[Sackboy: A Big Adventure] Make co-op levels optional or create dedicated co-op campaign

The end of year wind down is a real phenomenon for video games. I finally finished the PC effort I'd been working on for a couple months and then simply didn't start another one. Now, part of that was a very high level of real-life work stress that needed to be handled, and part of that was the act of raising three small kids who were suddenly out of school for a half a month taking up much of my own holiday time as well. The point though is that at the end of the year, it's nice to just relax a bit where we can, and for me that meant letting some stuff fall off and other stuff stretch out. It's a **6 games** kinda month, not counting the abandoned title tossed in there, and that's a feel-good kinda place to land. *(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)* &#x200B; &#x200B; \#81 - **Sackboy: A Big Adventure** - *PS5* - 4.5/10 (Disappointing) Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a lovely game to look at, though the aesthetic overall gives me some pause. The knitted/crafted style can do some beautiful things, but I first played Kirby's Epic Yarn on the Wii in 2010. I first played Yoshi's Woolly World on the Wii U in 2015. Most importantly, I first played Tearaway Unfolded on the PS4 in 2022 and *that* game more than anything else had me feeling like everything I saw in Sackboy was overly familiar. Not "look how gorgeous and creative this crafted world is" but "oh another one of these I guess." I imagine this feeling will be much less of a problem for anyone who hasn't recently played another platformer/adventure with a nearly identical aesthetic, but for me the style didn't add anything. Now the level design on the other hand, *that* stood out. Sackboy: A Big Adventure is full of nifty platforming ideas and I was continually impressed not only by the innate fun promised by its clever twists but also by how consistently my lust for exploration was rewarded by goodies and secrets. I made a point in the first world of 100% clearing every single level because I could tell this was a very well conceived game and collecting hidden treasures is an inherently fun exercise for me. That first impression ended up happily ringing true for the entire length of the game, but at only a handful of levels in I could feel the looming presence of frustration building. *Mandatory Co-op.* If you're going to commit to it, commit all the way. A game like It Takes Two is an end-to-end co-op only affair and it's marvelous. Puzzle game BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! has a co-op mode that's locked to its own unique campaign, and that to me highlights the choice laid out to game directors. When implementing co-op you've got to choose whether you want it to be its own mode with unique dedicated content (BB + BG) or cover your whole game. And if it covers your whole game, you've got to decide whether it's a fundamental, must-have pillar of your design (It Takes Two) or just an optional layer over top (a la any modern Super Mario Bros. game). You know, let people come and go as they please, but the core content is single-player focused and you can play the whole game that way. I don't know that I've ever seen a game like Sackboy, where the co-op layer is optional *except* for certain levels where it's simply not. These levels aren't required to finish the story, but *are* required if you're trying to full clear the game to get to the bonus post-credits content. The loading screens chime in with some advice like (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Don't have any friends you sad excuse for a human being? Maybe try our poorly implemented online matchmaking and pray that someone is still playing this game half a decade after release!" Five seconds into joining a random online session (you can't choose one) I realized it was a bust (it skipped me forward through most of the game to join the host's room - why would I want that?), and trying to host my own yielded no takers (unsurprisingly). Bereft of better options, I treated co-op like a dexterity challenge, grabbing the P2 controller and playing both characters simultaneously. It went better than expected in that I was actually able to 100% the levels with some effort, but I certainly wasn't much enjoying it. Which leads me to the heart of the matter: despite such promising design elements, the game's *mechanics* simply weren't fun to experience. Movement is responsive but somehow nevertheless feels sluggish. Maybe it's the animation or the fact that you have only your default movement speed to work with (i.e. no sprinting option), but the mere act of moving around the environment felt unsatisfactory. Jumping is pressure sensitive because you've got a little flutter jump move on button hold, but it's very unreliable and its existence tends to only mess with your timing. You've got a dodge roll that doesn't appear to have any iframes, and I didn't realize until maybe the 90%-through-the-game-mark thanks to a random loading screen tip that I was supposed to be using it to stun enemies. Which isn't ever necessary since any enemy