Running and Gunning thru Heaven with Neon White

Before I get into the article proper, I’d like to repeat my previous housekeeping announcement: Blogger’s email update feature has broken, so I took the opportunity to start a new mailing list for Out of Left Field! This will probably be the single best way to follow updates here; my plan is to only send out something when I have a new article to post. Hopefully, I’ll get to test it out again soon, as I have both an End-of-the-Year Playlist and another Indie Game article in the works. You can sign up in the box below or in the bar at the top (and if you’d like similar updates for my baseball articles, go check out Hot Corner Harbor for that list!

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Ever since I finished this game a few months ago, I’ve been working on this article in fits and starts, alternating between bursts of inspiration where I had so many ideas I wanted to discuss and roadblocks both from writer's block and just personal life scheduling. After a while, I wasn’t even sure if it was worth finishing this anymore, as so many other writers found ways to talk it up. But in the end, I think there are just so many good things in this game that get overshadowed, since so much of it is fantastic, and now seemed like as good a time as any to finish it off, since it’s almost certainly my Game of the Year!

There aren’t many games that I’ve been looking forward to over the last few years more than Neon White. Way back in 2019, I played a fun little puzzle-and-comedy game called Donut County; if you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you might even remember me mentioning it back then in my Year-End Roundup. If not, it was a fun little game with a cute, cartoon-y art style about moving a hole around, and watching as it grew with each object that fell in. There’s more to it than that on the story side (it was pretty funny, as you might guess from the silly premise), but gameplay-wise, it was mostly just that rewarding little loop: move hole, swallow objects, get bigger, swallow bigger things, repeat until everything in the level is gone.

I loved the experience, and as I do when I like an indie game, I decided to follow the game’s developer, Ben Esposito. Sometime after doing so, he announced his follow-up project: a stylish-as-hell, fast-paced first person shooter about a colorful cast of assassins being allowed into Heaven as part of a demon-exterminating competition, developed by his new studio Angel Matrix. A bit of a shift in styles maybe (to put it mildly), but I had only good experiences so far, and it looked extremely up-my-alley, so I was all aboard the hype train from that point.

And holy shit, did Neon White live up to my hopes and dreams.



For those who need a little bit more of a description, Neon White is one part First Person Shooter, and one part fast-paced 3D Parkour Platformer; you try to complete every level as fast as you can, while shooting every single demon along the way. The main gameplay mechanic is an ingenious combination of the two sides: the guns in-game are represented by magical cards that you pick up as you find them in the level, sometimes dropped by defeated enemies, sometimes just laying about.

Each one works like a standard gun, with a set amount of ammo… but you can also choose to “discard” the weapon. That loses you a demon-slaying option, but gives you some sort of bonus movement in compensation, depending on what type of gun you’re throwing out. So, to provide a basic example, if you can take out all of the demons with five of the six bullets in a pistol, you can discard what remains of it for an extra jump, which you can then use to find shortcuts and improve on your level times.



From there, the game builds up its library of tools and obstacles, which become easy to learn and master over the course of a playthrough. You immediately pick up what each type of gun each card is, how much damage it does, how it fires, and what special movement it grants you. And you get a stable of demons to go with it, learning how they’ll attack you, how much damage they take, and the best way to dispatch them and move forward.

Haven: Love on the Run Beyond the Stars

There are a lot of indie games that I’ve been meaning to try and just putting on the backburner; there are just so many titles out there nowadays, and stuff will slip through the cracks, but I do make an effort to circle back around to things on occasion. Such was the case with The Game Bakers’ late 2020 release Haven; I had been curious about their previous game (2016’s Furi, a boss rush game) before deciding it wasn’t for me, and after seeing a lot of praise for Haven, decided it sounded more up my alley.

But I sort of forgot about it after that, until a few weeks ago when I was itching for something new to try, and it popped up in my feed thanks to a recent update. That seemed like as good an onboarding point as any, so I gave it a shot. And after that, I was so enthralled that I basically ended up shotgunning the game in under a week.



Haven is also a weird game, because it feels simultaneously very difficult and very easy to describe. On the one hand, at its core, it’s one of the oldest story archetypes in existence: that of the star-crossed lovers, just set in a far-off sci-fi world. Yu and Kay are the main pair here, young adults from some sort of interplanetary empire known as The Apiary, fleeing their arranged marriages to live together. The game opens with them having recently settled on Source, a far-off shattered world hopefully outside of The Apirary’s purview, following a daring escape from home.

