Now Playing at SUPERJUMP: Issue 35

We're back with a brand new Now Playing. We're heading into spooky season and cold weather for the Northern Hemisphere, so next issue I'm confident we'll have some scary and cozy games to discuss. For this issue, though, some of our team have been returning to old standby games and indulging in some time sinks that they love. No matter what we're playing, we want to share with you and maybe send you down the path to try something new. Let us know in the comments what you're playing and what news has you excited for the future!

Mike Wilson

Football Manager 2024

Recently, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get to sleep, not because of any health reasons, but because I’ve been playing Football Manager 2024 until the most ungodly of hours. Then, when I do finally get to bed, all I can dream of is players I’m scouting, and stats, so very many stats. That’s not healthy, right?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

This is why, actually, I’m writing this to tell you, I’ve actually stopped playing Football Manager 2024! I know that this is highly unusual for this monthly piece, but let me tell you why I’ve had to take this horrendously desperate action.

It’s wholly consumed me.

I’ve played the Football Manager games before there even was Football Manager. Championship Manager was where life began for me and many an enthusiastic wannabe team leader. When Sports Interactive split from Eidos in 2003, they went off on their own to create the ever-popular Football Manager series. So it’s safe to say I’ve been hooked for a while.

This time, though, something has hit different, but it took a while. Football Manager 24 has already been out for nearly two years, but here I am, several seasons deep with a respected club and recently a new save on my teeny-tiny hometown club.

There’s something quite cathartic about jumping into a new team and wholly changing up their system to suit your own personal style. Switch up the match-day formations, set pieces, training, hell, even back-room staff. Everything is open for you to play and tinker with. And this is why I can easily get lost, so very deep within the data, the numbers, graphs, and ratings of, well, everything.

The odd thing about this is, I really don’t care too much for football. I’m a rugby guy, I’ve played, followed, and devoured rugby as my main source of sport since, well, I don’t remember. That’s how long we’re talking here. So why is it then that I love sending my Scout off to check out a player who’s been making waves? Why is it that the thought of being in charge of 11 sweaty men on a pitch enthralls me so much? Why is it that when I ask the board to make improvements to my youth regime and they decline, I get genuinely pissy and have imaginary arguments with them when taking a shower?

I wish I knew.

So I’ve only recently learned the only way to survive Football Manager is to quit Football Manager.

That is, until Football Manager 26 comes out. This won’t make the board happy at all.

Frostpunk

So you know how I just said I was addicted to Football Manager? Yeah, forget that. I started Frostpunk, as I had heard some good things about it. I lost an entire day to it. I started playing and boom, suddenly it’s the end of the day and I haven’t moved once. I haven’t been back on it since. I’m scared of losing even more time to it. How does that even happen?

I thoroughly enjoyed it, though.

B. Cantrell

I missed Wizordum in Early Access, but our very own Cat Webling had it on the radar way back in 2023. With the full release on consoles and Steam this month, I grabbed the Mac version and can happily report it runs flawlessly on my M1 Pro. As a fan of '90s dark-fantasy shooters like Heretic and Hexen, I was instantly back in familiar territory: gothic backdrops, chunky sprites, and that addictive rhythm of circle-strafing while lobbing fireballs at something unpleasant screeching in the distance.

Wizordum feels like a love letter to Heretic with a few lines thrown in from classic Doom. You sling magic first and foremost, with fire blooming from your fingertips and an ice wand that freezes creeps into brittle statues that shatter on command. Then there's a Doom-y shotgun that hits like a hammer at close range. It ticks all the boxes that a shotgun should, wth a punchy hit and a satisfying reload animation. It's not quite the legendary double-barrel, but it scratches that itch when those goblins get all-up-in-your-face.

The maps are sprawling labyrinths, made up of multi-layered dungeons that fold back on themselves with doors that tease you from balconies and switches that clang somewhere out of sight. The fold-out map is surprisingly helpful and kept nudging me in the right direction without giving the game away. There's an upgrade shop which opens after each level too, and while prices are steep, it forced me to explore every alcove in sight for loose coins.

The heart of Wizordum is its combat, and it wastes no time in throwing you into frantic spell-slinging duels. Enemies fling a messy variety of projectiles, so you're always weaving, ducking behind walls, and choosing when to push forward. I was playing as the Cleric with the default melee weapon, a hefty mace, which looks cool but feels unreliable since enemy windups can be hard to read. I found myself defaulting to spells and projectiles instead, and kept the shotgun 'handy for close encounters' (ahem). The later sewer levels ramp things up with nastier ambushes and a grimmer tone, forcing me to quick-save more often once the dungeons got darker.

