A new PS5 epic does smart, little things to respect its player’s time
Plus: A game of the decade (?) contender, and a chat with the Mario movie's composer
Rise of the Ronin, this week’s big PlayStation 5 exclusive, has a quality I increasingly value in the video games I play: It avoids wasting my time.
To be clear: I’m not saying it’s a short game. In fact, it’s a sprawling open world action adventure set in Japan’s Bakumatsu Period (the mid-19th century) that’ll probably take me dozens of hours to see through.
Rise of the Ronin is also not a svelte game. In recent previews, the third-person action game from Team Ninja (Nioh, Ninja Gaiden) has been compared to one of those Ubisoft mega-games where the world map has a severe rash of tasks to clear. Not unjustifiable. Rise of the Ronin has main missions and side missions, archery challenges and photography mysteries, friends to make, bandit camps to clear, books to find, gifts to give, a base to decorate, and cats to rescue (the calicos run away, so you have to sneak up on them).
Lest I waste too much of your time, I’ll get to the point.
Lots of games these days are designed to consume all your time. Call them “black hole games,” “games as service, even “games as a platform,” but I might also call them “games that appear to be made without much concern that I have anything else to do in my life but play them.”
I have therefore been delighted to discover that Rise of the Ronin is full of little conveniences that respect my time.
The game’s time-saving touches may spare me just a few minutes or even just a second here or there, but they nevertheless feel like a kindness from Rise of the Ronin’s developers.
Some of the best I’ve spotted so far:
Automated loot disposal: You pick up a lot of weapons, outfits and items in Rise of the Ronin, most of them color-coded to indicate rarity. Like the best loot games (but, sadly, not all), Team Ninja’s game will automatically disassemble (or sell) any loot I pick up that’s below a certain level of rarity (I can pick the level). That spares me from spending precious minutes clearing out weak items from my inventory.
Automatically getting on your horse: Many, many open-world games give you a horse that you can summon with a whistle. Too few of them make your character automatically jump into the saddle when the horse trots over. Rise of the Ronin does. It saves a second and has a nice flow to it.
Self-guided horses: Once you’re on your horse, you can pick any spot on the game’s map and, with a press of a button, command your steed to gallop there. Rise of the Ronin’s virtual Japan is full of cliffs and valleys and plenty of opportunities to waste time running the wrong way. But my horse knows the right path and can always take me along for the ride.
Endless running outside of combat: Stamina meters in video games force players to ration their character’s actions lest they exhaust themselves. That’s a good system during combat, but can be aggravating when just trying to travel somewhere (For example: I want to sail across the Indian Ocean in Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones pirate game, but I keep having to slow down when my ship’s stamina meter gets low. Annoying!). Rise of the Ronin’s stamina meter keeps players in check during combat, but the meter turns infinite when the fighting is done, allowing our in-game hero to sprint across the map forever. It’s unrealistic, but who cares?
Lots of fast travel: Yes, Rise of the Ronin’s map is freckled with activity icons. Many of them are checkpoints that can be fast-traveled to at just about any moment.
Never see a cutscene twice: If you see a cutscene in Rise of the Ronin, then fail the mission that follows it, you don’t have to watch the cinematic again. You don’t even have to watch the start of it while holding down a button to skip it, as is common in many games. Rise of the Ronin has a setting that will automatically skip any cutscene you’ve seen before. Thank you!
Frame-skip photo mode: Just about every mega-game has a photo mode these days. You freeze the game and can then adjust the camera to line up a perfect screenshot. Sometimes you’ve paused at just the wrong time. To fix that, you usually need to unpause and try again, which takes time. That’s less of an issue in Rise of the Ronin, because its photo mode lets the player advance the frozen scene’s in-game animations one frame at a time to get to a better moment for a better screenshot.
None of these features are the reason you buy the game.
All of them nevertheless make it a shade easier to fit Rise of the Ronin into my life. I value that a lot these days. Games keep getting bigger. Many are designed to take up more of our time and money.
I certainly appreciate one that uses its tech and smart design to cut down on tedium and just maybe give me a few minutes of my life back that some other game was going to waste.
Item 2: Balatro is a Game of the Year (Decade?) contender
Like poker? Play Balatro.
Don’t like poker? Play Balatro.
The strategy game from solo developer LocalThunk deploys the rules of poker hands (pairs, three of a kind, straight, full house, etc) into one of the most captivating and streamlined strategy games you can find.
Balatro (PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch*) has little to do with real poker. There are no other players. There’s no bluffing.
