the steak knives.” And then four or five levels later you’re like “Oh well, sounds like at least one of them’s still alive.” And I put that down to the game’s simplicity. Explore a maze, shoot everything in it, it’s like Pac-Man having a Vietnam flashback. And it flows well ‘cos between the slow-mo and most enemies dying in two or three shots and ammunition boxes practically bleeding out of the skirting boards, it’s a surprisingly easy game. I say surprisingly ‘cos when editor Nick and I first played the demo at GDC, we both found it really hard in a Hotline Miami kinda way.

I’d hate to think Xalavier Nelson scaled the difficulty back before release ‘cos all the game journalists were crapping out at it. Game journalists in the middle of a convention who’ve been alternating between jogging to hotel room demos and freebasing heroin don’t make a good control group. So final summary, El Paso Elderberry is a fun if repetitive callback shooter that’s essentially the nightmare sequence from Max Payne drawn out for six or seven hours and while the story frequently has the air of Xalavier Nelson’s Geocities poetry page, that also makes it feel very personal, which I’d take any day over the usual committee-designed drivel that’s about as personal as an industrial sheep dip. And of the two games I wanna talk about this week, it is undoubtedly the good one. Although frankly that’s not worth much, because the other game compares unfavourably to a Ryvita smeared with catarrh. The game is (record scratch)

Right, well, I have to pause things there, because I had this whole review ready but then a day before it was due I was informed that the game’s embargo date had changed. I didn’t play any other games this week, nor do I have the time to make an entire other review, so please enjoy the scheduled review with all identifying elements removed. Why not have fun trying to guess what it is? Here’s a hint: it’s not Armored Core 6.

A game I’ve been wanting to talk about because I’m pretty sure it’s completely f***ing terrible.
(title redacted) is what happens when someone tries to knock off Hades without having the slightest clue what makes Hades good. So it’s a roguelite dungeon crawler in which (redacted) descends through a sequence of randomized levels while collecting blessings from associated god-like entities, except there’s only, like, three blessings total so you usually get all of them in every run. And none of them do anything to fundamentally alter the core gameplay, which consists of running up to dudes and biffing them in the mush. Seven billion times. It’s a beat ’em up with a third person over shoulder camera which isn’t great for visibility but is perfect if you’re really curious about the contours of a bathrobe. And every room in every level is the same. Some shitty one hit kill minions you needn’t worry about and two or three big lads with spongy health bars and basically the same attacks. You pick one of the latter and start duffing them up, but with a control system that feels like (redacted) is immersed to the waist in marshmallow fluff and has the leashes of two large, curious dogs tied to his wrists. And yet, the game’s still insultingly easy, ‘cos the enemy AI’s as formidable as a large, curious dog trying to lick a piece of kibble out of a hairbrush. So in contrast to El Paso Emerald Hill Zone (redacted) is the bad kind of repetitive that’s like trying to eat an entire bucket of gravel through a straw.

I got through all four dungeons on my second go, whereupon the game went “Oh no a plot development! Go through all four dungeons again but slightly bigger!” So I did that without a single death, and the game went “Oh no! Another plot development! Time to take the fight to the main baddie!” “I don’t suppose we do that by going through all four dungeons a third time?” “Hey, did you peek behind my DM screen?” This time through I died once during the final boss because I committed the classic mistake of forgetting not to clip through the floor during the opening cutscene. (redacted) is the kind of bad that makes me paranoid. Like maybe I missed something. Maybe there was a checkbox in the options menu labelled “remove shittiness.” Maybe I didn’t notice the tutorial message for the “activate jetpack” button. ‘Cos the alternative is that an entire studio got through the development and release of a game with a relatively well known IP attached that presumably has its own controllers keeping an eye on things, and at no point did anyone raise a hand and say “Has anyone else noticed our game’s a load of old flystruck sheep placenta?” I don’t know if I want to live in that world, I mean, what if I have a medical emergency around such people? They’d probably get confused and stick chewable vitamins up my arse.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy XVI.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Mortal Kombat 1 Zero Punctuation Transcript

