Self Similar – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Tales from the Darkside

I’ve been curious about Darksiders since the first game was released in 2010. The oh-so edgy take on a war between heaven and hell and the highly stylized, seemingly Blizzard inspired graphics simultaneously intrigued me and repulsed me. As reviews came out, the often repeated claims that its gameplay was practically a 1:1 clone of the Legend of Zelda series’ action-adventure formula had me even more interested. Then, I watched as sequels were gradually released, each one with a different protagonist and significant shifts in its core gameplay, if not practically switching genre. This is often a bit of a sour point for fans, with preference for one game or another being highly divisive, but personally, I kind of like the idea of the series being so fluid in its gameplay – prioritizing core elements and themes over discrete mechanics. At some point, this all added up to me being sold on the franchise. Now, with news of a new game in the works, I’m finally tackling the first game in the series: Darksiders.

“I’ll horseman during the apocalypse, thank you very much…”

The aforementioned ultra stylized Blizzard-esque graphics, which look like something between World of Warcraft and Diablo III, mean this game has actually aged quite well. Throw in a remastered port to the 8th generation of consoles in 2016, given the face-palmingly punny title of “Warmastered Edition” and yeah, not too shabby! The game also got a free upgrade to the current gen on Xbox Series XS and PS5 back in May, which means my game was suddenly replaced right in the middle of my playthrough. Doh! Thankfully, there weren’t any real issues with that, though as its main benefit was 4k support and a more stable FPS, I can’t really say I noticed any major differences on my relatively ancient 1080p TV either.

Anyway, unless you’re the type of person who could never bring themselves to try World of Warcraft because of its graphics, the art style itself is cool: painted looking, colorful textures, chunky models, and a loose interpretation of scale. I guess to be fair I should give Joe Madureira more credit than Blizzard here, as he had a big role in this as Vigil’s Creative Director, and he was drawing comics for Marvel well before Blizzard went all in on that style with Warcraft III. Even still, I can’t help but make the comparison, especially when the angels and demons look like they’d be right at home in a Diablo game.

“Reaping hordes of angels. Trust me, they had it coming!”

While I’m at it, I don’t mention sound nearly enough in these impressions, but I liked the soundtrack too. It’s the kind of dark, epic, often atmospheric, orchestral stuff you might imagine, but it’s really well executed. The voice work is quite good as well, with a stacked cast including Mark Hamill, and some standout performances.

You play War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, summoned to present-day Earth to disrupt the Endwar between the angels and the demons that has seemingly just kicked off. It turns out that the 7th seal hadn’t actually been broken yet, however, so the horsemen shouldn’t have been summoned, not even one of them. The Charred Council, which is some sort of a powerful neutral party, and who the horsemen serve, bring War before them for punishment. He’s stripped of some of his powers, paired up with The Watcher, an annoying shitheel tasked with keeping him on a short leash, and reluctantly allowed to return to a now ravaged earth to figure out what happened and clear his name. Is it still a little edgy? Sure, though it (appropriately) feels more like something from a comic book than bad fan fiction, and I think it works just fine.

“I used War’s ability to turn into this massive fiery Balrog looking thing constantly.”

War is a dark, brooding tank of a man (err, Nephilim) who doesn’t say a whole lot, yet still devotes a significant percentage of the things he does say to badass quips. He manages to come across as fairly intelligent, despite constantly being manipulated by literally every faction in the game. Luckily he gets to prove his intelligence by solving a huge amount of ridiculous puzzles.

This is where the Zelda comparisons come from; beyond a steady progression of new abilities and item unlocks being used to gate access to certain areas, plus lots of fun chests to find, there’s also quite a lot of 3D platformer style puzzles not unlike those found in Ocarina of Time and later Zelda games. The world is mostly open, though it is also similarly chopped up into connected overworld zones, interior and connecting areas, and dungeons. At first I thought the comparison was a bit of an exaggeration, but as the game goes on the more prevalent these elements become. Personally, I find these kinds of puzzles a little tedious at times, but here they’re easy enough that I never had to resort to a walkthrough, yet I occasionally felt like kind of genius when I figured one out, which I think is precisely the balance you want to hit with this type of thing.