There’s your 52-card deck and a series of blinds—or dollar totals to clear—by playing three or four hands from the cards dealt from your deck.
The twist is that the game offers some 150 joker cards, each with special abilities, and lets you discover and then set five (or so) active as you play. One joker might give you extra points for any even-numbered cards in the hand you’ve played. Another does that with odd-numbered cards. One of my favorite jokers multiplies the value of your played hand by the number of consecutive times you’ve played hands that didn’t include any face cards (I’ve been able to do get a 40-hand streak going). An even more complicated and even more useful joker multiplies the value of your hand by double the value of the lowest card you’ve been dealt but didn’t play.
Not following?
It’s okay. None of this is as confusing as it may read, because the game doles out special cards slowly and does all the math for you.
I won’t even try to describe what planet cards do, to avoid scaring you off.
Balatro was a surprise hit during the last Steam Next Fest, is getting one breathless review after another, is coming to mobile, and, just today was announced to have sold 1,000,000 copies in a month.
Play it soon so you know what people are talking about when next year’s award season begins.
Item 3: Feeding the Martians
The odd little monochromatic Play Date handheld—the one that has buttons and a crank—just got a perfectly weird new game.
Mars After Midnight is a comedic strategy game about feeding hungry Martians. It plays especially well thanks to the aforementioned crank.
It also doesn’t hurt that it’s the first new game in more than five years from celebrated indie developer Lucas Pope (Papers Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn).
The first step of playing: Figure out what type of Martians you want to serve on a given night. Maybe you’ll serve frowning cyclopes? Or unblinking Martians? Or those who don’t blow away in the wind when you blast them with air?
Then: You wait behind a door, listening for a knock (or in some cases a fart, if that’s what you’re screening for). Turn the crank to open the eyehole and see if each visitor meets the night’s criteria.
Next: Let them eat at a dining table, then lift the plates with your tentacle arms, turn the crank to sweep the table, re-set things and repeat.
Half the fun is figuring out how the game actually works. There’s a translator? And you use it with which button? When?
And, wait, what did that Martian just say?
With luck, Mars After Midnight will come to other platforms in the future, but probably without the crank.
Item 4: In brief…
🥽 Sony is pausing production of PSVR2 headsets as slow sales fail to keep pace with inventory, Bloomberg reports. (Sony has not commented yet.)
😲 The North American esports finals for EA’s Apex Legends had to be postponed after hackers managed to activate cheats in competitors’ games as they played mid-tournament, Forbes reports.
🤔 LinkedIn is experimenting with adding puzzle games to the popular Microsoft-owned jobs app / social platform, TechCrunch reports.
Item 5: Mario movie music that you may have missed
Brian Tyler, composer of 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie, thinks there is one reference to classic Mario music that fans haven’t identified in the movie yet.
Mario music experts should focus on a scene where Mario is traveling to Princess Peach’s castle, he told me when we chatted backstage at the AIAS Awards in Las Vegas last month.
“There's like a moment there,” he said. There is a bit of music that’s “underneath another theme” that he hasn’t seen anyone pick up on online. The movie is packed with about 135 references to Mario music, he said.
Tyler was at the awards to set up Nintendo composer Koji Kondo’s induction into the AIAS Hall of Fame. Tyler had worked with Kondo on the Mario movie soundtrack. (Tyler said there was just one reference that Kondo himself hadn’t caught.)
Tyler’s Mario movie score has been praised by Nintendo fans, who have even celebrated music he composed that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut.
The movie’s official soundtrack includes a song called “Drivin’ Me Bananas,” Tyler’s homage to a range of tunes from classic Donkey Kong games. It’s not in the movie but perfectly syncs to a scene in the movie where the 1980s pop-song Take On Me by A-Ha plays.
Tyler told Game File that it’s common for movies to swap out prepared pieces of the score for other music, but said fans picked up on it more with the Mario movie. He believes the decision to use a pop song in that spot—and in some other scenes—was to ensure the movie had broader appeal. “Since there was another movie already made of Super Mario Brothers, all of us wanted this to really be the thing that was embraced by fans,” he said. The addition of pop music, he said, “was something along the lines of, I don't know, like, hoping that it would reach beyond just that.”
When I floated the idea that the studio could release an alternate cut with the full score intact, he replied: “That’s a great idea.”
No telling if it’ll happen.
Love reading about nice-to-have features that add polish. Gives me things to consider when I'm daydreaming about building my next game. Too bad RotR's a PS exclusive or that I'm too cheap to own multiple consoles or both.