Is it even worth harping on the title of Mortal Kombat 1? Or that there are now three games one is expected to call “Mortal Kombat 1?” Not that anybody does, in the case of what the wiki stubbornly refers to as MK9. You can’t just keep resetting your universe. For one thing it means we can’t get invested in any characters or anything that happens ‘cos God might shake the cosmic etch-a-sketch again at any moment, and for another, I feel sorry for all the normal plebs who have to live in Earthrealm. Imagine being just a random bloke who runs a dry cleaner. Would you understand why you’ve had to apply for a business license three times because ten or eleven martial artists you don’t know about keep punching each other too hard, or something? Anyway, after Mortal Kombat 11 established within canon that literally anything that happens in the story has all the permanence of a single sheet of damp bog roll after Tex Mex night, newly deified Liu Kang was left with the job of rebuilding continuity from scratch. And so he proceeded to make one basically the same as the last, with a few token changes for the sake of change, and if this were the Saturday morning cartoon the story campaign persistently resembles I’d assume it was trying to force parents to fork out for another round of action figures.

So Baraka and Reptile are good guys now, Sub Zero’s a bastard and the tournament between Outworld and Earthrealm is not a bloodsoaked death arena but a sort of jolly school sports day where entrants pulverize each other’s spines in the spirit of good sportsmanship. But trouble is brewing in the form of – oh it’s just Shang bloody Tsung again. This whole franchise really is just going around on a twatting carousel at this point. I won’t hold back – the word that summarises Mortal Kombat 1 in my mind is “pathetic.” It’s pathetic how all they did to create the logo was copy paste the MK11 logo and remove one of the ones. I’ve long relished the hilarious badness of Netherrealm fighter story campaigns, but the joke is now wearing single ply thin, and now a lot of it’s just plain regular badness. Characters endlessly relaying their entire backstories to each other on their first meeting and smug villains giving away all their secret evil plans to absolutely no benefit. The plot holes come so thick and fast you’d think they were trying to bait the twat who does those Everything Wrong With videos. “I have gathered the world’s greatest martial artists to represent Earthrealm in the tournament. Psych! Only one of you can actually enter, but I guess the rest of you can hold his coat.”

“Oh Raiden, you will represent us for you are the strongest and most honorable. Psych! None of that matters ‘cos all your opponents are going to cheat. Here’s a thing that gives you lightning powers. Bet you feel silly about all those press-ups you did.” And the character roster is… well, it’s pathetic. Mortal Kombat has long struggled with physically differentiating its cast, right from the days when half of them were palette swaps of each other. I remember joking that if you stripped the cast of MK9 naked and put paper bags on their heads you couldn’t tell most of them apart. Well guess what? In MK1, you don’t even need the bags. About 60% of the cast is “generically Asian dark haired man.” A good chunk of the rest are “generically Asian dark haired lady,” and it’s Kitana I feel sorry for. With her usual role of “very dutiful reasonable Outworld authority figure with cleavage you could ski down” split between her and four other chicks she’s left with bugger all to do all plot. Besides that you’ve got the inescapable Johnny Cage who’s now living a prolonged impersonation of Bojack Horseman, and a few monsters, including a vampire lady with the voice acting of a freshman drama major reading aloud the specials at the drive thru. Blimey, I hope whoever they got in to do her doesn’t aspire to a film career.

But the real joke of the story campaign is that it isn’t a reset, really. By the end it’s reverted back to where MK11 was at the end – with all continuity screwed up into a multi-timeline mess like a Gorgon’s bad hair day. At the very end, spoiler alert, contrivance leads every good version of every character from every timeline to battle every evil version on the steps of a giant pyramid that’s shown up for no adequately established reason. Kind of amusing in the initial charge as we discover just how hard it is to animate a character running up a flight of stairs with an air of kill crazy abandon, but which versions of which characters we’re still supposed to be giving a shit about and whether or not it matters if any of them die is entirely lost upon me. It’s like Mortal Kombat as a franchise has already written itself into a corner twice so now it’s trying to break its speedrun record. If it is, it’s about the only thing Mortal Kombat 1 approaches with passion. Everything else has a lacklustre feel, even beyond the easy mode logo design. The bespoke pre-fight banter unique to each character combo just keeps getting shittier with each game. Previously it would use three dialog lines to establish at least some contrived reason for fighting to the death.

