Category: Nintendo News

A little less conversation, a little more action, please. Lyrics don’t get more popular than that, and yet it’s this Elvis Presley quote that Subsurface Circular flies directly in the face of. From the mind behind Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell’s latest outing is all about the spoken interaction, and it makes for one very special experience.

The entirety of Subsurface Circular takes place inside a single train carriage, with you assuming the role of a robot, who is referred to as a ‘Tek’. Every android is programmed to perform a specific role, and after a fellow passenger tells you about his missing friend, it’s a good job you’ve been wired up as a detective.

This only scratches the surface, however, as you begin to uncover a conspiracy of multiple disappearances. To say much more would step into spoiler territory, but it’s fair to say that things escalate magnificently. You’ll take great care in your dealings with every Tek you come across, as you question them on anything they’ve seen that could be deemed suspicious, or influence them into revealing a secret. Twists and turns also keep you on your toes, with genuine surprises turning proceedings on its head. This all culminates in a final chapter that has to be some of the best storytelling we’ve come across. 

Presented with a choice, you’ll have to deal with the consequences no matter which side you pick, as what started out as a simple inquiry turns into a situation you feel is way over your head. This is an incredible plot that grows and grows from the word go, with curveballs thrown into the mix that you would never have guessed to be tackled by a seemingly simple game such as this, as well as a conclusion that had us both mesmerised and feeling a little bit too guilty because of our actions.

Carrying out your detective work is done by interviewing the various Teks that join you in the train carriage. The gameplay loop is based around the conversations you have, as you select who to talk to, choose between dialogue options and then react to what they say. It’s simple, but it works flawlessly.

Some depth to the interactions can be found in the fact that due to you wanting to extract information out of someone, they’re going to want something in return. This sets up the conversational puzzles, where giving correct responses or gaining a piece of information from someone and then incorporating it into a separate discussion is the key to victory. The driving force behind these puzzles are the focus points, words or phrases that can be used as a topic of conversation to turn the chatter in your favour. You’ll gather so much more knowledge from using these after all other avenues have been exhausted, if a Tek is refusing to budge on some important intelligence, a focus point is most likely going to get what you want.

Thanks to never getting too complex, this conversational system is so much fun to engage with. Watching a focus point change the course of the communication is a joy as you uncover something meaningful, while the general chit chatter of the Teks is funny and engaging. With simple side objectives that seamlessly intertwine with the main plot, Subsurface Circular’s systems allow you to interact with and help the many just as much as the few.

The other robots you meet all come with their own personalities and traits, and they’re a bit of an odd bunch to say the least. One Tek will have you playing the role of a priest as they confess their sins, while another will only talk to you if you can convince their lover to leave the train. They’re all endearing in their own ways, and it’s entertaining to speculate just who you’ll meet next.

Subsurface Circular looks and runs like a dream in both docked and handheld mode, as we didn’t experience a single glitch or graphical hick-up during our time with the game. We were too busy being distracted by the thumping electronic soundtrack produced by Dan Le Sac, which goes a long way in setting the mysterious but exciting tone that pulsates throughout the entire experience. This is one you’ll want to have playing on your chosen music device long after you’re done with the title.

A single playthrough can be completed in two hours, and with the conversational system sticking to a linear path rather than allowing you to branch out, there isn’t much reason to return a second time for the core plot. However, completing the game unlocks developer commentary, which actually slots itself into the experience seamlessly in the form of an ever-present BithellBot on the train with you. You can talk to it just like any other Tek, asking it questions about the game’s development. Delving into the title’s code, design, art, and mechanics, you can get into the nitty-gritty of how it all came together.

Conclusion

Subsurface Circular is a landmark moment in interactive storytelling. The elegance of its escalation is simply unmatched, as it tells a story that makes you feel like you’re in completely over your head, and yet still perfectly believable. The characters you meet along the way all feel unique with their own personality, which makes interacting with them a test of wit and cunning as you use the conversational mechanics to their full effect. There’s nothing quite else quite like Subsurface Circular, and when that uniqueness is combined with the phenomenal narrative at hand, you have all the ingredients for a simply unforgettable and very special journey aboard the subway.