“Some of the boss fights also have a God of War vibe.”

The other game I’d compare Darksiders to is the original God of War series. There’s plenty of combat in Darksiders, and it’s mostly of the slightly loose, button-mashy, hack and slashy ilk I attribute to that series. Also like that series, there are more complex combos and advanced moves too, but you don’t really need much technical proficiency to make it through the game, not even against the numerous bosses. Good thing for me, as it never fully clicked with me to the point that I felt like I was mastering it. Skill issue? Probably! It was still fun enough, though. Oh, and there’s also colored floaty orbs to grab after killing enemies too. That said, apart from the execution moves and a couple of other very simple button prompts here and there, there’s nothing really like the full-on QTE scenes found in the God of War games. Still, the more I think about it, the more apt I think that comparison is, even beyond mechanics. Tonally, War’s adventures and interactions with the larger than life world around him remind me a lot of Kratos’s.

Movement and control feels good, but not quite where I’d want it. I suffered a lot of darkflight mishaps early in the game, and I think falling into lava or other deadly out of bounds areas probably killed me more than anything else. Also, while your horse Ruin was no doubt really damn cool, it often felt a little clunky to control.

“Mirror me for an effective Abyssal Armor fit check.”

Traveling between areas could be better too. The main form of fast travel is via “Serpent Holes” which don’t bring you directly to a different area, but instead to weird little connecting zones. I don’t know if there’s some technical reason for this, like the game doing some asset loading in the background or something, but these areas feel kind of pointless. The fact that you can only fast travel from specific places also means you’ll need to backtrack a lot, especially when coming back out of a dungeon, which is particularly annoying if you intend to go back and track down some of the collection achievements. One re-visit to multiple old areas is mandatory for story progress reasons, but I also completed War’s Abyssal Armor. I actually only lacked a couple of artifacts and some weapon upgrades to complete everything else, but I decided that would be way too much of a chore. Perhaps if there was an easier way to browse the local map, if items were depicted more accurately on the local map, and if the connection points between areas on the local map were labeled, I might have been more open to the prospect.

“Welcome to Fishing with War!”

There were a few more frustrations here and there, like some bullshit insta-death moments (fucking sandworms!) but I mostly found myself enjoying my time with the game, especially as I got more and more comfortable with it, and by the end I was a little sad to be done with it. Also, something I don’t find myself saying a lot, is that the ending was actually quite cool and inspired me to immediately install Darksiders II once the credits were done rolling. Of course, realistically it’ll be quite a while before I get around to playing it, but the fact that I’m now confident that I will be playing it hopefully says a lot.

Mazes, Mulligans, and Monsters

My little co-op group occasionally takes breaks from the open world survival crafting games we normally focus on to play other things. Sometimes this is due to finishing one game and not having the time to properly dive into the next one that session, and sometimes it’s as more of an palate cleanser. As with Cleaning, Climbing, and Crime, I’ve got 3 more such games that we played relatively recently to cover.

MIMESIS is another “friend slop” game looking to capitalize on becoming a flavor of the week hit. While I don’t know how successful they were, the game is definitely interesting. At the risk of being offensively reductive, I’d describe it of combing the simple controls and pleasantly stylized graphics of something like the previously discussed Peak (but let’s be honest, thousands of other games too) with the basic gameplay conceit of an older and briefly very popular friend slop classic we haven’t discussed here before, Lethal Company. In a sentence, you and your group are sent into a creepy abandoned facility to scavenge while being harassed by whatever supernatural or at least paranormal entities lurk in the dark.

“Get used to this view.”

What sets MIMESIS apart is the clever way these “entities” are implemented. There’s something similar to Left 4 Dead’s AI Director going on, attempting to adapt to player behavior to for a varied and dynamic feeling experience regarding when, how, and what new entities and other events are deployed. In MIMESIS’s case, this also almost always includes a (usually gradual) escalation from the scares coming exclusively from the tension of being in a dark, maze-like environment and knowing that shit is eventually going to pop off, to utter chaos as you and your teammates end up getting split up, being chased by all kinds of terrible shit, and not knowing who is friend or foe.