Now we’re down to two lines and they’re mostly irrelevant pleasantries. “How’s the ninja clan going?” “Eh, could be worse.” Roundhouse kick, commence stabbing. All of which raises the question: what exactly has been improved, or added to the Mortal Kombat formula, to justify a whole new instalment? Are the graphics better? Not to any appreciable degree. Especially not if you bought the Switch version, which looks like everyone’s mildly perturbed at having had their faces sandblasted. There’s a new round of fatalities to enjoy, still vastly, unnecessarily cruel in a way increasingly at odds with the rest of the game’s tone, but I zoned out halfway through the Youtube compilation ‘cos there’s only so many ways you can pull apart a poorly secured sack of guts and deckchair parts and keep it interesting. Are the mechanics much different? Oh, I don’t give Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Shits for the mechanics of fighting games, you know that, I only play Netherrealm fighters to power through the campaign on easy mode by slapping the controller on my bum and then take the piss out of the plot. But I did note that the big new gameplay feature is the Kameo system, where you are assisted during fights by another character, generally one from a previous game with even less justification for their presence than the vampire lady’s voice actress at the academy awards.

But hey, we’ve established nothing matters. The principle purpose being to let you potentially add additional moves to your combos, but more importantly to give you a whole extra set of dressup dollies to kit out with the inevitable mother hen clucking cosmetics that Netherrealm continue to flog like stingily proportioned bags of granola at a farmer’s market. And that’s about all Mortal Kombat Wonk has to show for itself. I can’t help comparing to Street Fighter 6. On the one hand, a bright, colourful game infused with energy and life, full of flamboyant characters with distinct silhouettes and personalities, with a groundbreaking approach to single player gameplay that might conceivably sell a new player on fighting games, even if it doesn’t quite prepare you for them, but at least gives you the chance to beat up a fridge, which is great if you’ve been put on a diet and are looking for symbolic catharsis. And on the other hand, you have… Mortal Kombat One. More of the usual bollocks. And I’m not talking about the contents of the janitor’s wet-dry vac after every round.
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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Mortal Kombat 1, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, and System Shock (2023).

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar Zero Punctuation Transcript

It was one of those weeks for trying new things and getting out of my comfort zone, and obviously that’s why I spent half of it playing a Bloodborne clone. Which might not be in the least bit fair. I was drawn to Lies of P for two reasons: firstly the title is an anagram of “ooh me piles,” if you don’t know what an anagram is, and secondly it’s a Bloodborne clone based on Pinocchio. And what a sentence. I mean, how do you top that? A fighting game based on Les Miserables? A top down twin stick shooter based on A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu? I say “based on,” I couldn’t help thinking as I was slashing a giant mutated purple frog man to death and a snake with a spear-wielding priest on the end popped out of his bum that events weren’t quite unfolding in the spirit of the original text. Our dad’s name is Geppetto, our support character is Jiminy and the now requisite soulslike waifu character who will level us up if we fondle her titties is the blue fairy, and all that’s just name changes. We could’ve respectively named those characters Basil, Manuel and Polly and just as credibly argued that the game is based on Fawlty Towers.

And while we’re on the subject of names, I know you soulslikes all want to have your own bespoke identities, but nobody has a patent on “strength” and “dexterity” and we all know what those sodding mean. I go to level up not-Pinocchio and the stats page is like “Do you want to increase your Motivity or your Advance?” And what the hell do they do? “Oh, they improve your Fable and Legion stats.” NYUUUUURGH. Anyway, the other main connection to Pinocchio as a concept is puppets. The story is surprisingly understandable for a soulslike, although that might be because it’s pretty much the same story as Atomic Heart. There was this society where everyone relied on robot servants, and at some point they all went banana up the tailpipe kill crazy and so you have to go in and deal with your insane brethren because you’re Geppetto’s one special puppet who’s special for two reasons: you have the ability to lie, which didn’t come up that often but it’s in the title so they had to put it in somewhere, and secondly, whenever you get covered in blood or oil from your enemies, your clothes get filthy but your face and neck remain mysteriously squeaky clean. I guess we know the exact point Geppetto ran out of Scotch guard.