you can stun you can also pretty much just attack and defeat straight away. Enemy hitboxes are infuriatingly ambiguous, and of course one of the challenges for each stage is a "no death" run that'll be ruined in an instant by some stray "hit" that'll have you screaming at your TV. The game has five worlds before its conclusion. I was partway through World 2 when I realized I my quest for 100% was sapping all the fun out of the game. I resolved to get all the orbs (the primary secret and how you unlock stages) still, but not worry about other objectives - they're all cosmetic anyway, and I've never cared about that. By World 3 I gave up on the co-op levels because they weren't worth the continued hair pulling, and that meant I might as well give up on the orbs too beyond what I needed to clear the game, which also meant giving up on the skill trials that I'd been dutifully working through. I beelined to the end from there, and the fun never did come back. Maybe the damage was already done, I don't know. It really does feel like whoever designed the stages for this game teed up something truly great, which the gameplay design folks managed to completely mangle. Depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing, you may well end up loving Sackboy. But me? I'm well glad it's part of my past now instead of my future. &#x200B; &#x200B; \#82 - **Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue** - *GB* - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing) This is one of the more maddening 6.5/10s I can remember giving. Lemme give you the full official description in my rubric of a 6.5/10: *Almost gets it right. Enjoyable, but there's always one key element that doesn't quite work. The "if only" of gaming, as in "if only this one thing were different..."* Now usually that "one wrong thing" is something so fundamental to the game's design that altering it would change the experience significantly - probably for the better, in my estimation, but of course I couldn't say that with certainty. And so normally I score a game that way and my thoughts boil down to "I can see the potential of what this could've been, but it isn't that. Oh well, still fairly fun on other levels." Radical Rescue on Game Boy bucks that trend because *its* "one wrong thing" is so maddeningly simple to change that it's really upsetting that the game is the way it is. I'm talking about difficulty. Specifically, boss difficulty; the general screen to screen gameplay is fine in this regard and healing items are plentiful enough in the environment that I've got no complaints there. But these *bosses*, man. They've all got substantially further reach than your turtles (who all seem to have identical hitbox properties on their own attacks), they deal triple damage with every hit, they've got multiple seconds' worth of iframes to burn through every time you do hit them, they can cancel some of their attacks into other ones to feint you, and each of their moves typically has one and only one way to successfully avoid it. And of course, they're damage sponges, so each fight is a mental marathon. Every boss is heckin' stinkin' *hard* is what I'm saying, mitigated only by the fact that you can go in with effectively two life bars if you snag a spare pizza on the way. Then if/when you die, you get two extra lives, though those will take away your stored pizzas, making it an even harder struggle. Run out of lives and it's back to the password screen and a fresh trek to the boss's lair. This is a Game Boy game! It's so infuriating because the rest of the design is *stellar*. Radical Rescue is a proper metroidvania title that sees you start as Michelangelo working through a single, massive dungeon to save the other three Turtles, Splinter, and April. They're held in cells that require keys (which you get from the bosses), but there are also scanner doors that need their own keycards. All these critical items are marked on the game's map (without identifying *which* item each location holds), and you have the map from the get-go. What's nifty about this map in particular is that you can see every room's location, shape, and room adjacencies, but cannot see actual room *connections*. You might follow one potential route towards an item only to find that it's inaccessible from that direction, so the map manages to strike that fine balance between ensuring you never get lost while also still forcing exploration. The Turtles themselves then act as your ability upgrades, with each rescued Turtle having his own special move that opens up new areas. You can swap between them freely, though they all share the same health bar. It's really an incredibly well designed Game Boy game in this regard, and feels really good to play to boot. And then you get to the end where the game makes you fight all its four guardian bosses back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a forced boss rush mode with no spare healing pizzas, followed immediately by two final boss forms. Utterly heinous, it's a final impression that does all it can to shatter the immense goodwill the rest of the game has worked so hard to build up. This is an 8.5 or