“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – #029
9 min read
A weekly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
Happy Friday! Another week has come and gone and we’re back with another fine edition of Whatcha Playin’, Pixels! Let’s see what our writers were up to this week:
It’s not exactly Spooky Season yet, but the horror games on PS5 have been releasing quickly and with little warning. This week I took a look at Madison, another first-person scare-em-up where you wander around a house solving puzzles. It’s certainly one that put me on edge from the very start: the opening acting like a very intense escape-room puzzle before giving me access to a polaroid camera. Here’s where I expected it to go all Project Zero, but nope: no ghost-busting here! As you investigate the house, you’ll find yourself in total darkness and need to use the camera flash to see where you are going. Which is the perfect opportunity for creepy figures to leap out accompanied by a loud blast of unnerving sound. It’s a lot like that scene in the first Saw movie, but happening over and over.
As for the puzzles, there are some really taxing ones! One, in particular, had me searching the whole house for cuckoo clocks, and I admit that took me longer to figure out than it really should have! There’s only a very limited inventory space as well, so for a few puzzles, it involved trekking all the way back to the room with a Resident Evil-style storage box to rearrange the inventory, dodging extra scares along the way. The game knew exactly what it was doing, but it seemed a little unfair to make me put down a key so I could pick up a concrete block, for instance.
And the scares? Well, as somebody who regularly nopes-out of first-person horror, I must be getting braver. There was nothing here that I hadn’t seen in other games of its type, just the occasional scripted jumpscare as a ghost shambles about a bit and then disappears. In fact, although Madison builds the tension super-effectively, looking back on the game, a lot of it was spent approaching an open door, only for it to close before my very eyes, making me have to wrangle with the slightly awkward control to open it again. If anything, I felt the spooks were just trying to mildly inconvenience rather than scare me. A couple of sections involved finding objects in mazes before boss-style monsters attacked.. but they barely made their presence known and I had the puzzles solved before they had a chance to do anything.
So.. Madison is not exactly the new PT or Visage, but for the puzzles alone I would say it’s certainly worthy of your time if you want a decent PS5 scary game and can stand the bit of backtracking. It only took me a couple of evenings to beat, but I felt compelled to play through to the – rather surprising – ending!
It’s been a few weeks since I contributed to this fun little column, but between the county fair and prepping for harvest, gaming time has eluded me. Fortunately for me, my kids play more than enough games to allow me to live vicariously through them, as parents often do. All three of my children, even the toddler, are currently squeezing as much game time into their days as possible, because when the bells of school toll, all fun will end.
My oldest son has finished Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and has started on Assassin’s Creed Origins. He, like his father, is a history buff and enjoys historical fiction that could or could not have happened. The Assassin’s Creed franchise has slowly become his favorite set of games because of this, and he has resolved to finish the entire catalog of games by the end of 2023. Good luck, buddy.
My daughter, who is my middle child, is an avid fan of the YouTube sensation, Dream SMP. These Minecraft “let’s players” created an entire mythos of characters within their Minecraft server, and they have a huge following of young fans. With the recent tragic death of Technoblade, a streamer who was a part of that group, my daughter has dove further and further into the world of Minecraft, hoping to one day join up with her heroes in the Dream SMP server.
Finally, my two-year-old son, who effectively uses Xbox controllers as hammers and projectiles, has figured out how a touch screen on a cell phone works. With this, I downloaded a game called Hit the Fly on my Android, and, oh boy, he found his newest obsession. Practically designed for cats and other mid to low-intelligence mammals, Hit the Fly has the object of the game within its title. My son, even at the age of two, knows the objective of the game is to hit the fly, and he does that with great vigor. If he keeps getting the high score, he will graduate to Fruit Ninja by next week!
This past week my friends and I decided to become owners of a restaurant (in a video game)! Plate Up! has been a staple of our nights this week and it’s been a really fun time. If you’ve played Overcooked you’ll understand the general playstyle. It’s an arcade cooking game with a top-down perspective and simple controls. It has a bit of a rogue-lite style to it which means that if you fail or abandon your restaurant, it’s gone forever and you have to start at square one. You can play with up to four other players and each take on a specific role. The chef and sous chef cook the food, you pick which base meal you want to make and can add things later on like side dishes, desserts, and extra toppings. You can also be the waiter who takes orders from customers and delivers food. Last but not least, you can choose the busboy role. They clean dishes and mop up the dining room. You all must work together efficiently so that you don’t lose which causes the restaurant to close down. The gameplay is very simple but the challenge adds up as you go along. The game will throw things at you like more food options, increased customers mid-day, and staying open after hours when people are waiting. All this combines into a very fun overcooked inspired experience!
