“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – November 2023
13 min read
A monthly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
November may not have been as exciting as October was, but it doesn’t mean we were sitting on our laurels! It’s almost that time of the year when the mad rush to shopping centres both on and offline begins, and if you’re looking for gift ideas, The Pixels have two years worth of guides to help! We also have covered some interesting titles this month with SteamWorld Build, Raiden III x Mikado Maniax, and Siralim Ultimate, or CRYMACHINA, Endless Dungeon, and Worldless. And Red revisited Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for the SNES in anticipation of the remake being released on the Nintendo Switch.
But you’re really here to see what games we as writers have been playing this month. So, let’s dive in!
Right now with business and busyness ramping up toward the end of the year, I’m all about shorter, bite-sized gaming experiences. I got sucked into Atomicrops again thanks to the most recent DLC, Deerly Beloved. I also picked up Super Mario Wonder, the perfect 4-player family co-op experience. Black Friday saw me spending too much on games I can’t afford in terms of time, but that’s the holidays, innit?
I surprised myself in November by knocking out three SNES RPGs on stream as part of my journey through every Western-released Super Nintendo role-playing game!
Brandish was the beast of the bunch, a top-down perspective dungeon crawler ARPG with a ton of levels, ferocious enemies, dangerous puzzles, and a final boss that is literally just a room of lasers and fireballs. Definitely one of the hardest SNES RPGs.
Arcana was a much shorter experience, a card-themed first-person dungeon crawler turn-based JRPG by Hal Labs, who you may know for Kirby and Smash. I wasn’t aware of this game until recently, overshadowed by Hal’s other triumph on the system, EarthBound. It’s a breezy but grindy game with a steep random encounter rate, iffy translation, and simplistic dungeons.
Lagoon was even shorter! I trounced this action JRPG in just a few streams, thanks in no small part to that freaking butter knife, the world’s tiniest sword. The final boss encounter is a series of back to back fights that had me almost screaming, but I’m glad it’s behind me. Onto Robotrek!
November is always a busy month for me for things that aren’t games. Thanksgiving and NaNoWriMo tend to suck away most of my free time. Still, I managed a few hours of free time to get some games in. Mostly small things, a few hidden object games (I’m weak for the cat-themed ones littering Steam.) However, I did complete Cocoon, the newest game from the game designer behind Limbo, which is a strange and beautiful puzzle game. Short, easy to pick up, and not too complicated that I had to go to a guide for solutions. My perfect kind of puzzle game. I’ve also played some Potion Permit, review to come soon!
I’ve found myself with a little more time to hit the games than usual, seeing as my wife and children have made a move to Oregon while I stay here in Illinois. This was actually a planned part of our move from Illinois to Oregon seeing as I have to finish some education for my clinical chaplaincy and therapist position and also have to tie up some loose ends with our home. Adulting is hard, but during the evening, after everything is said and done, I have time for some heavy gaming sessions.
I have continued to play Starfield well after beating the main story of the game and starting an NG+. Despite knowing how everything will unfold, I’m still drawn to the near-infinite possibilities of RNG and the content that this game can produce. I won’t spoil the game’s outcome for those who haven’t completed it yet but just know that a complete run through the universe of Starfield is not the end, not by a long shot.
Having pried myself away from the depths of space, I also began playing the third installment of one of my favorite sleeper FPS franchises, Shadow Warrior. Much like its predecessors, Shadow Warrior 3 follows the adventures of Lo Wang, the snarky, foul-mouthed ninja who could probably give Deadpool a run for his money when it comes to one-liners. Unlike the previous titles, this game is linear and plays with more of a level-to-level format than “select your mission” style. This format allows for Shadow Warrior 3 to present a solid narrative that will stay its course as long as the player progresses through the game. This was the main level/progression format of the games that were made back in the ’80s and ’90s, so I’m totally loving it!
Finally, I must confess that I have become entrenched in yet another mobile game. This one, however, is different because it was lovingly crafted with old RTS fans, like myself, in mind. The game is Warcraft Rumble, and Blizzard released it at the beginning of this month with plenty of scrutiny from the MMO crowd. When people were able to cast away their bias and play the game, they discovered a delightful little Tower Defense-like RTS that pays homage to both what Warcraft was and what it currently is. Using narrative content from the early days of the MMO, the action is carried out by figurines that are placed on a board that automatically walks to the target. If you’re curious, there’s no shame in checking out, it is free and the microtransaction adds are very minimal.