even 9/10 Game Boy game that simply refuses to get out of its own way on this one easily adjustable element, but that element is so pivotal to the player experience that I can't help but penalize the whole thing. So my recommendation? Definitely go play this, and definitely just abuse save states or whatever you need to do to push through the boss fight issues. You'll have a much better time. &#x200B; &#x200B; \#83 - **Picross S** - *Switch* - 6/10 (Decent) From late 2020 through the end of 2021 I was on a Picross binge, playing all eight of the "Picross e" titles for the 3DS that made it to the West, and after that I was pretty well burned out. Four years later though I saw someone in the bi-weekly thread mention that they were playing some Picross and I'll be danged if the itch didn't come right on back. So it's into the Switch's "Picross S" series I went. One assumes the S is capitalized this time unlike the 3DS's e because the Switch isn't *merely* a handheld, but if you think I played this game in anything other than handheld mode then I don't know what to tell you. In short, it's just more Picross puzzles. Specifically it's 150 more Picross puzzles, even though the game markets itself as 300. This is because in every "mainline" title starting with Picross e6 (assuming my notes from 2021 are accurate) the more challenging Mega Picross mode simply reuses the game's base set of puzzles, a philosophy shift away from "give them unique content" towards "give them two ways to do the same content so we can save money and churn these babies out a little faster." I'd hoped the move to Switch might bring back some of the good ol' days when each puzzle was truly its own thing, but what even is a move to modernity if not actively making all products and services worse for the consumer? Consider that on the 3DS, they'd use the top screen to show you a preview of the image you were creating, gradually introducing color so you could get a sense of what you were forming and have a moment of triumphant satisfaction at completing the picture. Switch doesn't have a second screen, and adding colors to the actual playing field would impact contrast and therefore readability of the puzzle, so you just make pure monochrome stuff that half the time you can't even parse until the game tells you what you're supposed to be seeing. "Oh cool, I just made a pair of ice skates." "*BOAT ANCHOR.*" "Right, a boat anchor." It might as well be called Picross Rorshach, but then again if I were just doing nonograms with pencil and paper I'd be in the same position, so I suppose I can't complain too much about that. Instead I'll complain about the inexplicable performance problems. Of all the games, why is it frikkin' Picross that suffers framerate drops and stuttering on my Switch? Why can I play Tears of the Kingdom in handheld mode without much issue but trying to color in a row of black squares starts hitching? I just don't get it, man. Anyway...yeah. It's Picross. I like Picross, okay? I like it enough that I'll probably still play at least the next game in the series despite being disappointed with how this one went, because I'm a sucker for a good (or apparently also less-than-good) nonogram binge from time to time. &#x200B; &#x200B; \#84 - **Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2013)** - *PC* - 8/10 (Great) It's rare that I get to review a game that I've just finished for the first time and yet find myself having to balance nostalgia with current reality. That sort of thing only happens when you, say, play a game for dozens of hours, quit it right before the final boss, then come back and replay the whole thing start to finish in an updated form 20-some years later. Baldur's Gate II is one of those rare moments and I gotta say: it feels wonderful to dig out this thorn in my gaming side that's been dogging me for two decades. I finished the first game and its expansion right around the time the second one came out, and in that time we've had three (and a half) new DnD rulesets. We've seen CRPGs as a whole undergo stylistic changes such that at a glance they barely resemble the same genre of video game. We've seen "player's choice" romance systems become an RPG staple, in part because Bioware "invented" it for Baldur's Gate II when the directors felt a pressing need to "keep up" with advances made in Final Fantasy VII. What I'm saying is it's been a heckin' long time, and so in me there's this divide between the contemporary game I remember truly loving and the throwback game that I'm not sure has aged quite so well. The biggest annoyance for me is just the walking. *So much walking*. Oh sure, you can fast travel between distinct map regions (at the low cost of your mandatory one-and-only-one random encounter along the way), but this is a game that'll give you your own base of operations, stick it in a remote corner of a section of a map, and tell you to get hoofin' if you want to go check out your stash. Just lemme warp there! And the sheer quantity of walking both reveals and exacerbates the other constant annoyance: AI pathing. Even in this Enhanced Edition, party members are *dumb* when it comes to moving