Wizordum's excellent sound design does a lot of heavy lifting, too. The score leans into moody classical fare that gave me 'Witcher Infiltrating the Death Star' vibes, and in the sewers, you hear those distant drips and growls that channel dread somewhere deep in your soul. The soundscape convincingly sells the world, without getting in the way of all the running and gunning. For a boomer-shooter addict like me, Wizordum is a treat. Between this and the recent Heretic and Hexen remasters, it's been a great year for fans of spell-casting retro-inspired shooters.

Alexander Joy

Of all the games deserving of a reboot, Ikki Unite must be at or near the bottom of the list. The fame of the original – a clunky but thematically unique top-down shooter about a farmers’ insurrection – is owed almost entirely to its reviled NES port, a piece of software so ill-designed that it moved one critic to coin the term kusoge (“crap game”). Nevertheless, Sunsoft (purveyors of many a kusoge back in the day) have resurrected this 1980s oddity as Ikki Unite, which joins titles like Spelunker HD Deluxe and Spelunker Party as a modern monument to yesteryear’s tripe.

Whereas Spelunker’s various re-imaginings have striven to craft clean, polished experiences – advancing a tacit argument that its source material was conceptually sound, but perhaps too unusual for its time – Ikki Unite instead embraces its predecessor’s fundamental crappiness. The intention appears not so much to wallow ironically in poor design as to explore where kusoge design and aesthetics could have gone if unabashedly embraced. This framing is essential because, in many respects, the devs chose to make a bad game.

The gameplay largely apes Vampire Survivors (a kusoge if ever there were one, albeit one with tremendous commercial success). The art style of in-game sprites is wildly inconsistent. The music liberally samples the repetitive and borderline unlistenable NES BGM. But none of this is falsely advertised. The tenor of the experience is apparent from the title screen, which copies the flat, pixelated panorama of the NES introduction, but incorporates the awkwardly smooth animation of the Flash and RPG Maker cheapies that have carried the kusoge torch in the intervening years.

All this being said, Ikki Unite is actually quite enjoyable, if a bit difficult to classify. It’s not quite a run-and-gun, because, like in Vampire Survivors, you neither aim nor fire; all attacks are automated. But neither is it a Survivors-esque bullet heaven, because some weapons have limited ammunition, and plenty of enemies shoot back (unlike the slow, shambling hordes of Vampire Survivors and its many knockoffs). Instead of encouraging you to park in one place and power up ad nauseam, Ikki Unite sends you scurrying across sprawling maps to defeat bosses within deceptively tight time limits. Beating bosses awards extra time for your campaign, or brings you to the game’s next stage.

The challenge lies in striking a balance between growing powerful enough to take on the next boss while leaving enough time on the clock to hunt down and defeat them. The proceedings are often chaotic – especially if you convene enough participants to take advantage of the game’s 16-player co-op mode – but it feels like the right register for a game that’s nominally about riots and revolution.

In short, Ikki Unite possesses a clarity of vision that stands in sharp contrast to its inspiration. If the kusoge is in fact a genre rather than a mere pejorative, then Ikki Unite is not only a proof-of-concept for it, but proof of its appeal. If only every misunderstood would-be classic could enjoy a similarly loving, attentive afterlife.

C.S. Voll

Steins;Gate 0

I've finished Steins;Gate 0. Finally! In previous entries, I've commented on how this felt like a different type of game, and this is even more apparent to me now. For starters, this game is much darker than the previous entries. Where others felt more like sci-fi stories, this felt like a horror tale.

I didn't expect to become so attached to some of the new characters, either. The original game already featured a large cast, so I worried about whether there were too many new faces, but the game manages to communicate their emotional journeys, while also giving us insight into the established characters' motivations too.

The themes it touches upon remain really prescient today. Well, we have in fact reached some of the dates that the original game talked about back in 2009. Time is a slippery thing, and it doesn't always move in a predictable manner, which is why these types of stories always pose a challenge for an author. Steins;Gate breaks this conundrum by imbuing its narrative with timeless values. That means that, even if Akihabara and everything else were to change beyond recognition, Okabe's story will still resonate with a future reader, because we all struggle with some of those stumbling blocks. Maybe that's how a story reaches the ideal world line.

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker's Memory

Now I've started playing Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker's Memory. Unlike in Cyber Sleuth, the protagonist seems to be a major factor in the story. I look forward to seeing how it differs from the previous game.

