I finished this game a couple weeks ago, but only now circling back to review it following a rough stretch at work plus a bout of the flu. Fortunately, not quite all of my fluids were expelled from my body this time around. Hekki grace. Praise to the Allmother.

(I spent weeks confusing my partner by dropping phrases from this game into casual conversation. "What do you want for dinner?", she asked, wearing a blue cardigan. "Whatever you wish, sister blue." "What?" "Hair to hair. Sphere to square.")

This game marked a first for me: the first game I picked up and played because of another user's Backloggd review. I'd heard of it, certainly, but it was nowhere near the top of my list. You should go read Lucca202's review as I am jealous of their talent as a writer and critic, and their review is pitch perfect.

My extra few cents beyond what they wrote:

--While this is by no means the word or vision of one individual, as far as I can tell, it feels like the work of a film auteur going deep into their bag of tricks. Yes, there are sections where you're running around a static location chatting with NPCs, but they're interstitial. Otherwise, the game is constantly shifting how you're experiencing the narrative: through memories, dreams, first-person, 3rd person, with GIANT CINEMATIC TEXT, with music and visuals and no words. The perfect game to show someone who wants to understand how a Narrative Designer is absolutely not the same thing as "just" a writer.

--To segue off of that, the story is incredible. It weaves together themes and stories at every level of human existence: the individual, the family, the society, the world, and does so without getting muddled or cloying. One of my particular points of appreciation is that they manage to avoid being either too obvious or too ambiguous. By the game, far from everything is spelled out to you, but neither is it so deliberately mystifying that I felt frustrated with lack of closure. A hard (almost impossible) line to walk.

--A couple very mild criticisms, or at least mild when stacked up against the game's other achievements. First, the Orchard--the main hub area for much of the game--is confusing as all hell. I appreciate the diagetic, hand-drawn map, but neither it nor the waypoint system were as helpful as they needed to be. Even by the end of the game 10+ hours in I couldn't navigate to certain spots without a couple wrong turns.

--Second, while the graphics are functional and the design of characters and spaces are well-done within their limitations, I wish they had made some attempt to animate mouths/faces when people were talking. I figure they decided that whatever they could manage looked worse than not doing it at all, but in a game where most of the characters are clones, it certainly added a certain amount of confusion.

--All in all, though: this is a masterpiece and more people should play it. Yes, I'm talking to you.

The Gardens Between is a short, sweet time manipulation puzzler. It follows two tween neighbors as they explore surreal island dreamscapes representing memories of their shared exploits. Each island is a self-contained puzzle in which one tween is tasked with getting a lit lantern to the summit while the other flips switches that alter the landscape.

Neither the themes nor the mechanics are groundbreaking, as it does not even strive to be as complex as something like Braid, its obvious mechanical influence. But there's a great deal of craft and care here. I admired the way the camera swoops around the island as you fast forward or rewind; the evocative sound design; the detailed animations of the characters as they progress through and react to the world around them; and the way each island is organized like a self-contained puzzle box. The puzzles were rarely difficult, but even when I got them quickly, I was tickled by the cleverness of how all the pieces fit together. It's a very satisfying package that looked and sounded great on my OLED Switch.

This might sound more condescending than I intend it, but at 2-3 hours around 20 levels, it felt like a bunch of talented folks producing something that would stand out in their portfolio in hopes of landing something (or somewhere) bigger. It could well be that was really the case: the game was developed and published under the auspices of the Australian mobile developer the Voxel Agents, who haven't released a single game since. But it looks like other notable studios saw talent here too, as members of the team have gone on to big roles at places like Remedy, Night School Studios (Oxenfree, Afterparty), and League of Geeks (RIP).

"Arco!"
"Polo!"

I've been waiting since the moment I started playing this game to write that. (For the record: "arco" is Spanish for "bow", which you can kinda-sorta figure out from context within the game).

I bought Arco because the developer begged me to. Not me personally, but the games lead artist, Franek Nowotniak, made a splash on Twitter with this quote:

"We made something new. Our game has been well rated by critics and players but it sold badly. We'd get more sales copying an already well-established genre. Still, you have to make new stuff. As soon as you stop making new things the work stops being creative. Either way, my next project will [definitely] be more focused on 'Does this sell' [because] making under minimum wage is embarrassing. Even if it means you get to make games."

Would they have been more financially successful copying someone else? I don't know! I feel like there's a lot of chaff out there on the market that sells poorly despite trying to ride the coattails of an established genre or recent bestseller. Giant corporations set hundreds of millions of dollars on fire chasing trends.

The video game market is tough; people inclined to play strange new indie games that can’t be described with a handful of buzzwords have backlogs of checks own profile 1400+ games to get through. I wish developers making weird new games could reliably make money. But I also tend to wait for them to go on sale and only pre-order games that are the latest entry in properties that are decades-old.

So anyway, Arco. It's a tale of anti-colonial revenge set in an alternate universe Mesoamerica with a fantasy spin. Its indigenous protagonists all separately come to seek revenge against the “Newcomers”, the game's code word for your colonial antagonists. You wander around, witness your world’s despoliation at the hands of these monsters, make some dialogue choices, and fight lots and lots and lots of battles.

The promotional materials for the game make the case that the combat is something entirely novel, but I’d quibble with that, as it’s one of a decently long line of games that split the difference between turn- and grid-based tactics games and more real-time combat in open space. It’s true that games like Grandia and Valkyria Chronicles are different, but all of them are working within the same space.

Your characters have magia, which function as ability points that let you attack and use skills. This regenerates a bit when a character moves and even more if they stand still for a turn. You give all your characters (though there’s too often only one in your party) instructions while time is frozen, then you and your enemies—whose actions you know in advance—act simultaneously.

The issue is that each of these actions take different amounts of time. It takes trial and error to figure out whether your attack will land before or after your opponent’s, or whether you’re able to dodge the hail of bullets headed toward you or you’re about to eat it. And since your actions take different amounts of time, each round can take variable amounts of time.

This is one example of how the combat systems feel built to discourage aggressiveness, especially when you’re a party of one, which is a big chunk of the game. You can reliably dodge bullets and other projectiles while regaining magia, so running in circles and attacking as the enemy reloads or after you stun them is the way to go, which isn’t satisfying or strategic.

This is compounded by the fact that the game “generously” allows you to restart each battle or even withdraw and re-equip. In theory, this would seem like a good thing, but in practice it felt like it gave the developers a pass to avoid fine-tuning the elements of the combat that cause you to need to restart in the first place.

The game also contains a “guilt” system, where certain actions make it more or less likely that ghosts spawn during combat. These ghosts move toward you even while you’re selecting actions. This has rich potential as a way to marry thematic elements with gameplay, but is undercooked. I was never clear what actions increased or decreased my guilt—disturbing baby mice seemed to like it did, but murdering scores of people seemed like it didn’t—and avoiding the ghosts is a huge pain with a controller.

This problem extends to the writing. I’m glad the developers centered indigeneity and colonialism in their game, but the anachronistic dialogue replete with emojis and anachronisms was a huge miss. Thanks to the gorgeous pixel vistas and stirring music (I'm a sucker for original music with vocals in games), I felt some degree of immersion within the world, but never in the characters or story.

It’s great Arco’s developers tried something new and I wish it had paid off for them. I hope they continue to bring their creativity to whatever projects they release next. But trying out something new is a risk—both for the developer and for the player spending their cash to try it out.