together. They'll split up, they'll wander dead ends aimlessly, they'll try to shortcut through buildings they can't access, and most frequently they'll run into each other and vibrate for an extended period before someone finally steps aside. So much of Baldur's Gate II is spent just watching your characters try (and often fail) to move from point A to point B. But you know, that's just the old jank at work, so I accepted that as part of the package - perhaps strangely even part of the charm. What I found less charming here in my older age was the way so many encounters in the game seem to be designed around pure trial and error. Enter a room and a dialog is forced, at the conclusion of which combat is entered, and then you're up against the gods know what. Creatures you've never seen with abilities you can't predict or even discover/reference in-game, like "can only be hit by a +3 weapon or better on the third Tuesday of July." Enemy spellcasters with defenses that render all your standard prepared stuff useless. Areas where your attempts at healing the injured instead merely conjure gems into your pocket. The entire game - and *especially* the major boss encounters - revolve around dying a bunch, loading a save, reconfiguring all your spellbooks, resting, re-buffing, saving again, and then hoping this time things go better. It's a great way to create challenge, I'll grant you, and the feeling of overcoming one of these fights is pretty nice indeed...but it ain't really DnD. You know what *is* pretty DnD though? The story progression in BG2 felt very much like a proper DnD campaign and I adored it for that. You've got your overarching plot, you've got your tangential major quests with multiple legs, you've got completely independent side quests that are still fully realized things, and of course you've got a number of big, proper dungeons to sink your inner goblin's teeth into. All of these glitz you with exciting loot, which in turn typically has its own fun lore, and so the gameplay loop ends up feeling terrific all the way through. I was invested the whole way not just in reaching the conclusion of the primary story arc but also in simply seeing everything the world had to offer. Which surprised me, because I promised myself at the outset I wouldn't do that! I was just trying to right an old wrong of incompletion; I didn't want this thing to take me two months to play. Well, two months later, here I am. I couldn't help it. Just sucked me right in. Lastly, I mentioned magic up above as context for some complaints, but a big part of the allure of DnD (or other fantasy tabletop RPGs) to me is in the freedom of imagination the magic system provides. There are spells for nearly anything you can think of, and then there are all kinds of ways to use those spells as well, limited in large part only by your own creativity. In the first Baldur's Gate there were still plenty of spell options, but as that adventure concerns a relatively lower level party, much of the most interesting stuff remained inaccessible. Baldur's Gate II takes those shackles right the heck off and it's glorious. You wanna kill a dragon by creating a bubble of locally frozen time, simulcasting three "magic defense down" shots, firing off an anti-saving curse, pointing a finger at it menacingly, and then watching it instantly drop dead in the span of effectively a fraction of a second once time resumes? Baldur's Gate II lets you do all that and much, much more. It can be hair-pullingly frustrating when you're on the wrong side of the absurdity, but this is a game that allows the player's imagination to run wild about as well as one can possibly expect from a video game, and it did it a quarter of a century ago. I think if I'd finished this one back in the day the score would've landed even higher, but between the technical/gameplay drawbacks and the fact that DnD 2E has been so thoroughly outshined by basically every iteration since, my nostalgia and modern sensibilities average this one out to the territory of "still great." The story offered no closure whatsoever, perhaps because in the Enhanced Edition here it goes straight into the expansion with no break. Nevertheless I gave myself a short holiday break from the grind before I kick January off by diving into Throne of Bhaal for the first time. Once more into the <Breach-Breach-Breach-Greater Malison-Finger of Death>, as they say. &#x200B; &#x200B; \#85 - **Splatoon 3: Side Order** - *Switch* - 8.5/10 (Excellent) Let's be clear: though all three Splatoon games have increasingly robust campaign modes, they're all multiplayer-centric endeavors first and foremost. Some of you have probably dodged the series for that reason, like "hey this concept seems interesting but I don't want to play a team-based PvP third-person shooter," and that's totally fair. Some might fall in the opposite camp of "heck yeah this team-based PvP third-person shooter stuff is a blast" without feeling any particular draw to the single player content. That makes the Side Order expansion a hard sell to either side - if you've already got Splatoon 3 but don't care about single player stuff, a single player