Fear Effect: Sedna is the answer to a question only a select few dedicated gamers of a certain age were asking. It’s the Kickstarter-funded sequel to two cult action games and an unreleased third game from the PS1 era. If that sounds like a slightly odd list of ingredients for a modern Switch game, then you’re onto something. Fear Effect: Sedna is, indeed, a strange mish-mash. Sushee’s game is part puzzler, part squad-strategy game, part twin-stick shooter, and part stealth game. The main problem here is that the execution isn’t particularly great with any of those components.

Main characters Hana and Rain are partners in life and in work, serving as globe-trotting mercenaries on a futuristic Earth. When they’re offered a large amount of money for what appears to be a routine art heist they stumble into old teammates Glas and Deke, as well as a mystery concerning Inuit mythology and gene splicing.

The theme of the game’s story is an apt one, as the game is something of a Frankenstein’s monster. This is ostensibly a twin-stick action game, with the core requirement that you move around confined environments exchanging fire with gangs of armed thugs. However, the game has the zoomed-out isometric perspective, cover mechanics and team mate-switching ability of a squad-based strategy game. You can even pause the action with ‘-‘ and issue commands to each member before resuming. It’s also possible to observe the movement patterns and vision cones of your unaware enemies, sneak up on them and take them down with a single hit.

Whichever approach you choose, Fear Effect: Sedna doesn’t quite hit the target. Its action lacks the visceral feedback and precise aiming of, say, Enter The Gungeon. Lock-on is automatic, so you simply press ZR to fire your pop-gun until the enemy falls over – or until you do.  In the case of the latter, control switches to one of your team mates, where you continue to grind down those enemy energy bars. Once your last foe keels over, your downed squad member miraculously revives. It all feels a bit flat, even with the provision of a slow-motion dodge-roll.

The strategy side of the game is even less well formed. Pausing and issuing commands might appear like a good idea – particularly with each character having access to a couple of unique special weapons – right up until the first time the action resumes and you run into a hail of bullets. Often this is when the rest of the enemy squad reveals itself from the game’s stifling fog-of-war effect and wrecks your best-laid plans. Stealth is the safest, easiest, and arguably most satisfying way to progress in the game’s early stages, but it’s pretty basic and eventually loses its efficacy when the enemy numbers ramp up. Your own AI members tend to give the game away too, requiring you to issue a command for them to hold back.

Fear Effect: Sedna also stirs in a healthy smattering of puzzles from time to time. There’s nothing massively clever about any of them, but they’re nicely varied. You might find yourself observing the environment for clues to a pass code, shifting around haulage containers to form a pathway, partaking in a hacking mini-game, or shifting bookcases to block security cameras.

There’s also a heavy focus on narrative and the interaction of your teammates, though this too is a bit of a mixed bag. On the positive side, the game’s cel-shaded visual style gives everything a fresh 3D comic book style that really stands it apart from anything else on Switch.

On the less positive side, the dialogue is clunky and the voice acting stilted. Both issues could well be down to a less than perfect English translation (developer Sushee is French), with some expressions coming across as a little stiff or forced. Either way, it tends to spoil the flow of what promises to be an entertaining sci-fi romp.

In all honesty, the game needed more time in development. In addition to its half-baked strategy component – which almost feels like a vestigial limb from an earlier take on the game – there are general issues with signposting. It can be tricky figuring out where you’re meant to be going or what you’re supposed to be doing, while the game’s combat systems aren’t adequately explained. 

It all combines to produce a curious hybrid of a game. Fear Effect: Sedna’s varied components ensure that it’s surprisingly difficult to grow bored of, even though each constituent part is rather lacking in isolation. There’s enough positive here for us to look forward to the developer’s forthcoming remake, Fear Effect Reinvented, at least. Here’s hoping that game has a slightly more cohesive set of ingredients and spends a little longer in the oven.

