The World of Insufficient Light

When you get hit by a truck, it turns out that Earth was all just a simulation and you actually live on a floating island called Everafter Falls with a bunch of animal people (and a robot buddy!) who have peace, prosperity, and very minor drama.

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Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.

This is a vertical Game Boy styled 3.5” screen device that we’ve seen plenty of before. It’s got USC-C charging and a headphone jack, two SD card slots (but you only need one), and a dedicated menu button. (And oddly, a downward-firing speaker. Not sure I’ve seen that before?) Side-by-side with a R36S, it’s a little bit heavier and feels a little sturdier, but has basically the same dimensions. It’s also running EmulationStation as the front-end, with a different default UI from an R36S, but similar results. (After tuning it to my preferences, I expect the experience to be very similar.)

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Overall: The big selling point here is that it’s better than the R36S at the same price point as the R36S. This is probably the best Tier 2 device at the $30 price point, so then it’s just whether you want to pay up for higher-end system performance or a different form-factor.

I thought that between the advances in retro handheld technology and the ridiculous tariff nonsense that I was done getting packages from China. Well, that lasted a couple of months, but then there was a sale and I figured I probably didn’t have a lot more chances, so I got three more handhelds, all around $30 after various discounts.

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Overall: What I’d really want to do—which I’m certain isn’t feasible—is take the internals from this and put them in the RG50XX, because that had half-decent (though still cheap, let’s be honest) build quality but was hobbled by terrible software, and this gives you access to all the software tools to make things playable but is one of the worst-built handhelds I’ve used. Honestly, most of the $10 Famiclone bootleg handhelds (…though not all) were more playable.

Terrifying rifts in space keep opening in Hyrule and swallowing up everything…including Link! Fortunately, Princess Zelda has a magic duplication wand and a magical buddy and she’s coming to save the day.

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Overall: I give them a lot of credit that it’s a 2D Zelda game but it’s also something new and different.

Another Stardew Valley-like, but in this one you’re playing as a member of a primitive tribe who were led by the spirits to the new land and must build their civilization there. Find wild seeds and wild animals and domesticate them as your tribe invents the trappings of civilization for you to use.

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Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.

Clearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.

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Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.

It’s time to clear a variety of games off my Steam backlog. Five roughly ten-hour experiences in radically different genres:

Kingdom Rush Vengeance - A tower defense game with a nominal plot (a sealed-away dark wizard escapes and sets out to conquer the world) that’s really an excuse to set your minions against everyone in your way. The Kingdom Rush series has always sat in my “middle ground” place for tower defense, because what I really want is something totally grind-able (like Gemcraft), and this only gives you upgrades when you complete the main campaign stages and has limited levels for your heroes. (I do really like the click-and-find achievements hiding in most stages, though.) Still, it came as part of a Humble Bundle and I got my money’s worth of entertainment, even without re-doing every stage at higher difficulty/challenge mode and also doing all of the expansion stages.

The Messenger – A Ninja Gaiden-em-up with tongue planted firmly in cheek; you spend a lot of time clinging to walls, air-jumping off projectiles, and rope-darting across gaps. The second half switches from being linear to being a metroidvania that I would have found too obtuse without a guide—the world is too large, the travel too treacherous, and the fast-travel points too few for the amount of crisscrossing the map you have to do. The difficulty starts very reasonable (for the genre) but my number of deaths rose dramatically as the game went on. (You have infinite lives, but the demon buddy who revives you takes a bunch of the Time Stones you collect when you respawn.) I found that the difficulty level teetered just on the edge of too much; I had a bunch of points where I died a lot, got frustrated, but eventually came back and made it through. This was very much a game I had to play in bursts and stop to rest when I started getting sloppy—but in turn I’m rather smug that I got through the whole thing.

Ocean’s Heart – A 2D Zeldalike with a mixed amount of open-worldness; pirates attacked your town and kidnapped your friend, so now you need to follow in your father’s footsteps and go hunt them down. Along the way you’ll find the usual selection of bombs, bow, boomerang, and spell amulets. (Bombs are maddeningly limited for much of the game.) Instead of heart drops, you need to collect fruit or craft potions to restore health, though that also means you can build up a huge stock of healing by the midgame. There are also a lot of weapon and armor upgrades to find and collect, so the difficulty of various areas can be wildly variable depending on whether you’ve done sidequests. I died a LOT in the first couple of hours, but once I had a few armor upgrades and health upgrades (not to mention a proper stock of health potions) I didn’t die at all in the latter two-thirds of the game. Especially if you’ve been keeping up with upgrades, bosses are actually really easy and it’s only attrition that’ll take you down—which is avoidable with your massive stock of healing items. I would have liked proper dungeon maps and maybe a more detailed world map, but the quest log is great and the fast travel is very helpful. This is a fun game with just enough plot for the dungeons and vice-versa.

