The best Nintendo Switch games from PAX West 2019 – Feature

The craziest thing about this game is not even that they decided to make it a procedure generated auto runner. Which is really crazy – and we had to check this to make sure – did Super Meat Boy come out almost nine years ago. Team Meat is now slightly taller than its original two creators, even though it remains only Tommy Refenes. Asked about jet lag, Refenes quickly said that "life" was the main culprit, with the continuation only benefiting from intermittent development, at best, until 2017.

But we are here to tell you that we played Super Meat Boy Forever, and that skepticism is cursed, automatic mechanics brilliantly. Visually, the game looks pretty much the same, but something about the accelerated pace of the game took us in a way that even the original does not have. After breaking a level in the original, we felt compelled to take a vacation, but Forever's rhythm made us feel like we could keep playing against all the players.

After dominating the first world, Refenes installs me in an advanced world that includes all sorts of delicate elements, such as appearing and disappearing blocks, lasers, frustrating sticky bombs, etc. We could hardly drop it! The little guy is back and stops asking questions; Meat Boy seems to be in good hands with the sequel.

Windjammers 2 – DotEmu / Publication date: beginning of 2020

I wrote this To move out was the most fun game I played at PAX but Windjammers 2 was definitely (and surprisingly) a close second. For those of us who do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the obscure NEO-GEO games of the mid-90s, Windjammers was basically pong mixed with ultimate frisbee, a top-down arcade game in which two people try to throw a frisbee in a net without letting it fly away. The first person with 12 points wins the game and the first with two games wins the game. To get the job done, you get an arsenal of ridiculous power moves and a small cast of eccentric and sporty characters.

Fifteen years later, Windjammers 2 comes out of the wild. Against all logic, the game ends a period of prolonged development whose publisher, DotEmu, insisted on the need to refine every detail that made the original such a cult. Each card is a little different, and each character among the eight that we could draw and draw by hand sits on a spectrum between powerful and fast. Go with the super fast, spirited girl, or the big macho man hard? For us, we chose someone near the middle before our match with a member of the DotEmu team who described himself as "not very good". False modesty, but after learning the ropes, we managed to slam our frisbee into the net just a bit more than him to claim our victory.

After him, another member of the team, the artist this time, is introduced again. After a close match, we left victorious. Naturally, this degenerated into a developer of the team that said "the best Windjammers 2 player in the world". We were confident that we could win with all the skills we had accumulated over the last half hour, especially after choosing the 100% powerful character. He is so slow. Of course, we were wrong and finally our reign was over after he showed us how deep the mechanics of this Frisbee throwing game were.

Crown or not, we can not wait to get back to this extremely addictive game when it comes out later this year. We are still thinking about how we could have beaten him.

Luigi's Mansion 3 – Nintendo / Release Date: October 31, 2019

In camera, Nintendo unveiled a new section of Luigi's Mansion 3 For reporters, Nintendo's next adventure game featuring their green plumber adventurer, Luigi.

If this is your first-ever visit to a Nintendo enthusiast website, the catch of this game, which publishes this Halloween in a strategic way, is to explore a haunted mansion that aspires ghosts, ghost hunters-style. In this third game of the series, you will shake ghosts while climbing in a comic hotel of height, with radically different stages superimposed. The soil we played at PAX was overgrown with weeds and exotic flowers. A huge bean stalk sprouted magically between a spiral staircase, and Luigi left.

What Nintendo wanted to show that day was not just the breathtaking physics of a million pieces of grass all individually responding to the draw, but also the cooperative two-player mode. Players can participate at any time and play the role of "Goo-igi", a sticky and gummy version of the main character's beard that can do things like walking on spikes and falling through pipes. Goo-igi is normally restricted behind a button press, but you can also put it back via another Joy-Con or another controller.

Luigi's Mansion 3 is a methodical puzzle that encourages players to take on micro-challenges, piece by piece, and an extra person has not really harmed that mood. In fact, even though it took us a pinch of the lonely atmosphere to have another Luigi on screen, a double team in one room allowed us to halve what we had to do with our own controller while freeing us to play a little more liberally. In one room, Goo-igi (under the control of our Nintendo representative) helped us navigate the room as we aspired ghosts. In another, he fell under the screen to deal with some of the puzzle while we stayed up to collect all the money. Luigi's Mansion is a great single-player game, and it's not a lousy multiplayer game either.

In addition, shouting into the room with the circular saw with a circular saw, which allowed us to cut everything from the room extremely precisely, to any degree of our choice. Yes, Luigi's Mansion 3 could actually use the most "useless" gameplay based on physics since Half Life 2. (This is a sentence we would never have thought of writing.)

Blasphemous – Team 17 / Release date: sold out

You play The Penitent One, the only survivor of the "Silent Sorrow" massacre. By exploring the nightmarish world of Cvstodia and unveiling its infernal secrets, only you can free it from a twisted fate and reach the origin of your torment.

What it does not tell you is that even if it is insane, it also offers a superb pixel style that brings us back to the Super Nintendo era and Genesis in a perfect tribute. And speaking of Super Ghouls & # 39; n Ghosts, let it be known that this is extremely embarrassing to try to do a professional demonstration of a title when you continue to die again and again before the publisher. Are not we supposed to be good at video games? Wow, is blasphemous tough. You will come to savor every control point you can explore and trigger.

This game is a retro player's dream that is proud of its nightmares. With Blasphemous's complex enemies, custom weapon loading, unlockable skill trees, and a non-linear maze for a map, fans of Symphony of the night formula would be crazy to let this one pass. Just make sure you're not frightening and you have a lot of time left.

Since we played PAX, the game has been released. You can read our review of Blasphemous here.

