Now Playing at SUPERJUMP, Issue 18

We're back with another issue of Now Playing at SUPERJUMP! Our team has been working on a few new games and plundering their backlogs, so enjoy this week's entries and we'll see you back here soon with more recommendations and odes to the games we love!

CJ Wilson

This past week I had finally gotten around to some games that have been in my backlog. One that I finished recently was The Complex, an FMV game where you make a variety of choices in a story centered around preventing a virus from escaping a laboratory. I was surprised at how tense the gameplay could be, as you must make your choices quickly to advance the mission plot, but I was satisfied with the ending I got on my first playthrough. After that, getting all of the endings along with some miscellaneous trophies/achievements is an easy process since, in later playthroughs, you can skip scenes you've already witnessed.

Another game I played was Celeste. While it was certainly a challenging platformer at times, it had a poignant story of mental illness that resonated with me on an emotional level. You understood why Celeste wanted to climb the mountain and come to terms with her inner demons, and it made me want to reach the end of the game, even if I skipped most of the hidden strawberries in each level.

Leah Isobel:

Celeste is such a good game! I love how, in the last few levels, it gets you to perform actions that felt impossible at the beginning. Did you play through the Farewell DLC as well?

CJ Wilson:

Yeah it felt great to finally double-jump through the levels even if they are still challenging. I haven’t played the DLC yet, but I figured that was next since I saw on walkthroughs online that there are three more levels once you beat the story.

Rachel Alm

My boyfriend and I have been running through Overcooked 2 and just this week we beat the game. I didn’t really think much when I nabbed the free download, but we’ve been looking for a good couch co-op ever since It Takes Two left the game catalogue. Overcooked 2 is hilarious and adorable, with a very cute art style and plenty of chaotic stages. You have to collaboratively navigate the puzzle of a level together and fire up recipes with increasingly complicated steps and stage mechanics (floating platforms, rotating counters, etc.). We had a ton of fun beating our high scores and tossing food at each other over references to The Bear, and occasionally turning it into a PvP. I highly recommend it to people looking for a fun game with friends. I feel like I missed the train with it when it came out, but I'm so glad we stumbled across it now!

Leah Isobel

This week I've been digging into the Unicorn Overlord demo, and it seems like it's gonna be good! When I was a kid, I went on a vacation once with my cousin, who brought his PlayStation and a bunch of incredible PS1 RPGs - Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, and Lunar Silver Star Story. That trip became one of my most formative gaming experiences. At that age, I didn't really understand the systemic complexity beneath any of the games I played (like, I definitely did not get the progression system in Legend of Mana or anything in Valkyrie Profile). Still, I was really struck by the sense of mystery those games exuded, because I could feel that there was a lot beneath the surface that I wasn't comprehending. It was an early lesson in how mechanical design creates emotional responses.

Unicorn Overlord smacks of that feeling. It offers a lot of complexity - I create individual units of up to 6 party members, all of whom have different classes with different skills, weapon loadouts, and so on - and then move those units around the battlefield. So there's a lot of room to experiment with party member distribution, finding the different ways that classes interact with their unique skills. The world is very open-ended, too; I find battles by exploring the overworld, but I can go in basically any direction I like. Characters might say that I shouldn't go in a certain direction because there are very strong enemies that way, but I can ignore them if I want. It all feels very freeform. It's sort of intimidating, in that sense - there are tutorials and many ways to experiment in lower-stakes environments, but it still feels mysterious and confusing. Yet it feels refreshing, and it's nice to have a game that isn't afraid to make me feel like I'm not getting it.

Bryan Finck

After finishing Cyberpunk 2077 (finally!), I've been working my way through the game's various endings, each one better than the last. I can't wait to start a whole new playthrough as a Corpo kid. Or I might just stay in my original save and do a ton of side quests. Or... that's the beauty of the game, so much to do and there's no wrong answer.

Now, after watching the documentary about the making of The Last of Us Part 2, I've gone back to the tragic masterpiece for the first time since it was released in 2020. The improvements in the Remastered PS5 version are quite noticeable, and I'm really enjoying the commentary that can be played over the cutscenes. I'm looking forward to the No Return mode as well, and earning some great alternate costumes for Ellie and Abby along the way.

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 back next week when we're back with more.