That last part is key here, as there’s also a system in which some of these entities assume the identities of players, alive or dead, including attempting to mimic their behaviors and even repeating voice lines they said (which means for the best experience you should definitely be using the in-game voice chat.) In our age of LLM based AI this could get pretty sophisticated, though I don’t think what MIMESIS is doing is really is all that technically interesting. Instead, it often felt like dumb luck when just the perfect voice line was repeated at just the right time. In any case, it is highly effective in making people paranoid and thoroughly creeped out, and when things did get chaotic, it was some of the funnest, most hilarious moments I’ve had online in quite a while. Surprisingly, some of my favorite moments were after being killed and spectating on the remaining players à la something like Counter-Strike, only it’s much more entertaining to watch your remaining teammates frantically run around bumping into one obstacle after another, especially when that leads to interacting with your doppelganger(s) without a clue that you’re actually dead.

“Spectating another player as escape to outside.”

Naturally, there is a little hub area where you and your group can return to deposit your loot in between runs, buy some equipment and make other upgrades that persist to some degree, but this is an aspect of the game I can’t really speak to as after just a handful of runs across a couple of sessions, we all felt like we’d experienced what the game was about, had some fun, and were ready to move on. While I could see some groups sticking it out for much longer, it takes just the right game for our group to commit to something longer term.

Speaking of which, the next game is another “friend slop” game, and one we played for even less time. Super Battle Golf, as its name might suggest, is perhaps hard to even call a cooperative game. That is, it’s essentially a basic cooperative golf game, except all players go at the same time instead of taking turns, and you’re essentially racing against each other to see who can complete the hole first. As if that wasn’t chaotic enough, there are all kinds of funky items including Mario Kart like power ups you can find scattered around to make things that much more insane. There’s nothing like lining up the perfect shot to be suddenly run down by a golf cart, or similarly disrupting someone else by nailing them with a homing missile just as they’re about to take their swing.

“The exact moment a rocket slams into a couple of golf carts. FORE!”

Super Battle Golf was definitely fun to screw around in, but had even less of a hook to keep us playing long term than games like MIMESIS or Peak, so screwing around for about 2 hours or so was all our time with the game amounted to. Still, it’s one I could see randomly going back to when we need to kill an hour or two. In fact, we choose this one due to having a fifth person join us that night and not wanting to toss them into the middle of a longer or more complex game. Objective achieved!

And now for something completely different, For the King II. One of our group had played through the first For the King game with a different group of friends and was itching to try the sequel. I thought it looked pretty neat, and it was definitely a different type of game than our usual survival games OR the kind of quick friend slop experiences we just covered. Instead, to me, it feels very much like it is based on some of the popular cooperative board games which had been making waves in the last 10 or so years. In particular, having only really played a little bit of the Jaws of the Lion version, it reminds me quite a lot of Gloomhaven, though there have been tons of vaguely similar fantasy RPG inspired board games over the years, such as the venerable Dungeon! and classics like HeroQuest.

“The world map as we kick off a new adventure.”

To describe that in a little more detail, the gameplay is something like this: Each player picks a character/class archetype and some starting traits and equipment and then get thrown onto a hex based world map where they take turns moving to trigger fights, visit towns, and investigate events and other points of interest. At the same time, each adventure (essentially a mini-campaign based on a single world map) has its own story with its own victory conditions, and because of the magic of video games, this can feel reasonably dynamic, with NPC dialogs and plot events triggering, etc. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that in something of a rogue-lite twist, your characters do not persist between campaigns, but you’ll unlock new traits and equipment, points of interest, and even new classes which you can use in your next campaign.

As an aside, the class system is pretty interesting, as it mostly only dictates a few special abilities and your starting stats. The rest of your abilities are determined by the traits you pick during creation, and the weapons and other equipment you equip along the way. This means while it might be optimal to have a high intelligence, magic aligned character use a magic wand or staff, you can kind of do whatever you want.

“Strikingly familiar turn based tactical combat.”

