“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – June 2023
14 min read
A monthly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
June has been quite the eventful one! From the reveals in Summer Games Fest, to the highly anticipated release of Final Fantasy XVI, there was plenty of upcoming content to look forward to! And with great content comes a great responsibility to cover it in some way, shape or form! (Psst, we’re always looking for new writers to join!)
With June in the rear-view mirror, let’s take a look at what our amazing roster of writers have been up to this month.
Six fresh games under the belt this month, oddly the same as May (I ended up finishing Monster Sanctuary just before the end of the month.) With another Steam Next Fest right in the middle, I also once again loaded myself up with demos. Top of the month handily goes to Planet of Lana, which I reviewed for this very site. What an excellent game. I also knocked We Love Katamari Reroll off the to play list. I can’t say no to Katamari games. Top of the demos goes to the goofy stealth game World’s Worst Handyman, where you earn money by doing household work to save an animal shelter. Except you do the work very badly and there’s generally someone there who doesn’t want you to be. You will get your butt kicked by a granny who’s just trying to stream in peace. It was wholly unexpected and a lot of fun.
Just a couple to mention this month, but they have definitely earned themselves spots on my ‘potential game of the year’ list.
First up: Planet of Lana on Xbox Series X. As a sucker for 2D cinematic platformers, this one seems to occupy that sweet spot halfway between Limbo and Heart of Darkness, except in the most vibrantly coloured and beautiful locales I’ve seen in a while. There’s also a touch of the forgotten Xbox Live Arcade version of War of the Worlds in there as you duck and dodge around creepy robots and try not to get abducted! Well worth checking out!
Also.. kind of an obvious one at the moment but ever since the demo dropped for Final Fantasy XVI I’ve been hooked! The fact that demo progress carried over into the main game was a god-send, and I’m finding myself booting up the PS5 even if just for a few minutes’ worth of EXP grinding or a short side-quest. I haven’t been this hooked by a mainline FF title since XII and that is the biggest compliment I can give to it.
So, I’m not going to lie, and it really wouldn’t help me to do so anyway, but the only game that I have played for the entire month of June is Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I can not honestly think of another game that has captured my mind, body, and soul like this one has. Not even Breath of the Wild reeled me in like this game. It is nearly perfect in my book, showcasing the best and most ingenuitive ideas that Nintendo can muster. Of course, my favorite part of the game is the building system, which turns an open-world adventure game into a sandbox warzone in which Link is more of a mad machinist warlord than a kid who was raised by fairies. I hope to see some future DLC that will expand upon that concept.
Whenever I am lacking in variety with my monthly gaming repertoire, I have the tendency to add what my children are playing. In the case of my 15 year old son, he is playing a game that confuses me, almost to the point of anger. It’s called Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, or TABS for short, and it makes no sense. It’s basically a sandbox creation engine that is marketed as a “game,” and allows you to create everything from killer clowns to deadly ninjas and have them attack each other on a giant battle field. The name suggests it’s “totally accurate,” but that’s a joke. Really, this game is a big joke. These figures that you pit against each other in mortal combat have the most ridiculous ragdoll physics, and that makes for some pretty interesting battles. It’s pretty much a glorified meme generator like Goat Simulator, but at least my son is having fun playing it.
My daughter is in Oregon right now visiting my wife’s side of the family. When she has time between seeing cousins and jumping in swimming pools, she plays Stardew Valley… on her phone. I was surprised to see that the mobile version of the game is actually quite polished, and it works well with the hardware. Most cellphone games catch flack for being substandard gaming experience that are plagued with adds. I think that is the difference between phone games that are paid for and those that are not, and at just ten bucks, you get a mobile experience that is well worth the price.
Do you enjoy Vampire Survivors? Well, I may have found a game that is better!? At least in my opinion. Brotato takes the simplistic game design of Vampire Survivors and builds on it with more weapons, abilities, and challenge. You’ll fight in a much smaller and finite area while wielding a multitude of weapons that you choose at random. Each potato has their own set of beginning stats which vary wildly from simple damage boosts to completely different styles of gameplay such as exploding when enemies hit you. Instead of hunting various monsters, you’ll be slaying hundreds of aliens and picking up their resources to level up and purchase items. I’ve been slamming this game non-stop since it came out (or at least since its 1.0 release) and I gotta say it’s very satisfying. I’ve only gotten to the final wave (20) three times now but I’m determined to get all the characters and beat the game’s hardest difficulty. Wish me luck!
