It kind of felt like they didn’t realize their full vision with this, didn’t it? For instance, the robot never does anything. Again, I enjoyed my time with it, but it felt like they could have done a little more.
My son only knows two things about games so far.
“Mario”.
And.
“The Gunk”.
Usually I play Mario with him, and he sometimes comes upstairs and sees me playing The Gunk and sits on my lap for a few minutes before I quit out when I reach the next area.
Yesterday instead of Mario he kept insisting on “The Gunk”. So I fired up the Xbox and used the cloud gaming feature to play this on the Xbox One on the big TV.
It’s amazing how much more kid friendly this game is compared to Mario. In Mario Odyssey he’s constantly just falling to his death, losing 10 coins, respawning, falling to his death literally 2 seconds later, respawning, falling to his death. Whenever he takes over the controls, I lose a LOT of coins.
In the Gunk, he falls off the ledge, and it just respawns him back on the ledge. Heehee.
Put them together and you get Super Mario Sunshine.
Where is Tom, this game has default Chick difficulty!
I reached “The Garden”. A really great example of environmental and audio story-telling and atmosphere.
spoilers
It’s the section where the two main characters are mad at each other, so there’s suddenly no “voice on the phone” for comfort, while for the first time the protagonist goes into a new type of environment that’s really creepy and different. I just had this intense feeling of unease through a series of rooms, where they played this low rumbling string instrument soundtrack in the background. Very subtle. From a reductionist perspective, absolutely nothing actually happened in this sequence. I didn’t solve any puzzles, I didn’t shoot anything, I didn’t suck up any gunk, I didn’t talk to anyone, all I did was move the thumbstick forward from room to the next. And yet, it was great.
I checked my play time and I’m at about 6.5 hours now, and it feels very close to the end. The puzzles are much harder when my son is driving the controls. He doesn’t know about moving the camera but he insists on being in control, so it’s maddening to keep repeating “look around the room”, when I know there’s a puzzle. When you can’t look around the room, the puzzles are impossible in this game! Impossible!
No swapping on Xbox!
The whole point of swapping on the Switch is so that he gets used to saying yes to things with the bottom face button and backing out of things (or saying no) using the right face button. Xbox and Playstation already do that, so Switch is the only one where I remap.
Yes, it’s my second time in “The Garden”. That’s where the puzzles are hard.
I finished the Gunk tonight! Yay!
Sadly, it looks like I still had 2 things unscanned. And I needed one more metal to get the final upgrade, so I couldn’t get that.
Excellent game though. A light story with nice characters, great vacuum cleaner gameplay, nice challenging puzzles, especially at the end. And they didn’t overstay their welcome, a month and a half, and boom, I’m already finished. That’s how games should be.