While deciding what to do next, their new home, an RV-esque spaceship Yu fixed up called the Nest, sustains heavy damage from an earthquake, stranding them in place. And so begins the game proper; you guide Yu and Kay around the fragments of Source, searching for replacement parts, foraging for food, fending off wildlife, and dodging The Apiary’s search efforts. There’s constantly stuff to do to keep this loving couple up and functioning, and it gives the game’s story an almost episodic, cliffhanger-heavy approach that is well-executed and addicting.

Climbing the Open-World Heights of Sable

I’ve been playing a lot of cool games lately, and they’ve given me quite a few things to talk about. However, my last few games articles have gotten a little on the long side, both in word count and writing time, which can be a little daunting even when I don’t have a bit of a backlog to work through. So, I’m going to try and keep these a little shorter; maybe I’ll slip up a bit and one of them will grow in length, but keeping two out of three manageable isn’t bad.

And so, today I’ll be talking about Sable, the debut game of two-person studio Shedworks. I had seen and heard some good things about it prior to release, which got me interested. But one unusual thing that I noticed was that some of the previews I saw called it a 3D platformer (always a hot topic here), but that didn’t seem to be the case universally. “Open World”, “Adventure”, and “Exploration” showed up more frequently as genres/descriptors. And… yeah, it probably is those first and foremost, but I also don’t think I would dispute calling it a 3D platformer; it’s certainly not a traditional one, but it’s definitely more in line with that sort of level design and play style than most open world games.

But first, the general backstory: Sable takes place on an alien desert planet, beautifully rendered in a vibrant, rotoscoped* artstyle, where people live in much smaller-scale villages and societies (many even taking on nomadic lifestyles). You play as Sable, a young girl from a herding tribe known as the Ibexii, who is about to experience a coming-of-age ceremony, then set off into the world on a hoverbike to find her place in the world and decide what she’s going to do in life.

*Art criticism is not my forte, but I think that’s the term/technique I’m going for, at the very least for the animation? It looks like drawings over real figures, to give it a distinct mostly-realistic style with a few embellishments here and there, and usually colored in ways that are more striking, unique, or vibrant than real life? Either way, it makes for some amazing scenic landscape shots, and driving your bike over these dunes makes you feel like a master cinematographer with how easy it is to get beautiful and striking images of the world as you frame the in-game camera.

It’s a pretty basic story, but one that Sable sets up beautifully. You get dropped in pretty cold and build up an understanding of what’s going on naturally, talking to the rest of Sable’s clan as they mentally prepare both her and themselves for the coming separation of her going out into the world. It’s extremely relatable and well-done, and that natural discovery for the player, leading into the ceremony itself, is a huge emotional swell.

Some More Indie 3D Platformer Recommendations, Part 1: Tasomachi and Here Comes Niko!

I’ve mentioned it here repeatedly in the past, but I am a pretty big fan of 3D platformers, and I’m willing to give a decent variety of games a try just to see how they are. A few months ago, I did a round-up of smaller 3D platformers that I had found through this willingness to try new things, and it was a lot of fun! I didn’t necessarily have a ton of deep design insights or anything, but it is fun to recommend smaller titles.

And since I’ve found a few more fun 3D platformers in the interim, why not run another small game round-up? Technically, all of them are games I’ve briefly mentioned here in the past, but usually in passing on another article (two of them in the last round-up, and one in my most recent playlist). I’ve enjoyed all of them a ton, so I figure it’s time to give them their own full highlights!

One big difference from the last time I did a round-up, though: the last time, I was as much trying to break down the different components of the genre, and looking at games that did some things well and other things maybe less good. This time, though, there’s a lot more polish to the games I’m mentioning. If you’re also a big fan of 3D platformers and always on the lookout for more, honestly I don’t think you can’t go wrong with any of these. If it’s more a genre you occasionally dig into, though, you still might find something that’s your speed, and hopefully breaking down what I like about these games can help you make a decision.

This was intended to be a bit of a shorter piece, but things wound up spiraling a little out of control, length-wise. And so, today will be the first of two parts; look for the follow-up sometime in the next week or so!


Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight (Orbital Express)

Like all of the games here, I’ve mentioned Tasomachi here before as something I was looking forward to. Unlike the other entries here, though, it didn’t come in a video game article; rather, it came during my Summer 2021 playlist. Snail’s House, an artist who’s now a regular feature in my Playlist articles, provided the soundtrack here (albeit under his other pseudonym, Ujico*), which is part of what made me first take notice of it. And sure enough, as expected, I really did like the soundtrack. But the game it’s attached to is also pretty good!

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a Stellar Follow-Up to Wandersong (in a few ways!)

Two and a half years ago, I wrote about Wandersong, a wonderful little 2D platformer by developer Greg Lobanov that wound up being one of my favorite games of 2018.* I’ve been anxiously awaiting to see what he did next since then, and what was next finally arrived this year in the form of Chicory: A Colorful Tale. After nearly three years of anticipation building, I’m glad to say that Chicory more than lives up to the high bar of its predecessor, and it too will definitely stand as one of my favorite games of the year!

*Which is saying something, considering some of the other quality games I played that year, like Iconoclasts and Celeste.

Let’s start with the basics: Chicory is the second of the two Top-Down A-A games that I mentioned a few articles ago. To give a very general story pitch: You play as Pizza*, a janitor and aspiring artist in the world of the Picnic Province. The appearance of the region is normally defined by the local Wielder, who uses a magic paintbrush to color in the world. However, the current Wielder, Chicory, has gone missing right when all of the world’s color has suddenly vanished. With no other obvious solution in sight, Pizza takes up the brush and travels around the land, filling in everything and solving various citizen’s problems that have cropped up from the explosion of monochrome.

*The name is player-inputted, but Pizza is both what I used and the apparent default name; everyone in the game is named after food of some sort. Also, all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, with Pizza of course being the dog in the title art.

Clearly, there’s a lot more going on there, and I’ll touch on some of that later, but for the spoiler-light section, this will do. Greg Lobanov has once again recruited a great team this time around to help him make the game, one almost twice as big as the Wandersong team. Em Halberstadt returns on Sound Design (which looks like it was a lot of fun). Meanwhile, award-winning composer Lena Raine takes over the music, while Alexis Dean-Jones and Madeline Berger provide the game’s art.

 

Lenna's Inception Is One of the Best Games of 2020

Let’s start by getting right to the point. Playing Lenna’s Inception by Bytten Studio has been my favorite game experience of the year, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you’re at all a fan of 2D Zelda games and games like them; or enjoy things like Undertale and their style of storytelling, meta-awareness and genre commentary, and decision making, I cannot recommend this highly enough. It’s still only for computers rather than consoles at this point, but it is on both Steam and itch.io, and like with Underhero, it was a part of the massive itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from earlier this year, so once again, if you contributed to that, you already have it!

 

I want to give people the chance to go into the experience mostly blind, as I did, because while I think learning spoilers doesn’t necessarily ruin a work of fiction, in retrospect, this is one game that I really did appreciate going in knowing relatively little other than “it’s good”. So I’ll set a warning for “minimal spoilers”, for things that you might not get out of a trailer but would get with a little bit of playtime (you know, things that are okay to read if you aren’t the type to rush out and make purchases based on my word alone), and a later one for “maximal spoilers” that discuss late-game developments (you should definitely avoid them to not ruin the surprise, and I’ll just casually reference things like you have a working knowledge of the game, so they may not even make sense anyway).

 

Let’s just start with the basics: in gameplay, Lenna’s Inception is a top-down, 2D action-adventure game in the vein of classic Legend of Zelda games*, with the added twist of being procedurally generated. I think it does this very well, and if your major concern in looking for games to play is how it feels to play, know that everything it needs to do to work succeeds in spades.

 

*Side note: I’ve never really liked this genre name, as it’s sort of vague and doesn’t do as good of a job at quickly explaining the style in a way that other genre names do, for a few reasons. And it feels like there are more of them than there used to be, between things like Blossom Tales, Reverie, and Sparklite, so a better name would be helpful. Maybe I’ll tackle this issue in its own article eventually, but for now, I’ll make do with what we have.