Piles of Wee certainly has a striking visual quality, I suppose, although about half the environments make me think I’m playing the one quarter scale model village version of Bloodborne. And what’s that behind your back, Lies of P? “Nothing!” Is it a Bloodborne-style rallying mechanic? “No it’s nothing like that! You can only rally back health you lose while blocking! It’s completely different!” I’d say the game’s much deeper when it comes to micromanaging the fine points of your chosen build. There’s this whole weapon crafting gimmick where the blade and the handle have different bonuses and special moves and if you don’t like one combo you can snap them off and jam together different ones and have an electrified stun stick on the end of a partially eaten Twix if you want. Which is all very well, but sometimes Shites of Glee contracts a bit of Sekiro syndrome, i.e., for all the different builds available there are points where one specific style of combat is clearly favoured. The only way I beat that aforementioned giant frog ecumenical snake bottom entity was by mastering the timing on the perfect parries. Dodging wasn’t a lot of help when he was pulling out that usual neo-soulslike bollocks: lots of spazz-out combo attacks that snap to your position at the last moment and have huge invisible hitboxes the size of a parking space.

So soulslike fatigue set in, as it often does these days, and the monster variety didn’t help – everywhere you go, it’s just dudes, sometimes with a dog, sometimes with a bigger dude who spazzes out a lot. So I got bored during a mid to late game boss fight against some dudes and a bigger dude and decided to continue exploring games outside my comfort zone by playing something everyone told me was like Return of the Obra Dinn. Chants of Sennaar, two N’s, two A’s, but don’t worry, the similarities to Obra Dinn go beyond the incredibly awkward title. In essence, Pants of Seymour is a point and click adventure game in which we play a hooded dude in what is obviously the tower of Babel but is never referred to as such, possibly to avoid causing people to think about Babylon’s Fall again and setting off another wave of self-harm. You stumble into a community where everyone’s talking a weird pictographic language and your task is to decipher that language with the aid of context clues, a notebook and the invisible ghost of a fussy schoolteacher who hangs over you and ticks things in your notebook every time you’ve correctly divined the meaning of three things.

So as you know I’m a fan of deduction-based puzzle games that make me feel clever, to counteract the effect of having conversations with my wife, and that’s very much the intention here. You’ll see one dude buggering a mule and saying “Bish Glongy Splom,” and then you see another dude with his dick in a wine bottle saying “Bish Wompo Splom” and deduce “Aha, clearly Wompo means drink or beverage and Glongy means horny farm animal.” But there’s also a chance they were both saying variations on “get out of my living room.” Then just as you’ve gotten this language figured out you move to the next tier of the tower where there’s a whole other society with a whole other language that places different prominence on different concepts and whose grammar places the subject at the other end of the sentence, and the whole process begins anew. I’d say the puzzling sometimes suffers from giving away too much too easily, sometimes with the mere act of testing us. Like, I’ll have drawn the conclusion that these three words mean Apple, Hatred and Recidivism, but then the newspaper comics puzzle section opens up and says “Okay, which word means Love, which word means Banana and which word means Newsagent?” And I’ll be like, “boy, I was way off.”

Still, I enjoyed how the game culminated in a final boss where you have to get some dudes from each society together and act as translator for a conversation between them, gosh did I certainly feel clever after that. I wish it was the only thing that took the form of “a final boss” in Dances With Wolves, because there are also some rather obnoxious action sequences, usually involving forced stealth of the worst kind, crouching behind a bit of wall picking your robe out of your bum crack while you wait for a gap in the guard patrol to slowly emerge. Oh, and you get chased by a gribbly monster at one point, and it’s as interesting as my tone of voice implies. This is why games as an industry needs to have an actual long term memory. Remember when it was a trend in the early 2000s to have token forced stealth sections and they all universally sucked ass? Maybe if we hadn’t been so quick to brush our teeth designers today would still remember the taste of that ass and actually apply the lessons of history. And while we’re on the subject maybe publishers shouldn’t have forcibly removed our teeth and threatened us with prosecution if we tried to continue making use of them. Or try to charge us money to get an “I was very brave” sticker from the dentist.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), and Diablo IV.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about BioShock’s incredible opening, and why Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romance just isn’t very interesting.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Related: Do August 2023’s New Gaming IPs Have A Future?