The combat in For the King II resembles that more of a traditional turn-based JRPG in which your group and the enemies you’re fighting are placed on a grid and cycle throw and initiative based sequence. Like those JRPGs, it can feel a little tactical, with positioning and choosing when is the best time to deploy what attacks, abilities, and items, being a big part of the equation. There are also dice rolls governing a lot of the aspects of this, though they’re not presented as obviously as some games. In fact, in many ways I was surprised how little For the King II actually leans into its obvious board game inspiration; it almost seems like its trying to hide it.

Most of these fights take place on the world map and need to be purposely triggered unlike the infamous random encounter trope most often associated with JRPGs, though there are also scenarios in which you might need to defeat multiple waves of enemies. There are also dungeons, which are similar but much longer and involve moving from room to room. Most of these rooms are fights, though there are sometimes other events, choices on which path to take, and opportunities to heal and rest between rooms.

“The stats screen that comes with the successful completion of an adventure.”

I didn’t mention the aesthetics of the game yet, and I really should. The first For the King had a “mid-poly” style that looked quite nice. For the King II drops the mid-poly style and goes much harder into the cartoony style that was hinted at in the first game, while also further refining the overall look with some nice effects and polish. Overall, while relatively simple and certainly stylized, I think it looks quite nice.

There was a little frustration from my group around For the King II, but once we understood the gameplay mechanics a bit more (another thing it borrows from board game adaptations is its fairly unintuitive gameplay systems and atypical UI choices) and had experimented a little with different characters/classes, we started to have a lot more fun. If I recall correctly, we failed the first adventure twice, and then sailed through it and two or three more of them, clocking in something like 30 hours of game time. Personally, I had a lot of fun with the game and wouldn’t mind coming back to it, even if just by myself, though I think as a group, repetition had started to set in and we were ready to move on to something different.

Interestingly, the next game we tried ended up being similar in a lot of ways, but we’re still playing that one, so more on that later!

Writer’s Blocks

Like a lot of people my age, Tetris was first introduced to me via the venerable Game Boy version that so many of us got as a pack-in at the time, although certainly plenty of people fell in love with ports on other systems as well. Indeed, Tetris is one of those games that has been ported absolutely everywhere. Attempts to make sequels and spin-offs never managed to enter the zeitgeist in the way these late 80s – early 90s versions did, even if a great many of them were positively received. That hasn’t stopped attempts to keep remaking and iterating on the game, and some of the more recent releases were actually pretty successful. The original VR-oriented Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 both come to mind.

“Just one of the many themes in Tetris Effect: Connected.”

Tetris Effect: Connected is a version of that PlayStation VR version ported to other consoles and given some additional online features. It’s one of two games I picked up on Game Pass at around the same time, played a bunch, and then put down for a while before noticing they dropped off of Game Pass before I could finish them. Doh! Still, Tetris Effect was the one that was easy enough to keep picking up, playing a bit, and putting back down again no matter how long had passed since the last time, and that’s exactly how I played it. I did eventually beat the “Journey Mode” campaign on Normal difficulty after abandoning my initial goal to get at least a B rating on every level. The verdict? I loved it.

Tetris Effect combines classic Tetris gameplay with some trippy visualization and a dynamic, rhythmic soundtrack to create an amazing audio visual experience and, moreover, a really cool vibe. I’m sure it is an absolute blast in VR but even without a VR headset, it’s still fantastic. Gameplay-wise, it’s a fine version of the Tetris experience we all know and love. While there are some tweaks, notably the “Hold” queue, which lets you swap out the falling piece for the one in your holding area on-demand, and the “In The Zone” feature that, after building up, lets you hit something of a panic button to pause gravity temporarily, alleviating the death rain of tetrominoes and hopefully allowing you to maneuver yourself out of trouble, its mostly just good ol’ Tetris. I somehow missed the existence of both of these features and never purposely used them a single time during my entire playthrough, by the way, so it really was just classic Tetris for me. Maybe now that I know about those features I can go back an improve my scores, eh? 😅

“Dolphin attack!”

Between the classic gameplay and the awesome presentation, it’s just a great game to lose yourself in, and in that way, it’s quite relaxing, at least up into the point where it suddenly becomes a desperate panic, which is no doubt part of the core Tetris experience. Overall, the main thing Tetris Effect proves to me is that Tetris itself is literally a timeless classic; it’s just a great game at its core. To that end, I’m really curious about the recent Tetris Forever, which is something of a combination of a historical archive, including a documentary and a tour through many of those classic versions of the game. Once I can get it at a generous discount, you’ll probably see it here.

