Now Playing at SUPERJUMP, Issue 24

We're back with another issue of Now Playing at SUPERJUMP! True to form, our team is spending their time with wildly different, unique expressions of our favorite hobby, from obscure indie titles to handheld gaming consoles. Enjoy this week's entries and we'll see you back here soon with more recommendations and odes to the games we love!

Lawrence Adkins

This summer has been a very busy period for me, so I'm squeezing in short play sessions when I can! I recently purchased an Analogue Pocket which has been a wonderful incentive to play my GBA games and get my Game Boy games new batteries. That said, the game that I’ve spent the most time with recently has been Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls. This GBA remake of the first two Final Fantasy games is chock full of old-school random encounters with stellar pixel art and a visually engaging world (enhanced by the Analogue Pocket’s LCD screen).

I’ve noted how older pixel art RPGs design their worlds, using structures and city layouts as summaries rather than one-to-one representations of the world. The first area, Cornelia, is a kingdom with a castle, citizens wandering about, and a small river running through it. I interpreted this as Cornelia being a small, quiet kingdom that just so happens to be placed at the center of the game’s map. While the music of each town is the same, I enjoy that it paints the cities of FF1 as peaceful areas that are encountering the darkness that wants to destroy their world for the first time in a while. I also missed being able to name my party members whatever I wanted. It feels like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, naming my party after my friends and me as we travel through the woods fighting Ogres and Goblins, sailing the seas on a boat we received as a gift from a pirate who had a change of heart. It’s all very endearing and I can only hope that the subsequent sequels maintain the same feeling, if not better.

Ivanir Ignacchitti

This week I've been playing through the demo for The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak. It's the eleventh entry in an interconnected JRPG series but the start of a brand new arc with a new cast. The demo covers the prologue and first chapter of the game, which is a good chunk of hours to play. I was honestly impressed by how the game manages to make the turn-based and action combat options feel significant and good to use in their own right. As the first to not offer only a traditional turn-based system, Daybreak really gets what makes both systems compelling. Action commands are simple and fluid, placing value on reaction timing and dodging. Meanwhile, activating Shards makes it turn-based instead, which comes with the usual variety of skills, magic, items, boosts, and other systems that value strategic planning. All in all, it felt really good to go back to this world and I can't wait to be able to play the full edition.

C.S. Voll

I finished AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative recently and while some elements did get repetitive near the ending, it also made some interesting story choices. There's also a nice little bonus for long-time Zero Escape fans once you finish all the routes. It really made me think deeper about interesting topics, like most Uchikoshi games tend to do, to be honest. Afterward, I started playing 428: Shibuya Scramble; it's also a Spike Chunsoft title (well, it was produced before the merger between Spike and Chunsoft, but it's essentially part of its lineage). One can make the argument that this game actually put the company on the map back in 2008. It definitely features many of the ideas, like the diverging storylines, that would reappear in later titles, like the Zero Escape series. The FMV aesthetic is kind of charming, too. I'm intrigued to see where this story goes because it almost feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Tow Min Yi

Before I started on my new Elden Ring run in preparation for the DLC, I decided I ought to knock off some short indie games from my backlog. The game I ended up picking was Signalis, an indie survival horror game with a sci-fi setting where you search for your lost lover and missing memories on an off-world base that’s been transformed into a living nightmare. I’m not normally a fan of horror games, indie or otherwise, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Silent Hill. It was to my pleasant surprise that these two games turned out to be similar in terms of gameplay and how the narrative slowly unfolds. That Signalis features a doomed romance as the focus of the story is the cherry on top of a delicious sundae! I can never have enough of star-crossed lovers.

Another thing of beauty is the game's gorgeous pixel art style. The dystopian sci-fi setting makes for a consistently brooding and tense atmosphere, and the soundtrack perfectly complements the pervasive sense of despair and hopelessness that lingers throughout the game. It’s not often that I encounter a game that hits a home run in all of these aspects, so Signalis definitely ended up being more memorable than I’d ever expected. The game has been out for almost two years at this point, but experiencing it once was enough to leave an indelible mark on me. I would even venture to say that Signalis will end up a timeless gem, in the same way fans have obsessed over Silent Hill for decades.