In this digital age we live in, info is absolutely everywhere. You can extensively read up on the most obscure, underrated titles as if they were classics. When movies come out, you pretty much have to see them in the first 24 hrs, before the internet fills up with spoilers. In an attempt to recapture the surprise-factor, back from a time where all we had to go on when buying/renting games was the cover art, I occasionally make a “mystery purchase” at my local game store. The rule is simple: Spend no more than $5-10 on a game I’ve absolutely never heard of before. Not even the slightest inkling. I’ve no idea of the genre, gameplay, graphics, or how good/bad the game is. Yea, it does result in the occasional stinker. But every now and then, I discover a novel gem that recaptures the magic.
This month, that game was Fortress for the GBA. Glancing at the cover art, my best guess was some form of tower defense, which would make sense, seeing how popular they were in the early 2000’s. I was half-right. While protecting one’s castle is a key element, you build up said castle in the same way you would stacks of Tetris bricks. Random shapes fall from the sky, and how sturdy your castle grows all comes down to how well you fit them together. All the while, you’ll be fending off attacks from the adjacent enemy castle, who’s racing to build up their fortifications in the same way. The game is best played in short bursts, but grows quite addictive once you get the hang of it. There’s a tricky balance between building up offensive versus defensive resources, as your little helpers will be scrambling to repair damaged sections of your castle as you add new pieces. The variety of settings – Caveman, Medieval, Pirate, and Futuristic – play in a similar fashion, but add aesthetic variety. If a fusion of puzzle, tower defense, and strategy game sounds appealing, I recommend you give Fortress a try.
Hoo boy, November always goes by in such a blur for me! I’m not sure I remember everything I played this month, but there were a couple highlights worth mentioning!
I’ve spoken of my love of Lord of the Rings Online before, and it got an expansion release at the beginning of the month, Corsairs of Umbar. Naturally, I was eager to dive in, and was largely pleased with what it added to the game. I had my issues here and there – it took a bit too long to get to the most-hyped new areas, for instance, and one in particular was very tedious to navigate in a way I thought the game had largely moved past – but on the whole, I had a good time experiencing some fresh content in the game. Perhaps as might be expected for a game based on Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, what keeps me coming back is the stories it tells and the feel of the aesthetic and atmosphere, and this expansion did not disappoint on either point.
Super Mario RPG had its remake release as well, and having never played the original (yes yes I know, I grew up a PC kid, I didn’t even HAVE a console until the GBA/GameCube era!), I was very much eager to see what I’d been missing. Once again, I was not disappointed! It was shorter than I expected in practice, but it was charming and fun the whole way through – to the point where I blasted through practically the first half of the game in a single session on release weekend!! Very glad I finally had the chance to play this classic gem in some form, I’d been wanting to for quite some time indeed.
In-between, though, I played a little game that I somehow can’t get off my mind. That game is Chants of Sennaar, best described as a point-and-click adventure with a language translation mechanic. Based on the story of the Tower of Babel, the player explores five levels of a tower, each populated by a people that speaks a different language, presented symbolically. Many puzzles involve figuring out what everyone’s saying by discerning which symbols mean what, and in some cases, act as translator between two people who don’t speak each other’s language. I only needed two or three sessions to get through it, but it was a game that really resonated with me, not just for the ways it pleased my linguistics brain (though it did that on several levels!), but for the way it wove a tale. There’ve been several releases this year that I’ve played and enjoyed, but Sennaar might be the one that’s made the biggest impression on me yet – I know I’ll be thinking about it for some time to come.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet in preparation for a local tournament where one bad play knocked me out. It’s ok, I’m still new to competitive play. I also just got Lethal Company and will be enjoying that with some friends on Friday (12/1), as well as chugging through the Amid Evil critique that should be coming sometime this December.
Well between holidays and some issues in life, I haven’t gotten to play a lot of any one game, but I’ve done my best to make time to play a sampling of a lot of different games with friends over the month to try to plan out my December gaming adventures. The focus has been on rouge-likes lately, with Roboquest getting its 1.0 release and friends wanting to play Inkbound, Risk of Rain Returns, and Lethal Company. But I also made time to start a bit of Grim Dawn’s 1.2 update as well. All of these have been absolute blasts, so here’s hoping homeownership doesn’t kick my butt in December as well!