As an aside, while this is much less well known than its Tetris counterpart, another beloved puzzle classic, Lumines, actually got the similar Tetric Effect treatment from the same team in 2025 with Lumines Arise. Nice!

“Mio and Zoe, combining their powers… or something.”

Shifting gears completely, after enjoying A Way Out and loving It Takes Two, Hazelight’s similarly co-op focused Split Fiction ended up on my wishlist the second I got a good look at it. While we didn’t dive into it right away, my girlfriend and I eventually played through the game via couch co-op on our Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, it took us a few months of random sessions instead of being hooked enough to push through the game in a week or two as you might expect. Let me take a step back a bit first…

Split Fiction has each player playing one of the two protagonists of the story, Mio and Zoe. Mio and Zoe are both writers looking for their big break who, along with others, get invited to a big publishing company to pen deals to sell some stories, but are instead invited to participate in a new experimental virtual reality program which will apparently let them experience a sort of immersive virtual reality simulation of their own stories. Things don’t quite go as planned, and Mio ends up in Zoe’s simulation with her. Stuck in this corrupted virtual world built from the minds of both authors, the two must journey together through their stories and try to find a way to escape.

“One of the more WTF?! inducing side-stories.”

Honestly, the game’s first impressions weren’t that great, as I found the character models and scenery in the introduction where Mio and Zoe first visit Rader Publishing in the “real world” to look just a little too generic, almost bordering on the uncanny valley. Thankfully, once the game starts in earnest, it’s actually quite nice looking, and at times absolutely beautiful. Given the setup of the game, if they somehow dropped the ball on realizing these sci-fi and fantasy inspired worlds, it would have been hard to get passed. Sound design is also great, and I have no complaints with Mio and Zoe’s voice actors, which is good, because they talk a lot.

It’s hard not to compare Split Fiction with It Takes Two, and the biggest difference between the two besides the obvious plot differences, is in their gameplay. While It Takes Two felt inspired by the type of early 3D platformers that were all over the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation with their semi-open, more exploration based gameplay, Split Fiction feels more inspired by 2D platformers in that it has much tighter controls, much more action, much more linear level design, and is much more challenging overall. I wouldn’t say Split Fiction is necessary a “hard” game, but it definitely felt like there was a lot more friction than we felt in It Takes Two. I think we collectively died far more times than in It Takes Two, though I could be wrong and I just don’t remember dying often in It Takes Two because it was just so much more forgiving. In either case, at the end of the day Split Fiction felt a bit more intense and at times aggravating, and as a consequence, a little less fun than It Takes Two.

“2D platforming, mirrored!”

It’s hard to quantify and that is no doubt entirely subjective, because despite this, the game is still absolutely brilliant. As with It Takes Two, there’s a huge variety in gameplay, level design, and themes and almost all of it is competently executed. Split Fiction tends to mix up the gameplay mechanics per level rather than in sub-sections, and even the mini-games found throughout It Takes Two were replaced with “Side Stories” which are themselves differently themed smaller levels. While there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, I’d argue that most of these side stories were more interesting than the mini-games found in It Takes Two, it does contribute to that more linear feeling. I also think the style of cooperative gameplay is a little different, with Split Fiction focusing more on scenarios where each character has different abilities which they use in parallel, and sometimes in together, rather than being forced to work together through mechanics that require being used in combination as was often the case with It Takes Two.

Like the game, I want to end on a more positive note, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, Split Fiction really ups the ante with its last level, which twists the concept of split screen co-op in some really creative, often mindbending ways. Saving these antics for the last level kept them from overstaying their welcome and felt like a great send off.

“Q: Are you in my world, or am I in yours? A: Yes!”

Overall, while I’d highly recommend Split Fiction for those looking for a solid two player co-op experience, I’d recommend It Takes Two first. While I’m sure some people will prefer Split Fiction, it seems that the popular consensus is with me on this one.

You know, I really should play Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons one of these days to complete my tour of Josef Fares’s work… 🤔