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Zero Punctuation Transcript

Oh boy I’ve been looking forward to Bomb Rush Cyber Funk. And yes, that was the last time I’m going to call it by its actual name. We like to have fun taking the piss out of titles here on Zero Punctuation and this is enough meat to see me through the winter, right here, can’t even say it without sounding like a confused grandparent reading aloud the highlighted words on the side of their grandchild’s can of energy drink. Talk about a verbal car crash. I don’t even know where to put the dry heave, or even if I’d be dry heaving because of unnecessary colons or just dry heaving unrelatedly. Well anyway. Pace yourself, Yahtz, start with a mild one. Bum Rush Cyber Flunk is a new game very deliberately setting out to evoke the Dreamcast’s classic graffiti skating game Jet Set Radio, also known as Jet Grind Radio, apparently in accordance with the rule that this kind of thing has to be titled the way an oblivious mother dresses their child in a three-piece tartan suit for their first day of school. This isn’t one of those Bloodstained or Mighty No. 9 also-by-the-same-author stealth remake situations, the original devs aren’t involved as far as I know, but the desire to be a pseudo-stealth sequel to Jet Something Radio hangs off of Bum Flush Khyber Junk like an infected piercing.

It’s got a similar visual style, i.e., like the Saturday morning cartoon version of You Got Served, and it’s gone out of its way to look convincingly like a game on the Dreamcast, i.e., like a Playmobil set based on the above that got sneezed on by a coal miner, all janky animation and blurry textures. And of course the gameplay is based around skating through a futuristic city, doing graffiti and outfoxing a ludicrously overfunded police department. All set to music that sounds like a very excitable person got their synthesizer caught in a car door. The story is, you play a graffiti artist skater boi who gets busted out of prison by another graffiti artist skater boi, but gets decapitated by an insane DJ on the way out. So the second skater boi, instead of, like, calling a doctor or asking if you’re OK or anything like that, jams a robot head on your body and announces you’re going to help him and his crew take over the city, his crew consisting of you, him, and some perpetually jiggling girl who hangs around very conspicuously not explaining her presence.

From this I got the impression that the plot of Poo Tush Pile o’ Spunk doesn’t actually matter that much, which is a shame, because it started mattering later on and I kinda wished I’d paid more attention. Meanwhile your actual task is to go to each district of the city, paint over all the occupying gang’s graffiti and then challenge them to a stylish skating contest. Thankfully this isn’t one of those serious skating games where there’s a dedicated control for everything from pushing off to diving face-first into a concrete step. Again, it’s the Saturday morning cartoon version – you snap onto grind rails like they’re made of streaky bacon and your board is an unsupervised labrador, and then press buttons to do tricks. “Oh but don’t just randomly mash the trick buttons,” warns one of your NPC friends. And then the actual gameplay waits for her to leave and says “Yeah, just randomly mash the trick buttons, it’s fine.” Still, I was missing something, because when I challenged the Southside Crapouts or whatever the very first, easiest to beat gang in the game were called, they proceeded to stomp me in stylishness points no matter how many ollies I cracked off in a row.

I dropped the game for a few days after that, but something made me go back. Maybe it was every other game I played that week not quite scratching the right square inch of bollock, or maybe it was the innate charm of Bong Hit Cider Drunk’s retro graphics, tragically 90’s vibe and endless parade of gyrating bottoms. I returned to the battlefield and remembered that games about rewarding stylishness very rarely actually do. I mean, if an AI can’t even point out all the squares containing traffic lights why would you think it knows anything about style? No, the thing to do in this sort of game is figure out the one thing the game gives inordinately high points to and then do that over and over again. In the case of Bum Gush Diarrhoea Bucket, your secret weapon is the corner. Yes, those innocuous seeming points where two grind rails meet from different angles aren’t just jolly useful for pedestrian safety, they’re the secret path to victory. Every time you lean into a corner while rail grinding, you add one to your score multiplier, and that shit mounts up. You do have to lean into it, though. Circumnavigate an entire food court while standing upright, boo, amateur hour, sod off back to the swingset, Tommy Pickles.

