Update One Hundred and Sixty-Seven: 6 April 2018

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I really enjoy playing games with my girlfriend, which made me sad when HER PLAYING BREATH OF THE WILD FOR THE SECOND TIME FOR EIGHT MONTHS, MADISON got in the way of that. She had chosen to play Slime Rancher, but just didn’t feel like doing that kind of gameplay, since she had Breath of the Wild (girlfriend note: and Stardew Valley!) for all of her fuckin’ around in nature needs.

So I got her to pick another game out of the bunch of games I set aside to play with her, and she chose BOOR.

She would come to regret this decision. I, for one, wouldn’t have finished the game without her.

I take a lot of chances with 2D sidescrolling platform puzzlers, because sometimes they’re right in my wheelhouse, and sometimes they’re not. BOOR was not. It is a gorgeous, well-stylized, well-done game that held zero joy for me in any way. There is zero character (your player character never gets a name) and only the flimsiest of stories, with a LOT of typos and errors for how little text there was. It’s a try-and-die game, and, as you all know, I’m not a try-and-die gamer. My girlfriend is more that kind of gamer, and even still this game frustrated her a lot. While I played a lot of the earlier levels (and grinded the dopey little arcade games for achievements) she did the heavy lifting in the later, more complicated levels and boss fights.

I did manage to beat the last boss, though, but I found no joy in it. It’s just… it’s pattern recognition. Do the pattern over and over until you do it right. I don’t know. It felt empty for me.

Here’s what my girlfriend had to say about it:
“Hello BLAEO! I helped tsuper beat this game! It was…. uh….. interesting? I am a lot more fond of these types of games than her, but even this was dragging on me. I liked the idea of the game- that you can make a copy of yourself with limited life, and as you control the copy your body sleeps. And a lot of the puzzles were really clever in how it used the copy! I particularly liked one where you had to drop your sleeping body onto a moving platform and use a switch to open pathways and remove hazards in your body’s way. That was a tense moment, and super fun to get right.

But the game is… difficult in the Nintendo hard way, with lots of cheap shots and moments that make you go, “Oh my god are you fucking kidding me”. You move painfully slow, and you have little maneuverability when jumping. Puzzle rooms can be exceedingly long, and if you die you go back to the beginning. This began to really drag by the end, where you had like three or four ‘levels’ to go through within one puzzle. I wish there were checkpoints, or some way to not…. have to deal with all that wasted time and energy. By the last levels, I got really sick of playing it.

But at least it looks nice as it’s aggravating you? I’m a sucker for a cool, limited color palette and this one is nice to look at. The design of the robots is super goofy, which makes them very endearing– and when they shoot their lasers it’s a big “DOOF” sound, like a massive shot, which is hilarious. (tsuper note: It is VERY GOOFY) But other than that, the art style is pretty…. generic. Nice, but it doesn’t look special.

Anyway. It was fun, I guess. I wish they didn’t make it so aggravating, and I wish the dialogue had been looked over more than once before the game was published (this either was translated, or English is not the writer’s first language).

That’s all from me! Thanks!”

She’s a peach!

Next up: my girlfriend chooses -

See you soon!