Conclusion

Fear Effect: Sedna is a flawed amalgam of disparate parts. It fails to wholly convince as an action, strategy or stealth game, and the delivery of its story is a little stilted. However, the sheer variety of its mix and its fresh visual style may prove enough to keep you playing through.

Following the release of the shmup Aero Fighters, several members of developer Video Systems left and formed a new company: Psikyo. Aero Fighters 2 still turned out rather well without them, but Psikyo would release some high-quality titles itself. Zerodiv has already brought some of those to Switch, but now it’s bringing Psikyo’s first game to the eShop: Samurai Aces (aka Sengoku Ace).

Like many of the games Psikyo produced, Samurai Aces is a shmup where you pick one craft from a selection of choices and then go through several levels shooting down anything in sight. It was also designed with a vertically orientated monitor in mind and should you be playing undocked this experience can be recreated by playing in TATE mode; optional scanlines can also be added to the image. Play on the big screen and the default display makes more sense than flipping your TV on its side, but naturally this restricts the action to the middle third of the screen.

There’s a similar art style to Psikyo’s later released (but already on Switch) Gunbird and Strikers 1945 games, with the same powerup and bomb icons and similar bullets, explosions and colour choices. The locations are different however, with a variety of rocks, greenery, water and villages flown over. There’s a wide range of enemies encountered with different aircraft types, insect-like attackers, tanks and turrets. In other instances statues rise from the water to attack and large armoured warriors appear on screen to unleash bullets or shuriken in your direction. Similar to the Strikers titles these enemies are more technologically advanced than the setting would normally allow, but aesthetically fit right in.

There’s also variety in the six aircraft availabl, with regular designs included alongside bird-like craft and a wooden X-Wing. Each has different attacks that become more apparent when you collect weapon upgrades as well as having different bomb and charged attacks. As is common with Psikyo shmups there are two buttons for shooting your primary weapon, where one is held down for the charged attack and the other is held for rapid fire.

Set across seven levels, gameplay is enjoyable as you move about the screen dealing with the various enemy attacks and movements. You need to keep alert as buildings can slide aside to reveal more dangers and other enemies can emerge from clouds. Bullets come from multiple directions and can crisscross to make safe passage tricky. The pace of the game alters too, sometimes enabling you to make slight adjustments to gently slide out of the way of a stream of bullets, where as other times enemies streak towards you requiring quick reflexes to if not shoot them down, then to at least get out of the way. 

Boss battles put you up against large mechanical creatures or constructions and require you to blast pieces off before their ultimate destruction. They can be tense affairs when low on lives and/or bomb attacks, with the screen getting dense with bullets as you try desperately to navigate a safe pathway whilst also trying to get in attacks of your own.

If struggling with the game, there are seven difficulty settings available (default: five) and your three lives and two continues can be increased to nine and unlimited respectively. Whilst this can certainly aid in clearing the game it doesn’t completely remove the challenge as after the first few levels, failure sends you back to the beginning of the stage. After clearing the game (apart from on the easier difficulties) a much tougher second loop begins, although (unlike some Psikyo games) you can still use continues.

The game is fun to replay, with each craft having a different pilot that results in different between-stage dialogue and endings. Two-player mode is also available if you’d like to have a friend join you to help vanquish the enemy forces, whilst also adding an element of competition as you look to see who has the highest score at the end of it. Hi score chasing can add a lot of replayability to a shmup in single player mode, but here the scoring is flawed due to there being no score reset upon continue. Struggle on a stage and replay again and again and you will score higher than a player who has breezed straight through.

Conclusion

Psikyo’s Samurai Aces plays a lot like its Gunbird and Strikers titles. As they were both great shmups, however, seven more levels in that style is no bad thing. Dealing with attacks and utilising your own offensive options leads to varied and enjoyable gameplay and the changing pace of combat keep you on your toes as you anticipate the next attack. With no credit/life limited mode included, the hi score leaderboard is flawed unless you and those using your Switch agree on what settings to use. It is a well put together shmup however, so whether playing alone or with a friend Samurai Aces is fun to replay whenever you choice to boot it up.