World of horror – Ysbryd Games / Release date: 2019

This one surprised us, and not only for jump fears. This point-and-click adventure game is inspired by the famous horror artist Junji Ito and HP Lovecraft, and if that is not enough to get you through the door, the fact that it is described like "a 1-bit cosmic horror made by a guy from MS Paint" should do the trick.

World of horror is absolutely striking, from the multiple color palettes you can choose from, to elaborate 2D animations, disconcerting and offbeat music that feels as if you are going through a 56k modem. It plays from the point of view of using an old Mac IIe or other obsolete material, and every hand-drawn Microsoft Paint animation is so complex that we had to ask the main (and only) developer Pawel " Panstasz ". Kozminski if he got scared when he saw people click on the screens very quickly. (He said that he was used to it.)

The way the game works is that you fall into a mystery horror novel, one of at least twelve offered by the game. The game is a bit RPG roguelite, and lets you navigate between locals and interact with people and creatures with whom you probably will not get along for long. During our game, we were dropped into a haunted mansion, we took a bath, found strangers in the lobby, discovered a corpse, then discovered that the body was gone, and without spoiling us too much. we were delivered to a troubling battle. meet to finish.

The setting up of this game is exciting. The menu system and the controls are … a bit clumsy. Or maybe we did not understand them, but at least they were far from intuitive. We also broke our story in about 10 to 15 minutes. As a result, your overall mileage may vary when World of Horror is released for the first time in a larger version this year. Nevertheless, designate this one because you have had to see this game in action.

N1RV Ann-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action – Sukeban Games / Release Date: 2020

N1RV Ann-A: Cyberpunk bartender's action is the next sequel to VA-11 HALL-A, a text-based bartender game in which you play as a generous-sized purple bartender but who contracts and entertains all those who wander through the doors of your bar; the player learns to mix drinks with the exact specifications in the process. It is a meditation on the lonely life of bar stools, the playable part only exists on the alcohol mixing screen, the wealth of experience residing in the stories of the thirsty characters carousel.

Just like in the original title, the writing of N1RV Ann-A is alluring and luscious, at the height of their stunning anime movie avatars. Unlike the first game, however, beverage manufacturing is much more open and allows you to serve just about anything you want to the customer. Damascus suggested that you could serve, for example, vinegar and mayonnaise, provided that you wanted to resist the reaction of giving such a thing to someone. The hope is that with more agency, players will carve the script even more than in the original.

A curious choice is to remove the suite from the dive bar in the future setting, this time to "an artificial island in the Caribbean that is experiencing a great economic boom and breakthroughs with technological advances in environmental climate control. ". Futurism Crosses the Heart of this series, although the exchange of the slimy feel of a tropical paradise is a curious choice, was clearly highlighted during the brief meeting we had with the rich client of the demo. And as for the first game, the poignant character runs through the writing, but hardly the work of art.

We will keep the conversation with Damascus confidential, although we share it, as fans of the series, we are publicly waiting for the release of this game for 2020.

Kunai – TurtleBlaze / Release date: to be determined

The developers of kunai hate the beginning of Metroid Games.

In other words, they hate the part where you lose all your abilities before going on an adventure. Kunai is a "reverse Metroid", in the sense that, even if your skills are constantly growing, it's a game that consists in mastering your path through twisted 2D maps.

The world of Kunai is a world in which humans are gone and robots roam the Earth. You play Tabby, a kind of robot tablet with arms and legs that breaks free from its limits and tries to find its reason for being in artificial life. If the game was not so violent, it would be pretty cute. Tabby displays his emotions in emotional faces on his "face" and each slice into metallized enemies produces a satisfactory flight of nuts and bolts. It's a clever game that uses a soft color palette for a fantastic effect.

Even smoother than the visuals are the controls. This is especially true when you gain shooting ability, and even more so when you get the second take-on ability, which you shoot with the left and right triggers, respectively. Tabby becomes like a little Spider-Man ninja a few minutes after the start of the game, paving the way for speeding paradise. Of course, the levels are a little cavernous, but the action is frenetic and the map becomes more and more winding as we play. We are still in the early stages of development, but do not forget Kunai when its release date will be known, especially if you are a fan of action games.

Haven – The Game Bakers / Release Date: 2020

The very first thing that struck us about Haven is the awesome the dubbing is. To start the game, you play as a detached camera floating in a small spaceship, from room to room, clicking on the two characters to explore their breakfast, toiletries or evening routines. We had no problem believing that these two were in love and we definitely targeted them from the moment they went to the screen. Haven is a little sexy with her marketing materials. You are not surprised to lose yourself in a dating scene … before the power goes out and you do not leave the spaceship.

The outside world is essentially the Haven map, and that's when controlling the characters themselves. He plays a bit like trek in the sense that we had to drag our two flying lovers into veins of blue energy that populated the ground in order to supply our ship, thus teaching us how to maneuver the outside world. Although when we say that it's like Journey, we mean that the game tries to unfold as transparently as this classic, although the camera and maneuvers are still a little rough at the moment.

The fighting was also mentioned late in the demo, where they presented us with two separate menus, each with four actions. Perfectly time with each other to defeat the bad guys encountered. We must admit that we were very bad at that, and barely survived. Even if we were a little frustrated with the main combat mechanic, we could imagine how much fun it would be to develop his skills with another person using a second controller. (Game Bakers, can we suggest a color code for the menu?)

Even again, we really love what Haven will do. A narrative RPG in conjunction with impertinent characters and out loud would be something that would draw a lot of love from your two Joy-Cons. Really, it's a couple game for couples. We can not wait to see how that goes when it comes out in 2020.