Throughout the month of June and continuing into July I’ve been streaming games I received from PlayStation+ dating back to the PlayStation 3 era. The list of games is quite long but we’ve been making a solid dent since the beginning of June. To help with the process, I’ve made a spinning wheel to randomly choose what I play next. From AAA to indie, we’ve played a good mix of genres and quality of games. One of those games was CounterSpy which is a stealth action game that has a lot of missed potential. If it had come out during the Rogue-lite craze I think it would have done a lot better. It is a 2D stealth-action game that deals heavily in upgrading equipment while gathering intelligence from two warring nations. Having a rogue-lite element may have given this game the boost it desperately needs.
Finally for this month I would like to touch on a game called The Lord of the Rings; Gollum, you may have heard of it. People are saying this is the new ‘worst game of the year’ but my story is a bit different. No wait, it’s exactly that! Putting aside the egregious deluxe edition offerings, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum fails to deliver in the most basic areas of game design while also stumbling over The Lord of the Rings franchise. It’s a stealth game at its core but offers hours and hours of chores for you to do while captured in Mordor. The game is also very glitchy, has an odd graphic style, and adds nothing to the story of Gollum. When I saw the credits roll I wished that I had played anything else instead. The only positive I have for this game is that the graphics look better halfway through the game due to a change of scenery. Unfortunately though, this is one that will be remembered for it’s horrible launch and I don’t see how the developers can improve on this without a major overhaul. Gollum will not be the next No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk 2077.
Hoo boy, it’s been a full month for gaming on my end. I think I polished off a grand total of seven games in June, when all was said and done! Granted, three of those were smaller indie titles that didn’t take much more than an evening or two. Most notable of these was Lil Gator Game, which I’d been intending to play for months and finally took the chance to do so. Boy was I glad I did! It’s adorable, it’s charming, and it had me grinning and giggling like a little kid the whole time – which, judging by its tone and aesthetic, was exactly where it wanted me to be.
Loom also didn’t take long, though I do wish it had been longer. It’s an intriguing little point-and-click adventure game with no inventory – instead, puzzles are solved through the casting of four-note musical spells, with more notes (and thus more spells) becoming available as the game progresses. It was an intriguing setting that felt like it flew by way too fast, but I was glad for the experience – it’s a unique little gem!
I managed to finish a couple entries in the Trails series as well, taking a couple evenings to wrap up a languishing Trails of Cold Steel II playthrough I’d set aside a few months ago, then heading over to give Trails to Azure a go. JRPGs and I tend to go together like oil and water, in that they’re often games I want to like but bounce off of for whatever reason. Trails, though, continues to prove the reliable exception for me!
The June game that had the most impact was what I spent the first few days of the month on, though. In a similar vein to last month, I decided to give one of my Big Three games a replay, and it was one I approached with some trepidation. Though it’s one I profess as one of my all-time favorites, I’ve only played a complete run of Planescape: Torment once, and that was more than a dozen years ago. I was a tad worried whether it would live up to my memory of it. Suffice it to say that I had nothing to be concerned about. Though it hits differently in my mid-thirties than it did in my early twenties, I was still blown away by the story it told, and the ways the medium only accented its message. I’m still thinking about it weeks later – there’s considerably more words to be said on it than is fitting for a “Whatcha Playin’” column, that’s for sure! So I’ll simply say it cemented its place as a personal favorite all the stronger, and much like it did back when, really got me thinking about what games and the stories they tell are capable of.
There’ll be more from me on that subject in due time, I promise you that.
-Linguistic Dragon
This month I’ve been playing more Resident Evil 4, and am amazed at how good it is, considering I hated the original so much (but more on that to come!)
I’ve also revisited 2 older games recently too. 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot still holds up and delivers a good adventure, despite some irritating quick time event sections, and the more modern take on Lara Croft makes for a character you can really root for when the chips are down!
The other game is one of my all time favourites, Metro 2033, which I went back to for the eighth or ninth playthrough! That immersive, bleak Russian horror shooter will always be close to my heart, janky bits and all! Even after all these years, Artyom and the other Metro survivors are a joy to knock about with!
I can hardly believe it’s the end of June already. It seems that the days are flying by in an instant. By the time this posts, Kid Espresso will have finished his first year of school and that was a heck of a ride. There’s a reason I’m starting off with this, as we’ve started a new gaming tradition between myself, Mrs. Coffee and the oldest son.