 

Story-wise, the setup is a bit of a send-up of the classic Zelda formula. You play as Lenna, local schoolteacher in the Kingdom of [randomized name that also serves as the seed for how your world is laid out, which is a nice touch]. One day, she steps outside of her classroom for a moment, and finds that she is unable to return because her school has become a garbled mess of glitched-out pixels (another homage, this one to the other big story inspiration, but I’ll get to that later). You seek out local hero-of-legend Lance to help return things to normal, but in typical meta-storytelling/parody tradition, things immediately go sideways, and Lenna has to take action into her own hands.

 

--minimal spoilers warning--

 

Indie Game Recs: Sayonara Wild Hearts

2019 was a great year for video game soundtracks. I already covered the Crypt of the Necrodancer spinoff Cadence of Hyrule a few months ago. I also finally got around to trying Lumines Remastered, a puzzle game that also makes the soundtrack part of the gameplay, and enjoyed that (although not quite as much as Meteos). And while less integrated into the gameplay, the Pokémon series, which has always put out great soundtracks, hit their strongest one in a while (in my opinion) with Sword and Shield. Similarly with Waypoint, a company that always has good music, and their new game River City Girls (although it integrates into the game in a cute meta way when you fight the soundtrack vocalist as a character in the game). And this isn’t getting into a few other music games that I didn’t get around to, like Ape Out or Songbird Symphony.

We truly were spoiled this year, but for my money, none of them take home the Best Music of the Year award. That honor belongs to Simogo’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, a masterpiece of a game with an absolutely killer soundtrack courtesy of Daniel Olsén, Jonathan Eng, and Linnea Olsson. And thanks to that music, it was one of my favorite games of the year.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a game that is both stunning in its ambitions, yet also incredibly straightforward in conception. You might be familiar with the idea of visual albums, musical albums with video aspects added to them. Simogo took that idea and extended that into their specialty of game design: what if that visual aspect was instead a series of video game levels that you played through? It would almost be shocking that the idea isn’t more common, until you remember that it requires the effort of making both an entire album and an entire video game, and keeping it all cohesive (although it would be amazing to see others attempt it!)

Like most concept albums, Sayonara has an overarching narrative, steeped in big, sweeping, metaphors and abstraction and with most of the specifics up to player interpretation. This tale focuses on a young girl who experiences a heart break so profound that it ties her to a cosmic struggle for universal harmony between the forces of good and evil, represented by tarot card arcana. Thus, she becomes The Fool, the masked, swashbuckling hero charged with fighting the representations of the evil arcana (who may or may not be representations of her former lovers).

That’s really the main framework of the story, with most of the details told via the level designs and songs for the player to pick up on and work into their understanding of the narrative. It really is impressive how much story you can draw out of the three aspects put together, given how little of it is made explicit, and it makes building a personal interpretation out of all of that extremely fun.

The levels each serve as sorts of "music videos", with your character constantly running through different absolutely gorgeous environments and picking up different heart icons to score points. The level design mentioned mostly comes through both the placement of collectibles and obstacles, which often serve as accents on the musical accompaniment in cute ways, and Sayonara's impeccable aesthetic sense. Each level is a tightly choreographed (sometimes-literal) ballet of motorcycle chases, fistfights, acrobatic stunts, and more, against backdrops like neon-technicolor cities and surreal forest-raves; the actions and environments become more building blocks setting up the game's story, open to their own interpretation. But even if they weren't, they'd all be beautiful enough to check out on their own.

The levels themselves are rather short, as they correspond directly to the songs. Most fall in the 1-2 minute range, with longer levels coming out to more of a traditional pop-song length (and usually serving as boss stages of sorts). And the game itself isn't too long, and can be completed in under an hour. Of course, that's not too much of a problem, since the game is at once an album and an arcade game. Each level is infinitely re-playable as you try and outdo your best score, and the game stays interesting for as long as you still enjoy the soundtrack. I've played through it essentially three times at this point just as a function of wanting to re-listen to it, and I can see myself continuing to do so.

And oh, that soundtrack! Olsén is a wizard with synths, with complex layers filling out lush orchestrations to further build out the worlds shown in the levels. They all feel so propulsive and energetic that I can't imagine them accompanying anything but The Fool's constant forward movement, and yet, all of them feel like they could just as equally serve as dance tracks. Laser Love might be my favorite such example.