As I mentioned in October, I’ve dedicated these last few months of the year towards writing. November’s goal of 50K words will not be met, but I’ve still made a considerable dent, so I’m not too disappointed. Despite the writing, I’m still knocking games off of the ol’ backlog.
First off, I’ve finished the The Lost Horizon content for Sonic Frontiers. There is actually a lot to cover – so much that I might want to write an additional critique as an addendum to my original writeup. But to sum things up: Sonic uses his cyber corruption to unlock an even more powerful form of Super Sonic. While Sonic focuses on unlocking this power, Tails, Amy and Knuckles assist with locating Chaos Emeralds while also slowing down The End’s release from Cyber Space. The DLC acts as a game in of itself, with over 15 hours of additional content for players to mine through. The difficulty is ramped up and includes tougher versions of enemies, challenging missions in remixed Cyber Space levels and even scaling a set of enormous towers to undergo Trials with little to no chance to recover progress if you fall mid-climb. And the Trials themselves are a mission. Each of them set heavy restrictions on Sonic, forcing me to think outside of the box to clear within the time limit. The final Trial was an exercise in Ring management, as it featured all three Titan fights back to back with base leveled Sonic, 400 rings and no chance to earn additional ones. And don’t get me started on the final boss and how to beat it… Despite questionable design choices from Sonic Team, I was extremely satisfied with how the final content played out.
Moving on, I began playing Sonic Superstars and wow, this was a fun one! It plays beautifully, with punchy and colourful graphics, excellent momentum and speed-based physics and intricate level designs that encourages experimentation to find the most optimal routes from start to finish. The Emerald power gimmick is a welcome addition to the series, offering unique ways to conquer levels and uncover secrets. I’ve finished the main story with all Emeralds (naturally) and have moved on to what’s essentially a hard mode starring a brand new character that becomes playable after beating the game.
Finally, I’ve knocked out Jak 3 from my backlog after it sat on my shelf for more than a decade. I gotta say, what a thrilling end to the Jak and Daxter trilogy. It’s easily my favourite of the three Jak games. It wasn’t as hard as Jak 2 was, but it still provided enough of a challenge that I didn’t get bored of it. I’m now moving on to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker as part of the Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection for the PS3.
I’ve once again made the error of starting too many games. In this busy season of releases, there have been a lot of games I wanted to play across all systems such as Spider-Man 2 on the PS5, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty on the Xbox, and Super Mario Wonder on the Switch. On the PC side I’ve also been playing through SteamWorld Build, feel free to check out my review for my full thoughts on this fun town-builder!
Luckily, there was at least one game I actually finished this past month: Sea of Stars! There’s also a review by a fellow writer you can read up on to get more details, but I personally loved the experience. It’s the type of game that I gave a personal 9 out of 10 after beating it the first time, then I kept playing the end-game content. After going through and finding all the treasures, finishing all sidequests, beating the tough optional bosses, and getting the true ending, it raised my thoughts on the overall experience to now feel like it’s a 10 out of 10 for me! After seeing several Reddit conversations on the game I now feel like I want to go back and play through The Messenger once again since it takes place in the same world so I can see where there are connections in the story and locations.
So here we are, end of 2023 and, after weeks of putting off my second playthrough because I’m a wimp, I’ve returned to the recent Resident Evil 4 remake. I’m currently helping Leon navigate Ramon Salazar’s castle, popping 9mm rounds into suits of armour infested with parasites and bugs the size of large dogs, as one typically does. This is still an absolute masterpiece of a remake and could be one the finest games Capcom has ever made (which is saying something, they’ve made so many genre-defining games over the years!
I’m also continuing my ongoing quest to find games that I can play with my dad, the latest addition to this being the multiplayer behemoth that is World of Tanks. While I have no time for freemium nonsense, loot crates and all of that nonsense, I am finding the core gameplay loop to be quite fun. It’s all about choosing your favourite historical armoured war machine, shooting other people’s favourite historical war machines (with a surprising amount of tactics involved) and then spending your XP and points on upgrades, commanders, paint jobs and, yes, little flags to go on top of them. It probably helps that I’m a big old tank nerd, but I would recommend giving this a go!
And so ends November. What have you been playing recently? What did you finish? And what’s next on your backlog? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading, 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.