Jahanzeb Khan

Between moving house and other life stuff, gaming has been difficult to fit in, but that's where ol' faithful saves the day. By that I mean the Game Boy, still unquestionably the greatest video game handheld ever. Nothing comes close, not even the Switch. Two AA batteries can last for what feels like forever, and the better the quality and make of the battery the more playtime you can get. The Game Boy is ergonomically perfect and practical, and even the lack of a backlit screen isn't a deal breaker. Thanks to my Game Boy I've been able to have Tetris and Pac-Man on the go. Smartphones, Nintendo Switch, or any of those premium hand-held gaming PCs will never feel as portable or practical as a Game Boy. No charging station required, no electricity, just any set of AAs you can grab from anywhere.

CJ Wilson

I have played several games within this past week that are completely different from one another. They were Max Payne and Still Wakes the Deep. I replayed Max Payne on my Xbox Series X to see if I could enjoy the rest of the series. Playing through it again made me appreciate the comic book aesthetic within the cutscenes while loving the film noir story being told. The dialogue is absolutely fantastic with its atmosphere and tone, utilizing its main character as the narrator. Even the gameplay is superb with precise gunplay and cool slow-motion mechanics. While I found certain sections of the game annoying at times, I still enjoyed Max Payne to the end. I certainly see myself playing the sequels in the future.

With Still Wakes the Deep, I didn’t know what to expect from it. I played it on Game Pass through my Xbox and I understood that it was going to be a walking simulator with some horror elements. But what I found was an intensely atmospheric game with a compelling narrative. I cared about the characters, owing to their good performances, the image was beautiful but grotesque, and the story left me feeling a mixture of emotions. It’s clear that John Carpenter’s The Thing n inspired the main enemy here, an aspect I loved. Overall, I’m glad that I decided to play it even if I get very nervous when I play horror games.

Ignas Vieversys

I'm playing a lot of wacky stuff this week which works like chicken soup for my sleep-deprived, unemployable soul. Starting off with Santa Regione's upcoming black and white horror project Horses, which, besides giving strong A24 vibes (just watch the trailer and you'll see what I mean) and being very hush-hush in terms of giving fans anything to chew on, might be the most bonkers indie game I played this year - and all the better for it. Then there's also Free Lives' Anger Foot that's blessing gamers and feet aficionados worldwide this very week with Hotline Miami's pulsing insanity. Playing it feels like watching sped-up John Wick on three cups of espresso or surviving your first Death Grips moshpit. It's a doozy. Don't sleep on it (or else... I'll spam you with my feet pics and nobody wants that).

Then there's Elden Ring: Shadow of Erdtree which feels like going back to Tolstoy's "War and Peace" after reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". It's kicking my ass so far - I've finally beaten Messmer, that one-eyed, slithering schmuck (not gonna lie, he's cool as hell) - but its shadowy dragons and those super creepy Lantern-Headed ghouls that K.O. you if spotted are doing it, so it's hard to resist the appeal. And when the Shadow of the Erdtree difficulty that inspired countless opinion pieces on Miyazaki's sadistic game design philosophies starts to make your blood boil (inevitable), there's no better way to get back at the cruel cruel universe than switching to Anger Foot... or screaming into your pillow.

Bryan Finck

It's been more than a month since the last edition of "Now Playing...", and I've split my time between three games that couldn't be more different: Still Wakes the Deep, Elden Ring, and Dave the Diver.

The latest from "walking simulator" studio The Chinese Room, Still Wakes the Deep is a horrifying, dramatic, and atmospheric fight for your life on an oil platform in the North Sea. You can read my review here, but suffice it to say the game accomplishes what it sets out to do, delivering the scares with more interactivity than expected and some fantastic writing and voice work to boot.

With the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion releasing in June, I was like much of the gaming world in revisiting the base game to get back in the swing of things. I spent another 20 or so hours progressing my character, exploring mid-game areas like Altus Plateau and the two River Wells, while leveling up my character to somewhere in the mid-60s. I remembered why I love the game and why I can only take so much at once. I made amazing discoveries and died with laughable quickness. I played until I needed a break, and while I know I'll return to it before long, I craved a different experience, which is exactly what I got.

I've had my eye on Dave the Diver for months and once it hit PlayStation Plus Essential, it was on my shortlist. I'm a 2D platformer wonk, and while there are so many more layers to this game, the main gameplay sections of scuba diving, exploring, and catching fish are sublime 2D action at its best. The management sim aspects of running the sushi restaurant never get old, and the game adds so many extra mechanics and sidequests in quick succession that you never feel like the gameplay is getting stale. I'm loving every minute with Dave and his cast of friends and enemies; I can't recommend it more.

That's a wrap for this week's Now Playing at SUPERJUMP! Thank you for checking out the veritable treasure trove of games our team is playing right now, and be sure to check in next week when we're back with more.