The pop songs bring in Eng on lyrics, and he writes perfect mood pieces to underscore the actions on-screen. They walk the fine line of filling in details to make the songs reflect a distinct experience, while also remaining universal in the feelings they convey. And Olsson's vocals are just perfect, ethereal to match the surreal world of Wild Hearts while also carrying intense emotion, driving home the heartbreaks and triumphs. Her voice reminds me a lot of Lauren Mayberry (lead singer of CHVRCHES), which I mean as the highest praise. To get a picture of how it all comes together, just take a look at the first "boss level", Begin Again, a story of preparing to move past a doomed romance set to an extended chase scene through a town known as Hatehell Valley. That sort of heightened emotion is the backbone of Sayonara Wild Hearts, and it really sells every minute of it.

I could go on about this game for ages, but I really just want to treat it as a short but strong recommendation. So if any part of this review sounds interesting, definitely pick up Sayonara Wild Hearts. It really feels like a genuinely interesting burst of creativity and ideas, the start of something genuinely new, on top of just being a stellar pop album, and I love it for that.

Forget Genres, Cadence of Hyrule Seamlessly Mashes-Up Entire Series

I’ve been slowly working my way through some of the indie game backlog on my Switch, and wanted to do a few shorter reviews of games that especially jumped out at me, starting with something I hinted was coming in my last piece on video games: Brace Yourself Games’ Legend of Zelda spin-off, Cadence of Hyrule.

(The music is of course great, as both series are known for their soundtracks. So why not check out a sample as backing music while reading this review?)

One of my earlier favorite pickups for the Switch was BYG’s original Crypt of the Necrodancer, a game I had heard a lot of good things about but never gotten around to trying. It went on sale on the Switch, so I decided to finally try it out on a whim. And I wound up getting a lot playtime out of it! I had always been sort of iffy on dungeon crawler and roguelike/roguelite games for various reasons, but Crypt took the best parts of those two genres and used them to balance each other out, all set to a banging soundtrack that made it an even more interesting rhythm game.

Giving each move in the dungeon crawler the strict time limit of a beat in a song kept you from overthinking and over-optimizing every move, and tying the dungeon sizes to the length of songs kept them from becoming too sprawling or overwhelming and made the threat of having to start over not feel completely dispiriting. Conversely, the rogue-lite elements mean you get to try different styles of play rather than just following your optimized plan, and there’s only minimal planning you even could do before tackling each level, plus the music helped to telegraph enemy attack patterns so that you learn how to navigate each world quicker. On the whole, it was a really neat little system.

Meanwhile, I’ve written before about my love for The Legend of Zelda series, especially the 2D entries. I’m always excited for more entries into whatever-that-genre-is-called (maybe I’ll tackle that issue another day), but tying it to Crypt of the Necrodancer’s systems posed some interesting clashes. Legend of Zelda isn’t really known for small procedurally-generated worlds, or for losing all your gear regularly and starting over, or for randomization, or for strict rules on movement, or any number of other things that could have tripped up the developers. When the game was first announced, all of those questions and more made it seem interesting, but like something that would be more of a novelty, something like a new Crypt of the Necrodancer but with Link plopped in as in Soul Calibur II, or a Zelda spin-off with added focus on music instead of, say, multiplayer.

Instead, though, Brace Yourself Games hit the perfect balance of the two; Cadence of Hyrule feels like both a Zelda game and a Crypt sequel, with enough new ideas brought to the table to make it not feel like it solely belongs to one series or the other. Areas were the two might have clashed have been reconciled in ways that keep them feeling true to both games. It really is a hybrid of the two series, which on the whole makes it feel like a new and exciting experience.

Wandersong, a Groundbreaking Musical Video Game, Is One of 2018's Best

One of my favorite games of 2018 was Wandersong*, and I wanted to write something about it for a while, but wow was it difficult to come up with something that didn’t just devolve into gushing praise.

*note: I played the Nintendo Switch version, but it’s also available on PlayStation 4 and PC/Mac via Steam.

