Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
ShackNews 
TheGamer 
Playstation Lifestyle Latest Reviews
Here at Shacknews, I’ve talked about Atelier a few times. GUST and Koei Tecmo’s item synthesis and cozy vibes RPG series has had a lot of ups and downs over the past few decades. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you might have a skewed perspective, as the most recent outing was a big down, and the one before was, excuse the cliche, a mixed bag. But dial the clock back just a bit more, and you have the current peak of Atelier mountain: Ryza. This time, we get to talk about Ryza.
Unless you’re sitting in the ludicrously small mid-section of a Venn Diagram comparing “Katamari Damacy fans” and “Apple Arcade subscribers,” you’ve probably been waiting upwards of 14 years for a new Katamari game that isn’t a remaster or wacky spin-off. And Touch my Katamari was a PS Vita game, so that’s a barely deeper pool than the Apple one. Once Upon a Katamari is the series’ return to the “main” platforms, bringing a brand-new Katamari experience to consoles and PC. The goal here seems to be packing as much gosh-darned Katamari gameplay into this bad boy as possible, for better or worse. Yeah!
I find myself growing more and more tired of roguelikes lately, and I don’t really believe in “guilty pleasure” as a concept. But if you held a gun to my head and asked me to identify my gaming guilty pleasure, I’d probably answer with Vampire Survivors. It’s the perfect combination of brainless dopamine and just-thoughtful-enough build-crafting that makes me dump hours into something that isn’t up to my usual tastes. So when another game in the “like Vampire Survivors, but with Specific Twist” pool floats up to the surface, I’ll gladly check it out.
Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Laylee was one of many Kickstarter successes of its time, in an era in which spiritual successors for classic games were an easy hit. The 2017 original was a clear callback to Banjo-Kazooie, a Nintendo 64 platformer known for its googly eyes, wealth of collectibles, and complex platforming moveset. Nearly a decade later Playtonic has returned to the project with Yooka-Replayee, a “re-imagining” that uses the original almost like a blueprint to make something that feels like an entirely different game. It’s a fascinating approach that feels great to play, but loses some of its identity in the process.
King of Meat is an action-packed, multiplayer dungeon crawler developed by Glowmade and published by Amazon Games. It’s kind of a mix of goofy vibes, from Adult Swim-like edgy cartoon humor to Ninja Warrior and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. Imagine a fantasy-flavored challenge of carnage, spikes, and skeletons, televised to god knows who and where with color commentary and massive display screens. I had a lot of fun with its cute-but-crass tone, long list of unlockables, and novel mix of platforming and combo-driven combat. I do feel, however, that I reached my capacity for what King of Meat has to offer much sooner than intended.
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, a janky, low budget PlayStation Vita RPG from 2015, is one of my favorite games of all time. I’m not even that much of a Digimon person, but that’s a game I’ve dumped a few hundred hours into over multiple playthroughs, something I’m rarely capable of doing. A literal decade later, that team has finally produced a follow-up, Digimon Story Time Stranger. It’s a big, bold, and beautiful sequel to one of the most fulfilling RPGs of its kind, succeeding in nearly every attempt to improve upon what came before.
Mine is a Mario Party household. Over the years my wife and child have enjoyed many nights of minigame-fueled board game chaos. Things always got heated, especially as we taught our young one to handle things not going his way. The grown-ups needed a refresher on those lessons as well, let’s be honest. Even so, we’ve always come back to that series and had a blast. So it made sense that, when LEGO Party! came across my desk, we made a weekend of it. I’ve come away from the experience with the dreaded Mixed Feelings, a combination of being impressed with the overall presentation while not loving the nuts-and-bolts gameplay nearly as much as Nintendo’s competition.
Atelier, Gust’s long-running item synthesis RPG series, reached new heights with the debut of Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout in 2019. Gust used that momentum to sincerely attempt to reinvent what Atelier is in systems and scale, leading to the massive and successful Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land. At the same time the series couldn’t escape a certain albatross hovering above Japanese RPGs, and we saw Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & the Liberator of Polar Night hit mobile and PC as a free-to-play game with a gacha system. The history here is as important as it is fun to write out all the titles!
Re-releasing a classic game isn’t as easy as you might think. People talk about preservation, but that’s largely solved. You can just download a ROM. Hell, Final Fantasy Tactics, subject of longtime fan demand, was a ROM you could pay for if you had a PlayStation device, for years. But that doesn’t count; it’s the “remaster” that folks want to show up for. But is that really preservation? When you add bells and whistles, move stuff around, make changes… is it still the same game? Case in point, Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles is here, giving one of Square Enix’s most renowned stories the red carpet treatment for the first time, since handhelds and mobile don’t count either sometimes.
As I pushed my way through Baby Steps over 11 or so of god’s own hours, I asked myself a few questions. What does it mean to feel accomplished in a game? What value is there in pushing beyond one’s own perceived limits for the sake of finishing something? Can one continuous joke still be funny eight hours later? Does the presence of a metaphor elevate a story? I’ve sat down to write this review but I don’t think I have answers to everything here yet. Such is the outcome of staring far too long at a game about a jiggling neckbeard pushing his way up a mountain like a brainrot-infused adaptation of Sisyphus.