It seems like I'll learn more about the hacker groups, too, which is a nice twist, because they were often the antagonists in the previous story. Digimon Story: Time Stranger was released only a couple of days ago, so it's an interesting time to be a fan of the franchise, that's for sure!

Ignas Vieversys

In fear of sounding like a record that can play one tune only, I'm back on the saddle in Red Dead Redemption 2. I know, I know... It must have been, what - a year, more(?) since, after 140+ hours, I had bid the game farewell, shedding a single tear. But the Souron-like lure of RDR2 was as strong as that of the One Ring was for Gollum, haunting me in my dreams like death haunts Arthur through the game - and, look, I'm just a feeble human. I know that life's too short to be playing the same game over and over again, missing out on epics like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Anyway, I'm back gunslinging with the Van der Linde gang, accidentally punching my buck, and being too invested in keeping my cowboy hat on. How Rockstar pulled this feat off is beyond me... I'll traverse the entire map to get my hat back if I need to. I lost my fancy scarf a couple of weeks back while moshing in the pit and did I go back to look for it? No, I did not. I'm constantly in awe at the sheer amount of details in this magnificent game. Now, if someone could help me with getting those mods working...

I'm also in the midst of my Metal Gear Solid Delta run. I'm gonna be honest with you: I've never finished a single Kojima game in my life. I gave Death Stranding ten hours of my life, and maybe 30 minutes for MGS: Snake Eater on my PS2. But as much as I like reading about Kojima's absurd production and watching hour-long MGS story recaps on YouTube, I had to admit to myself that maybe I'm just not cut out to enjoy Kojima games.

So, when MGS Delta dropped, I knew that this might be my only chance of getting into Metal Gear Solid games and understanding the silly references all my favorite writers and content creators keep dropping ("Hurt me more!"). I just beat The End without dying a single time (unlike previous bosses, he didn't explode, instead turning into leaves scattered in the wind), which was kinda disappointing. I had read all of these reviews, including classics from ActionButton.net, and forum threads where people waxed poetically about how it took them hours to outsmart the old geezer, and how epic it felt, using thermal googles, a microphone, and whatnot. I just used the sniper rifle and approached him in the wide open, and was done with it in no more than 10 minutes.

Love the anime-ishness of it all. Love all the vintage movie references Eva keeps bringing up. But if it did have, say, gun/gameplay mechanics of The Last of Us 2 - this would be the perfect game. And yet, I know this is a true-to-heart remaster for the OG fans. A boy can dream, though.

Bryan Finck

I haven't been in these pages in a few months, so I've had to work on remembering what I've been doing in that time. I finished the fantastic Expedition 33, and knowing Ghost of Yotei was on the horizon, I didn't want to take on any large games.

Browsing my Steam library brought me to Ori and the Blind Forest, a game I had started years ago but bounced off due to my love/hate relationship with Metroidvanias. I remember it being more open-ended and difficult, but it really isn't either of those things. It is quite linear for the genre, and the now-common Hollow Knight-inspired difficult bosses are nowhere to be seen. The biggest challenges came in escaping each portion of the forest once your goal there is acheived, and they did feel spikey in their difficulty, but it was never a deal-breaker. I loved everything about the game, and I'm now working my way through its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

Another game I had started when it was still a new release, but never finished, was Dishonored 2. The original game was one of the best I've ever played, but life got in the way back in 2016. Almost 10 years later, I picked up Arkane's masterpiece again, and it was just as great as the original. So many ways to play, secrets to discover, and fights to have (or run from); there really is a silly amount of agency for however you want to play. I usually fight as much as I can, but the enemy AI was improved from the first game, so that was a less appealing strategy this time around. Possessing rats and running past enemies or into tiny openings became my favorite way to proceed. I'm very happy to have closed the loop on the Dishonored series; maybe I'll finally finish Prey someday.

Beyond that, I went through a mish-mash of things, including the puzzle game Blue Prince, the DLC for my favorite shopkeeping game Moonlighter, and the demo for the fantastic new Shinobi game.

Finally, it was time for Ghost of Yotei. As I write this, I am about 15 hours in, and the game is a wonderful house built upon the foundation laid by Ghost of Tsushima. Everything here is familiar, though Sucker Punch has changed and improved enough things that it doesn't feel like DLC for the first game. The combat is better than ever, and the open-world aspects are improved, leading to some really fun exploration possibilities and discoveries of side quests that I'd have hated to miss. I'll have more to report next issue when I've finished Atsu's tale of revenge!

A big thank you to our writers for dropping by and to all our loyal fans for being here to check it out! Be sure to tell us what you're playing in the comments, and check back next month for more of what our team is getting into.