expansion probably isn't what you're looking for. If you don't have Splatoon 3 because you just want quality single player content, you're probably not going to go buy the base game AND its expansion just to get at this nugget of joy, and it'd be hard to blame you for that. Therefore to me it seems like Side Order was created for that niche of players who thoroughly enjoy both a good single player experience as well as Splatoon's unique brand of multiplayer mayhem. In other words: me. Side Order itself is a roguelite game, and I do say game rather than "mode," which is how I initially dismissed the expansion altogether as unworthy. For a while there it felt like everybody was slapping a roguelike DLC onto their games, and while certain of those efforts may well have been good times, when one got announced for Splatoon 3 I just kind of scoffed it off. Turns out I was wrong about that, so I'm very glad my curiosity and boredom blended together just right here at the end of the year to finally check it out. The gist is that your mind is trapped in cyberspace and to get out you've got to climb a tower one floor at a time until you reach and defeat the big bad at the top. Each floor gives you a set of three challenge options to choose from, each with its own ability reward that'll last for the duration of the run. I was pleasantly surprised by the huge variety of these choices, ranging from basic stuff pulled from the main game (ink efficiency, movement speed, damage boosts, etc.) to new stuff built specifically for this content (item spawns, shot piercing, etc.). Most notably there is a whole range of abilities tied to your new "drone," which by default warns you of nearby enemies and allows you to glide jump, but can be enhanced with passive bombs, ink coverage, and even powerful super moves. When I successfully cleared the very first run after booting it up, I was a bit concerned that I'd fallen for the bait and this was a bare bones kind of thing, but that quickly turned to relief when it was made obvious that I'd only beaten the tutorial run. After that the tower tripled in size and the real fun began. While your per-floor abilities reset each run, you can (after that first successful foray through the tutorial) start unlocking permanent upgrades with a secondary currency you get along the way. I struggled for a while against the tower early on, stubbornly trying to force a certain ill-advised loadout to work for me, but once I got some permanent upgrades going I really noticed the difference. I beat the game for real on the fifth day of playing it, and it's a sign of how much I enjoyed it that I quite happily continued on after for an additional eight days to clear it with the other 11 weapon loadouts as well, being rewarded with additional story content for my efforts. Even after that I'd have been happy to go back yet more were I still in any way engaged with Splatoon 3's multiplayer, since you can use Side Order's progression currency to unlock gear and cosmetic options for the main game as well. All this to say Side Order is a terrific experience that I heartily recommend to anyone who's a fan of roguelikes, third-person shooters, or especially both...but given the barrier to entry I'm guessing it's a relatively small cross section of players who will ever experience it. &#x200B; &#x200B; XX - **Pokémon Stadium** - *N64* - Abandoned Think back to the spring of 1999. Pokémon had just hit American Game Boy systems like a bolt of lightning six months earlier, and now the face of that lightning was showing up in a brand new type of fighting game called Super Smash Bros. It was the first time we'd seen any of these creatures meaningfully animated in a video game, and it sparked a deep yearning in many a Pokéfan to get a proper 3D, fully animated game experience. Luckily we'd only be waiting a little under a year for Pokémon Stadium to debut on the Nintendo 64, bringing dreams to life. (Aside: Yes, I know my European brethren had to wait even longer for these events to transpire, but they did happen in the same order so the points should hold.) Pokémon Stadium doesn't seem terribly ambitious in retrospect but at the time the sales pitch of “you get to battle using your Game Boy team in full color, fully animated 3D complete with an announcer” made for a very enticing proposition. I mean, when your alternative consists of JPEGs "roaring" in chiptune, how could it not? So I remember this game being mightily popular, and it's likely that the only reason I never owned it is that I also never owned any of the Pokémon Red, Blue, or Yellow versions. I'd borrowed Blue from a friend for a while, so I wasn't completely out of the loop, and I eventually owned Gold version. But Gold and Silver weren't supported by Stadium, so a lot of the draw to the home console game was gone for me.  