Children of Zodiarcs – A “Square-Enix Collective” game which mashes together a tactical rpg, a deck-builder rpg, and a dice-based combat system. You maneuver around the battle map in classic trpg style, pick your attacks from your custom attack deck (and the size of your hand also impacts some effects and can be affected by spells), and every attack is resolved by rolling custom dice. You gain new cards by gaining levels; you win new dice in battle or craft them from your excess stock. There’s no equipment or consumables; and each character is unique with no class system or anything like that. Despite the abundance of systems, there’s actually very little customization and you don’t even get to choose your party for battles (and about a quarter of the battles are with completely uncustomizable teams anyway). You can grind side battles on normal mode, but if you’re underleveled the enemies are weakened anyway, so it’s not necessary and at least once for me was counterproductive; you really can just charge right through and if luck goes against you, reset and try again. This game has an amazing amount of board game-ness to it for something that doesn’t play at all like a board game. The plot revolves around a small street gang who’ve happened into a very important artifact in a world that had previous been decimated by wars that used the Zodiarcs; but it stays in a very small corner of that world and you basically fight the same battles with the city guard, the rival gangs, and the weird cultists half a dozen times each. I suspect people were expecting a big Final Fantasy Tactics experience from both the systems and the story here, and the disappointment is what lead to mixed reviews of the game. That said, while I don’t think it was brilliant and I didn’t feel the need to thoroughly do everything, I beat it and had some fun with it.

Worlds of Magic – I backed a Kickstarter for this and it was released back in (checks notes) 2015…and it’s sat on my backlog since. It’s a fancy, juiced-up version of the 4X classic Master of Magic, that I’ve replayed (and played official enhanced hacks of) several times in that interim. They added a lot of new overworld features and tweaked a bunch of mechanics, but the majority of the actual gameplay (including unit types and tech trees) is identical. A bunch of the mechanics are a little janky (and not just in that they fight my muscle memory), as units tend not to move along set paths you make for them and need to be micromanaged. There are also graphical glitches in battle to the point of the game freezing if you bring a magic spirit into a battle on water. Also, Hero inventory is a mess where things appear and disappear at random. But the biggest change and the biggest problem I found was that units don't gain experience over time, only in battle, and the battles that you can beat are very limited. Which means leveling up your heroes is a mammoth endeavor (of micromanaging!) and that really changes the power curve of the game. I think it’s also interesting that most of the achievements—including the really basic ones you can get in the first few hours—have a very low percentage of players who have them. That implies that a lot of people who bought this barely touched it. (And reviews from the people who played more of it complain that it’s unfinished and prone to crashes in the late-game.) I gave it the ol’ college try and played ten hours, conquering the Prime Plane (and covering it in settlements) and meeting the enemy wizard in the Water Plane before I decided I’d gotten the experience and my money’s worth.

Overall: A mixed bag, though I enjoyed them all for the time I put in. The Messenger and Ocean’s Heart get recommended if the descriptions appeal to you.

This is a squat and remarkably square device, which is more screen than anything else. The unusual form-factor was the reason I bothered with it, as it’s mostly just another device in the $30-40 range that plays the standard range of classic systems.

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Overall: This picked one thing to do well (play GBA games at 2X resolution on a small form-factor), but that’s kind of the only selling point. It’s not quite compact/pocketable enough to compete with one of the 2.8” screen micro devices at the same price point, but a RG35XX-H or Trimui Smart Pro has it beat on power and capability for only slightly more money. I like that it’s a little different, but I think it’s trying to stand out in a niche that’s already pretty saturated.

The makers of the Miyoo Mini bring us this tiny little horizontal candy bar with a 2.8 inch screen; clearly they believe that smaller handhelds are the ideal. This is the smallest system I’ve used since the original Trimui Mini; it’s even more compact than the Powkiddy Q90, and it’s shockingly good.

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Overall: This is finally something that I think can take the place of the Powkiddy Q90, a candy bar that's reasonably comfortable to play on that can fit into pretty much any pocket, but is cheap enough you don't mind if something happens to it. It plays more systems and fixes a bunch of flaws the older system had (it plays SNES perfectly, it upscales GBA properly, and can even manage some N64 and DS). And even buying a fresh SD card to load separately, you can’t argue with the price. ($30 on AliExpress)

This is the knockoff Playstation Portal that I got on a lark when it dipped to $30 on AliExpress. (And yes, I know I said I was pretty much finished with handhelds, but I was bored and they were cheap and seemed like I’d get a few hours of entertainment out of some weird new things.)

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Overall: This was a blast from the past (...five whole years ago), but in a world where you can get a R36S for basically the same price and it’ll run real RetroArch and everything up to DS well (And even PSP/N64 badly), there’s no reason anyone else should ever buy it.