Not that gushing praise wouldn’t be merited; the game is beautiful in every capacity, and the team of Greg Lobanov (creator), A Shell in the Pit (music), and Em Halberstadt (sound) deserves all of the compliments. Everything clicked with me. The game looks beautiful, with a strong art direction full of bold colors and a look that brings to mind construction paper and Paper Mario. The writing and story is fantastic, and full of probably my favorite cast of characters I’ve seen; even random townspeople stick in the mind, and the main cast are all incredibly endearing. And man oh man, the music.

I mean, the game is called Wandersong, so of course the music had to be good. But it really is something else. The soundtrack is, naturally, amazing, and I’ve been listening to it on repeat since even before I finished the game. It’s loaded with memorable tunes, and so many are tied to key moments in the game that instantly call them to mind when you here them. It’s a perfect synergy.

It’s more than that, though; everything in the game revolves around music, from the biggest story themes to the smallest game mechanics. It’s a level of focus that many games don’t have, especially games in the rhythm/music genre. Every action in the game more complicated than basic moving in a 2D space (basically left/right/jump) is undertaken using the singing wheel that serves as the game’s main mechanic. Puzzles to cross large gaps or scale large heights? Casting magic spells? Dialogue with non-player characters? Encounters with large monsters? Every one of them, you use the wheel to get the Bard to sing, and the Bard’s music in turn interacts with the game environment in some way to meet the challenge.

Celeste Perfectly Unites Story, Theme, and Gameplay

Continuing my ongoing attempt to highlight and analyze amazing indie games (especially those on the Switch), I would like to discuss one of the year’s best titles, Celeste by Extremely OK Games (previously of Towerfall fame*). For anyone curious, I played the Switch version, but it’s available on pretty much any platform you’d want to play it on.

*Which, it was recently announced, is itself coming to the Switch at the end of September, if you haven’t tried it yet and are looking for an excuse; it’s wonderful in its own right!

Celeste is a rare beast, a game that is mechanically tight, incredibly well-designed level-wise, and fun to play while also being an incredibly moving narrative and thematic experience. For those who haven’t heard of it yet, the premise is pretty simple: a girl named Madeline arrives at a remote peak (the titular Celeste Mountain), looking to escape some sort of (initially undefined) personal trauma by climbing it. Along the way, she meets a variety of figures that aid her in her journey, with the entire story rendered in some simple-yet-beautiful pixel art graphics, and with one of my favorite game soundtracks supporting the whole thing.

The game is an incredibly tough platformer, challenging players in a variety of ways while also being one of the more forgiving games of its kind. Save points are frequent in the normal course of a level and carry through between sessions, and on top of that, the game has a variety of options to tweak the challenge in almost any way imaginable so that anyone can feel comfortable playing it, regardless of whether or not you’re the type of person who can beat a classic Mario game in ten minutes. That in and of itself is pretty notable; Game Makers Toolkit has more on these features, which is definitely a worth a watch.

If you’re at all curious about it and want to go in unspoiled of the deeper plot details, I would absolutely recommend trying it! From here on out, I’ll be getting pretty deep into the nitty-gritty of the story.

A Hat in Time and Level Design Philosophies in 3-D Platformers

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my favorite indie games from the past year and I lavished high praise on A Hat in Time by the development team Gears for Breakfast. It’s a throwback to the 3D platformers of the ‘90s and early 2000s that I loved growing up, but like all of the best nostalgic throwbacks, it’s good not just because it references the classics of a past, but because it understands what made those classics work, and consciously decides to do its own thing. Now that I’ve more or less finished the entire game, I feel like I can begin to break down some of the things that the game does especially well.

Every aspect of A Hat in Time is meticulously designed and pitch perfect. The aesthetic side of things are incredibly strong; the game is filled with beautifully-animated, cel-shaded style worlds, each with it’s own hilariously-written and quirky side characters. The entire thing is scored with a triumphant and exciting soundtrack that makes you feel ready to set out on an adventure. Protagonist Hat Girl is given a strong personality with almost no dialogue, and is one of my favorite new main characters in the past decade or so. The controls are tight and so much fun to use, which is critical to a platformer that relies on navigating spaces. Few games make simply moving around a level feel so natural and easy.

And while that all is nice, there’s one specific aspect of the design that I’d like to focus on: the construction of the worlds that serve as your digital playgrounds. A Hat in Time makes some interesting choices in how they went about building these stages that I feel like digging into a little, because I think the variety they provide are part of what keeps the game feel so exciting and new at every turn.