Every Friday night for the past month, Kid Espresso would stay up a bit later than he usually would and he’d play a round of Mario Party 2 with Mom n’ Dad. This leads to the next thing – I now own a Nintendo 64! Well, technically I got it back at the end of May, but I forgot to mention it. This N64 actually belongs to Mrs. Coffee (which she bequeathed to me with her blessing), and it came with Super Mario 64 and Mario Party 2. Despite her not being a gamer of any sort, Mrs. Coffee is a unforgiving BEAST to play against in Mario Party 2. I just played a round against her the other night and she SMOKED me. I’ve never been so humbled, haha.
Speaking of console acquisitions, I also received my Sega Genesis 2 Mini! The squarish and flat form of the console brings me back to the days I first played Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my cousin’s Genesis nearly 30 years ago. The Genesis 2 Mini is packed with a ton of games from the 16-bit console and its CD add-on. On top of that, there are plenty of secrets abound on the system, including hidden options for games, enhanced ports of classics, like Space Harrier II, and even never-before-released titles. I’ve had a lot of fun messing around with it so far. Little Macchiato (A.K.A. Little Mac, my youngest daughter) also has been enjoying watching Daddy Coffee play it. So much so, that she’s trying to om-nom-nom the six-button controller wire. Combined with the Sega Genesis Mini console, I now have access to over 100 SEGA titles, which is nuts when you think about it.
Beyond that, I’m still knee-deep in Tears of the Kingdom. I could technically finish the game off now, but, I’m having way too much fun exploring the lands above and below Hyrule. Right now, I’m collecting armour and materials for upgrades, along with completing sidequests and shrines. So, yeah, typical post-BOTW Zelda stuff, haha.
Now, after all the discourse about Final Fantasy XVI and watching the vid produced by ProfNoctis himself, I really want to get a PS5 to at least try it out. Alas, I don’t have a third console acquisition to announce. However, my Magic Question Block has told me that attaining a PS5 may be in the cards for the future, so, fingers crossed that I get one for my birthday in July!
It’s been such a busy month! Not only did Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom finally release but also Final Fantasy XVI, two huge games that are both from two of my favorite franchises! I’m 90 hours into Tears and feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Final Fantasy, however, I’ve only put an hour into because I’ve also been playing the Resident Evil 4 Remake that I bought last month. I told myself I should try to at least finish it before jumping into FFXVI instead of juggling 3 big games. I thought I would be finished with it weeks ago but it’s a much bigger game than I anticipated, plus the fact that Zelda has sucked so many hours out of me. Capcom certainly beefed up the game considerably, but I’m not complaining because I’m having a blast with it. I now only have 2 more chapters to go and then I’ll be able to focus on the other two gigantic games.
I did beat one game recently, one that has been on my list of games I’ve wanted to finish for decades! When I was very young I used to own an NES, one of my earliest memories is of me playing Kiwi Kraze (Better known as The New Zealand Story outside of the U.S.) when I was about 4 or 5 years old. It’s a colorful side-scrolling platformer where you play as a kiwi that can shoot arrows. The game starts out pretty simple but eventually gets very challenging, especially with some precision platforming. I played it for years but never was able to finish it. I do remember reaching the final boss once or twice though, but by then I had very few lives left to retry. So recently I took it upon myself to finish the game on stream! I used save states for convenience, mostly at the beginning of each level but I finally did it. It felt great finally beating a game that I’ve had fond memories of for over 30 years!
I remember when summertime meant an idyllic and leisure era to soak up the sun and the games at my own pace. Now as an adult and a games writer, June means an absolutely insane barrage of new announcements, new releases, new demos, and an ever expanding backlog! Since I went swimming with my iPhone (long story, don’t ask), I haven’t been streaming Brain Lord and Inindo: Way of the Ninja, so that gave me an opportunity to catch up on a few new experiences.
I couldn’t resist picking up We Love Katamari Re-Roll + Royal Reverie, an awkward title but a cluttered one befitting this amazing nonsensical game. I don’t remember the original all that well, but this remake didn’t cease to amaze. Really enjoying it as a foil for the longer RPG experiences I was drowning in. Please look forward to a review soon.
Speaking of drowning, I submerged myself in Rogue Legacy 2 recently! It’s nice to get that addiction going for a rogueish game now and then, innit? I enjoyed the first game tremendously and was delighted to find that not a whole lot had been changed for the sequel. Gunslingers are the best.
Finally, I’ll be covering Front Mission 1st: Remake! I’m excited to get started on that game later today. Should whet my appetite for Armored Core later this year.
That’s all for this month. What have you been playing recently? Finish any games in June? Let us know and we’ll see you all again next month!
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.