As shock Switch releases go, Outlast: Bundle Of Terror didn’t so much sneak up on us as jump out at us with a knife. Not that we’re complaining about this surprise attack. When it comes to horror games, Switch owners have had to take the rough (Hollow) with the smooth (Resident Evil Revelations).  

Thankfully, Outlast joins Capcom’s re-release in the ‘frighteningly good’ category. This is a terrifyingly compelling and suspenseful first-person adventure with admirable production values, and it also serves as a consummate example of how to port a game from more powerful hardware onto Nintendo’s wonder-hybrid. Playing the part of journalist Miles Upshur, it falls to you to investigate the shady goings on at Mount Massive Asylum, run by the suitably named Murkoff Corporation. You’ve been tipped off by a whistleblower (whom you learn more about in the included DLC episode) that some distinctly weird experiments are being carried out on inmates.

The difference between Outlast and most other survival horror games is that you’re completely defenceless against the crazed inmates and pumped up abominations that lurk within the asylum walls. It kind of resembles the old ‘Nemesis’ system from many of the Resident Evil games, whereby an implacable foe stalks you across a whole game. Here, though, even an ordinary stooge can end you in a couple of successive strikes, with no hope of retaliation. Your only options are to run away or hide. Fortunately, you do have a few evasive manoeuvres at your disposal. 

Break the line of sight with your pursuer and you can hide in a dark corner. Light – or the lack thereof – plays an important role in Outlast. Alternatively, you could hide in a locker or under a bed, though if an opponent suspects you’re in the room they’ll start searching all the other hiding spots around you. It’s a moment of obvious artifice, but you’ll still find that it gets your pulse racing.

Outlast’s most interesting mechanic, and Upshur’s only tool, is an old-fashioned camcorder. From your first-person view you can film events with a press of R, and use its night vision mode to see in the dark with a click of the right stick. There’s a tension-raising catch with that latter function in the form of limited battery life. The game is at its most tense in the moments where you’re wholly reliant on the grainy image of your viewfinder to see what’s ahead, and the battery indicator starts to blink red.

Fortunately, there are plenty of spare batteries littered around Outlast’s grim environments, which serve as the key incentive to stray off the beaten track. Goodness knows there’s no other sane reason to delve into a murky bathroom, padded cell or underground pipe – not with the gory sights that await you. This game isn’t for the squeamish.

However, this stripped back approach means that Outlast is a pretty shallow game from a purely mechanical perspective. At times it even feels a little like a walking simulator, as you trot from one horrific scenario to the next, picking up fragments of the story from files and your own recordings. To its credit, Outlast thoroughly sells the concept through the rich atmosphere it creates. Technically, this is a highly impressive effort from developer Red Barrels.

It may have been cut down from the earlier PC and PS4 versions, but we were still mightily impressed by the crisp graphics, dramatic lighting effects, and grisly textures of this Switch port. It runs at a slightly curious but still solid 1008p when docked, and a full 720p in handheld mode, while both modes run at a fluid (for this kind of game) 30fps. 

The audio design is arguably even more impressive, with a reactive score that ramps up the tension whenever a threat appears. Meanwhile, hearing Miles hyperventilating at a particularly grisly discovery really serves to set your own pulse racing, even when the game’s numerous jump scares start to wear a little thin.

And make no mistake, this is far from a perfect survival horror experience. The run-and-hide gameplay not only gets a little repetitive, it can occasionally verge on the farcical during protracted chase sequences. When the game’s mask occasionally slips, such as when you’re running between two hiding positions in a bid to shake off your pursuers, it can feel like a particularly grisly episode of Benny Hill.

Still, this is a richly enjoyable package overall, particularly at this cut-down eShop price and with the enjoyable Whistleblower episode adding a couple of hours of extra gameplay. Just take our advice and play the game in brief sessions – for the sake of your heart, if nothing else.

Conclusion

Outlast is a generous package of finely crafted survival horror thrills. It looks and sounds great on Nintendo Switch, and while its brand of hide-and-seek gameplay occasionally falters, it’ll still keep you playing right until the grisly end.