Do exactly the same thing while leaning slightly to the right, yay, superstar, consider yourself served, rest of universe. Your other secret weapon is the manual button. See, your combo immediately ends if you touch the ground. Even if you so much as prod it with a toe in between using your skateboard to perform high-level particle physics experiments. But, if you hold down the right trigger as you land, you do a manual, and that does not break your combo. Then you can manual your way over flat ground until you find another grind rail with another seven or eight corners, or as I prefer to call then, angel clitorises. So again, do nine thousand tricks and touch the ground, that’s scrub shit, go get a job in the toilets so you can scrub shit some more. Do nine thousand tricks and touch the ground with your feet at a slight angle, all hail the new emperor of the cosmos. And once I knew all that, Bog Brush Cyber Twat was almost trivially easy. Although I was having fun. Sometimes it’s nice to play a game that doesn’t feel the need to point a nailgun at my gonads and command me to dance, and I could zone out and lose myself for hours just skating around the city, idly wondering if the game’s interface will bugger up if I get my combo over 999.

I do have black marks on my examination sheet. The combat is a complete wash, it’s like slapping balloons on a conveyer belt, so the police are more of an irritant than a challenge. The five enemy gangs you go up against are a bit underdeveloped as characters, and during the battle sequences I might as well have been pitting my skills against a Dance Dance Revolution machine hanging from a meathook. And the music ranges from decent to someone’s beating me to death with a malfunctioning drum machine, and I kept hearing the same songs over and over again, so either there aren’t enough tracks or that was when the concussion set in. But that’s all baby new potatoes compared to the butternut squash that is the fact that Plop Splutch Spider Haemhorrhoid is a fun game. I’ve always had a soft spot for pure traversal gameplay and this hits a good balance between skill and breezy fun. I admire how you don’t unlock abilities, they’re all available from the start and you just have to figure them out. And after I had, I could restart the game and when the jiggly lady in the tutorial went “See if you can get a combo of ten!” I could go “You mean like this?” And then still be comboing into the hundreds hours later long after her face had been fully melted off. This isn’t nostalgia; I never played Jet Set Radio and never owned a Dreamcast, because… well, one hardly needs to justify that statement, I’ve also never put my bellend in a hole punch.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Starfield. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), Diablo IV, and Street Fighter 6.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about BioShock’s incredible opening, and why Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romance just isn’t very interesting.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Related: Seeing Earth’s Fate in Starfield Broke My Heart

Zero Punctuation Transcript

Starfield, or to give it its full title, Starfield and Friends (he he he he) is the long-awaited new action-RPG by Bethesda, which by all accounts is what the lazy bastards have been making instead of the Elder Scrolls 6 or a non-shitty Fallout game, but who the hell needs those when you can have a game with a whole galaxy of explorable planets. Where there could be an Elder Scrolls planet and a Fallout planet and a Littlest Hobo planet and a planet made of meringue, why not. When space exploration’s on the cards, not even the sky’s the limit. So, how did Starfield turn out, now we’ve established that it oozes potential like a poorly made Big Mac does thousand island dressing? Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, huh, it’s, it’s, it’s really bloody boring, as it happens. I’ll say this, though, this is absolutely the game for you if you’re really, really into doors. If you’re openly door-sexual, and get illicit thrills from watching a staggering variety of sci-fi doors open in every imaginable direction with lots of little fiddly bits and lights and hissing noises then Starfield will get you more excited than the MST3K countdown sequence ever did.

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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Sea of Stars. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on STARFIELD, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, and Amnesia: The Bunker.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about why Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romance just isn’t very interesting, and not wanting to save the world anymore.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Related: Sea of Stars Has One of the Best Video Game Moments of 2023

Zero Punctuation Transcript

In these troubled times, with neofascism nipping at our toes and climate disaster ruffling our hair like an obnoxious relative at a wedding, little wonder that we turn so often to nostalgia. It’s like a big warm comforting family dog sitting in the corner continually eating its own sick. How fitting that so soon after the community requested I review Chrono Trigger that an indie game very heavily inspired by it should come out. Sea of Stars, developed by Sabotage, the lads who made The Messenger, a retro-inspired action platformer that I thought was rather good, if a touch overwritten. Probably for the best that they moved to classic JRPGs, I suppose. Ain’t no one complaining when those are a touch overwritten. If anything people complain if you get to the end and God doesn’t mouth off for three hundred lines about the futility of our struggle and how He certainly isn’t about to have his papal orbs handed to him by the power of friendship. Also, the Escapist put out a documentary on Sea of Stars’ development recently so I’d figured I’d better give it a look and make sure it’s not a load of old dog sick. Or we’re all going to have half-digested Bonio on our faces.

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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews En Garde! and Blasphemous 2.

If you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on SEA OF STARS, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, Amnesia: The Bunker, and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about why Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romance just isn’t very interesting, and not wanting to save the world anymore.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Zero Punctuation Transcript

Do you ever feel the need to go to video games as a whole and say “Hey, are you doing alright?” Was I the only one who watched the announcement trailer for Mortal Kombat 1 and all the people getting hyperrealistically spread across the landscape like jam on toast and said “Do you need to talk to someone, Mortal Kombat 1? Is everything okay at home?” “SHUT UP. DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND I HAVE TO BE REAL. MORE REALISTIC GORE ALWAYS ALWAYS OR THEY WON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!” I’d say it’s the way you just split that dude in half from the nostrils down that makes you hard to take seriously. Oh, video games, what happened to that cheeky fun loving scoundrel who would let me while away the hours playing We Love Katamari without letting me know I forgot to free up space on the memory card? “FUN? WHO’S GOT TIME FOR FUN WITH ALL THE COSMETICS YOU NEED TO GRIND FOR?”

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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Baldur’s Gate 3, brought to you by Humble Bundle.

If you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, Amnesia: The Bunker, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about not wanting to save the world anymore and “BioWare” face in Final Fantasy XVI.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Related: Withers Is the True Hero of Baldur’s Gate 3

Zero Punctuation Transcript

So I hear the new Baldurs Gate is making bank like a knicker elastic shop next door to a French burlesque club – I don’t know, it made sense in my head – and a lot of people are going “Oh! Finally gamers send a clear message that they want good single player games with strong design and narrative, not just fancy graphics and live service twattery.” To which I reply, “You mean besides the previous twelve times they sent that message?” I mean, Christ, at this point it feels like saying “Prisoners in basements send clear message that they’d rather not be sodomized with a six inch wooden dowel.” But is Baldurs Gate 3 actually good or just riding the wave of the metaphorical demand for dowel removal and soothing bum cream? I’d never been one for this sort of top down clicky RPG before, but a couple of significant factors drew me to this one: editor Nick strongly suggested I give it a look, saying it’s doing some full on immersive sim stuff that sets it apart. Ooh, you mean you can break doors AND stack crates? And the second factor was that since the last D&D-based video game I have become a D&D player IRL, tune into Adventure is Nigh every other Saturday only on the Escapist plug plug, so when I started the game and the screen became deluged with icons like it was being subjected to the wrath of Windows 95, I understood what some of them meant.

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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood.

If you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on BALDUR’S GATE 3, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, Amnesia: The Bunker, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about not wanting to save the world anymore and “BioWare” face in Final Fantasy XVI.

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Zero Punctuation Transcript

Viewfinder really impressed me when I saw it at GDC, and at the time my back really hurt from running between hotel rooms like an amnesiac wifeswapper and I was in the early stages of complementary muesli bar overdose, so it was starting from the back foot. It was a sort of Superliminal situation where the first time you see the game do its thing you react like a very credulous person watching David Blaine standing on one foot. “OH MY GOD HOW DID YOU DO THAT. HOW DID YOU BE SLIGHTLY OFF BALANCE FOR THREE SECONDS.” In Viewfinder’s case, you pick up a 2D picture, you hold it in front of your face, and then the world becomes the picture. It’s hard to do it justice in text, but trust me, it’s like being smacked across the eyes with a very interesting book. And then you get a polaroid camera and take your own pictures with which to solve lateral thinking puzzles – oh, forget those stupid graphics card demos showing off how accurately they can depict some blank-eyed hoojimatwat’s split ends and acne scarring, this is what makes ME say “Now that’s impressive tech.” But my fear was that, again like a Superliminal situation, that once we had the full game in our hands we’d play through it once and then go “Right, what’s for tea?” and never think about it again once we’re eating our evening sausage roll.

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