On stream I completed two games this past week, one of them is Halo: Reach. Halo was one of the first mature-rated games I bought with my own money and I’ve been a fan of the series ever since. Halo: Reach was a game that I remember playing a lot back in the day and it was fun to go back and check out the campaign again. It’s quite good, with each level having a different gimmick or gameplay segment to keep it feeling fresh all the way through. You’ll pilot machine-gun-wielding Falcons, go into space and fly a spaceship, drive around a tank, and the list goes on. I found it all very enjoyable and would suggest replaying it yourself.
The second game I finished on stream was Star Fox: Assault on the GameCube. This game is a mixed bag in some areas, specifically when you are boots on the ground. The controls are awkward and the level design is a bit boring. Where the game shines is the space combat. Flying around with Fox in an Arwing is very satisfying and feels great. I wish there were more levels that utilized this, in my opinion, they focused too heavily on land combat. If you have a GameCube and some extra cash it’s not a bad playthrough, I still enjoyed the story and space missions enough to recommend trying it out. The developers were possibly pushed to make the 3rd person multiplayer mode an essential part of the game which hurt it in the long run. Still, I had a fun nostalgia trip and am glad I played through it again. (Editor’s Note: “Oooh! I love this game! Totally agree with you on the space combat: there’s not enough of it!”)
Not a lot of time to play games this week due to the semester starting (the students are moving in even as I type this!). However, I have been playing two games in what little spare time I have. First, I continue my slog through Live A Live. I’ll say, the western chapter is a huge improvement over Edo. I’ll share more as I discover it. 
Finally, I am playing (for the eventual review!) Video Game Fables; a newer indie game. I’m really digging it! It’s a satirical homage to old-school JRPGs with dialogue that rivals the wit of Paper Mario. Look forward to my full critique as soon as I finish it!
This week was a pretty slow one. It’s something which I’m thankful for since the previous week was filled with birthday parties to attend. I didn’t stream on Sunday due to the aforementioned birthday parties, but I did stream on Tuesday and Thursday. Wind Waker is both comforting and familiar and I’m loving it! Playing it feels like coming back to your hometown after being away for so long. It’s bringing back some fond memories of my brother and me playing it together all those years ago.
Off stream, I’ve busied myself with more Neo: The World Ends With You. Speaking of bringing back memories, this one and the first title bring me back to the days when I used to go to conventions back in my 20s. Man, I miss cons haha. Back on topic here, I’m hunting down more of those elusive Secret Reports, which are arguably a lot easier to pick up than in The World Ends With You. Whereas the first game had you perform a series of tasks to get each report, the second title’s requirements are much more lenient, which I appreciate.
It’s been one of those weeks for many of us here at The Pixels with a lot of busy-ness and not as much play-ness. I kept my hands working on a lot of side projects this week, though I did manage to squeeze in a bit more time in Live A Live and its Edo period. I got my eldest kiddo started on Super Mario RPG, which I first played when I was his age! It’s like reliving a memory…
I am also back on Total War: Warhammer II, which I got myself re-addicted to thanks to the last episode of MAGE CAST podcast. I’m confederating high elven Ulthuan with Alarielle the Ever-Queen and stalking the sands with High Queen Khalida of the Tomb Kings. I’ve got a thing for the villainesses of this game, so Isabella von Carstein is next on my campaign backlog.
(click for full view)
Speaking of villainesses! I just finished this most evil collage of video game villainesses, which was intense but a lot of fun to put together, kinda hitting that trance mode while working on it. It’s a part of a GIVEAWAY I’m running this weekend, courtesy of Teepublic! Check it out:
🔥Teepublic is sponsoring a GIVEAWAY of my art🔥
2 winners: any design (including the villainesses collage & more!) printed on your choice of shirts, mugs, posters, books, etc.
To win:
❤️RT
❤️Follow me + @TeePublic
❤️Tag some friendsWinners drawn on Monday!
(SALE link below) pic.twitter.com/0nK820SIsG— the Well-Red Mage (@theWellRedMage) August 12, 2022
Good luck and thanks for supporting indie artists and indie writers!
So, what were you playing this week?
Ryan Cheddi – our friendly, neighbourhood caffeine addict – is a man of many talents: an engineer, a gaming historian, a fiction writer and a streamer. He is also a self-avowed Sonic the Hedgehog fan. You can check out his cool beans at his site – Games with Coffee – or find him on Twitter as @GameswCoffee, and Instagram as @games_with_coffee. He streams on Twitch, also as GamesWithCoffee.