Here so many years later I can only conclude I was right to stay away under the circumstances. All the tech advances this game offers have been outdone many times over by even the shoddy modern efforts of the mainline series, such that the novelty of the battling is gone. More importantly, with no Game Boy connectivity you're locked to a selection of poorly developed rental Pokémon, who are quickly outclassed as you progress through a given tournament. As such, I played several rounds of just one of the tournaments before I decided I'd seen enough. There's a solid dozen hours of (highly repetitive) content in here if you've the Game Boy link to make it worthwhile, but absent that array of retro tech, five minutes is all you need for the whole picture. &#x200B; &#x200B; \#86 - **Kid Icarus** - *NES* - 4/10 (Unsatisfying) This was my what, fifth or sixth attempt to play and actually get through this game? I'd never made it past stage 1-3 before, and even reaching that took some real doing because the first world of Kid Icarus feels like it's designed specifically to make people bounce off the game. It's a platformer, but instead of scrolling horizontally you move steadily upward, your horizontal movement noteworthy only for an admittedly neat little screen wrap effect that the platforming itself is partially built around. Of course, given the vertical nature of the affair, missing a jump generally means instant death, and of course, enemies continuously drop down onto you from the top of the screen as you go, which means it's fitting that these stages represent the Underworld, because they're genuinely hellish to play. Adding to that oppressiveness is the game's shop system and economy. Every slain enemy drops hearts (which like in Castlevania represent a form of currency rather than health), but shop prices are very high, meaning you need to do extensive grinding for anything you might want. But enemies have limited respawns, so there's also a firm ceiling on how much grinding is able to help you. Finally, there's no going backwards, and shops lock their doors behind you once you exit them, so it's impossible to save up for "that one thing" you saw in the shop. Once in, once out, nevermore.  All of this is why I noped out of Kid Icarus several times over, but earlier this year I revisited a retrospective on the game that talked about how the game was built in a kind of "reverse difficulty" way, getting easier the further you went. Which would mean that the opening stages are indeed designed to sift out the quitters (Past Me guilty as charged, I guess). Thematically it makes sense because Pit spends the game gradually ascending towards the heavens, where naturally evil has less of a hold. And indeed, this time around once I pushed through to stage 1-4 for the first time my relationship with the game changed quite a bit. Here was a proper dungeon! With loot and objectives and a map and a boss! Meaningful horizontal movement! New enemies! Instantly Kid Icarus became a much stronger experience. Then World 2 is a more traditional horizontal scrolling action platformer, and you get some permanent upgrades along the way that make combat less of a burden, and yeah...*this* is a game I'm willing to play. The vertical stages did eventually return, which sucked, but I still had my permanent upgrades for them, which mitigated the annoyance a little. All of it culminates in a final stage that completely abandons the platformer genre altogether, transforming into a very low stress horizontal shooter with an absolute joke of a final boss. Kid Icarus feels like torture at the outset and a waste of time at the conclusion, but there's a precious hour or two there in the middle that strikes a good balance and lands in worthwhile territory. Just a shame there's not more of it. &#x200B; --- **Coming in January:** * From one expansion into another, as mentioned above I'll be playing through the Enhanced Edition upgrade for **Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal** throughout the month of January. I'm not sure whether I'm more excited to discover its content for the first time or to put it behind me and get back to the freedom of starting brand new PC experiences, but either way I'm eager to play. * Speaking of expansions, December didn't just bring me itches of Picross and post-nuclear cartoon shooters - It also brought me an itch for souls. Initially I was going to go in one direction to scratch that itch, but then remembered that **Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree** had been sitting on my list for quite some time. Considering the main game was my personal Patient Game of the Year for 2023, playing its expansion felt like a must. * On the portable front my pattern goes like this: Big Game, Borrowed Game, Retro Game, Small Game, Book. We're at the "Small Game" step of that sequence heading into the new year, and so I think I'll swing back around to **Overcooked**, a game I briefly dabbled in on the co-op side with my wife a couple years back. If any game has me scared of joy-con drift, it's probably this one. * And more... &#x200B; &#x200B; [← Previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1pbdppl/chronicles_of_a_prolific_gamer_november_2025_ft/)|**[2025](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1qausgy/chronicles_of_a_prolific_gamer_2025_year_in_review/)**|[Next →](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1qszumn/chronicles_of_a_prolific_gamer_january_2026_ft/) :--|:--:|--: