The cat game's here to save PS Plus
Plus Forza Hot Wheels, Lego Atari, and the crushing shame of climate change.
Hello there! In this week’s Press Any Button we’re big on playing as animals at the end of the world, and we’re letting our inner child go wild with Lego, Hot Wheels, Atari and indecipherable English adaptations of Japanese stuff.
This week is the first in a while where I've felt there are truly too many games coming out, in a good way. We talk about Stray, Endling and more below, as well as new expansions for some of our favourites. But Square's big RPG remake Live a Live is also days away (I'll have more to say on it next week), flashy shooter Bright Memory: Infinite is coming to consoles, loving Pokémon ripoff Coromon is finally arriving at its spiritual home of the Switch, and Capcom wants more money for its 30-year-old fare in a new edition of Arcade Stadium. Spoiled for choice!
Take a breath and resist all cat puns
By Tim
A post-apocalypse adventure where you play as a cat, Stray has such a winning premise that it's been highly anticipated since its official reveal in 2020. Now that it’s here I can say it’s more than just a good premise; it’s a thoughtful, funny and well executed game. And I think it was the perfect choice to be the first new game included in PlayStation Plus at launch.
Stray’s set in a time seemingly after humans, and you’re a member of an adorable feline family living in the plant-dominated space between giant walls. But when you one day fall through the cracks and tumble into a long-forgotten subterranean robot city, you find yourself on a quest for escape and discovery.
At its heart this is a traditional adventure game, and most of the time you’re exploring to find objects you can show to robots, or solving basic puzzles, or running to escape the all-consuming bacterial polyp-looking things the humans left behind, and there’s a handful of collectibles and secrets to find along the way.
But the cat factor goes beyond just being a cute visual or an interesting point of difference. Environments have a fun verticality that puts your ability to leap and climb to great use, and your small stature lets you skulk through barely open windows and small gaps that the humanoid robots of the world don’t expect.
I also love that no opportunity to show off your realistically cat-like character is wasted. You always have the option to tear up strangers’ carpets and couches for no reason, bat empty tubs or buckets of paint off of tall shelves, roll balls around, coil up for a nap in cosy spaces or rub lovingly around someone’s legs.
There’s certainly enough charm, polish and excitement here to justify the game’s $40 price tag, but for some people it will still be hard to justify given its roughly five hour duration and the lack of incentives to go through a second time. And that’s why it’s a great choice for a subscription. If those paying $19 per month for PS Plus Extra can expect an experience of this calibre at a regular cadence, it could turn out to be a brilliant value.
What to play
If you like the idea of playing as a cute animal, but prefer your dystopias to be more realistic and depressing than the one featured in Stray, you could check out Endling: Exctinction is Forever. Here you play as the very last adult fox left in a world ruined by pollution and industrialisation, and it's up to you to raise your cubs and help them survive against very dire odds. It's beautiful to look at but, as you may expect, also heartbreaking.
None one is surprised that my (Alice’s) pick of the week is the Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels expansion. This is my Christmas. If you’re super into the base game, now would be a good time to get the Premium Add-Ons bundle on sale for $56 (usually $70). That gives you access to both this expansion and the next, as well as the Car Pass, Welcome Pack and VIP. The discount makes it all only $1 more than the expansions alone.
Into the Breach is one of my (Tim's) favourite strategy games; a time-manipulating roguelike where you manage a small platoon of giant robots in grid-based combat against insectoid aliens. This week sees a free update on all platforms (after four years!) with new mechs, weapons, enemies, and missions. The game has also been ported to Android and iOS, where it's available only to Netflix subscribers.
New on Game Pass this week is As Dusk Falls, which is essentially an interactive TV show drama about two families and their intertwined fates over 30 years. It’s the ideal kind of game for playing periodically with a few friends, so it’s nice to see some multiplayer options that let you vote on each important decision. Additional players can join with an app on their phones so you don’t need to stock up on half a dozen controllers.
Also added to Game Pass this week is Watch Dogs 2, which is the best entry in Ubisoft’s open world hacking sandbox series, and is well worth a look if you missed it way back in 2016.
New to Apple Arcade later this week is Hero-ish, a hero-based adventure game with characters that strongly resemble some famous Disney creatures. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels is good
By Alice
Happy Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels Expansion day to all those who celebrate. I’ve spent five days with it in early access, and not talking about it has almost killed me.
Obviously, it’s amazing. I didn’t think there was quite enough of it. Sure, it was probably the same size with a similar amount of content to the original full Horizon game, and this is just an expansion, but I wanted more gosh darn it, and that’s a great thing.
One thing wanted specifically was more classic Hot Wheels cars. The expansion came with 10, which seems awfully light for a game with over 600 cars on main.
I also would have liked a bigger variety of activities, like the Lego Speed Champions of Horizon 4. But that’s just nitpicking.
Something I found interesting was all the anti-motion sickness accessibility added in. The original Horizon 3 Hot Wheels expansion was notorious for making players feel sick. It’s one of the reasons I never finished it. But in Horizon 5 there is a marginally expanded field of view for the follow cam (though, I would like the FOV to have been even bigger), and a visual indicator of levelling, like what you’d see on Flight Simulator.
This meant that while I, someone who is very susceptible to motion sickness in games, did occasionally feel a bit off when twisting around and around and upside down, the effect was temporary and I was able to play for around 4-5 hours per day non-stop.
Given that the original Horizon 5 beta made me motion sick to begin with (going for performance mode over graphics mode helped, btw), this is a big step forward.
On a related note, I am this close to buying a massive Hot Wheels track from Kmart, so the not subtle advertising all through the expansion worked.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
In a move clearly aimed directly at Tim, Lego last night announced a brand-new Lego Atari 2600 set will be hitting stores September 1. Priced the same as an actual, working console at $369.99 with 2532 pieces, the value proposition is even worse than the Lego NES with its 2646 pieces at $349.99. First inflation came for petrol and food, and now it’s gone too far with Lego bricks constructed to look like retro consoles.
The build itself looks very detailed. There’s a joystick, game cartridges and obviously the console itself. Hidden within the console is a little scene of a kid playing games in their room with a tiny CRT TV, which is adorable. Plus, there are little scenes from the three games you can build on the cartridges, depending on how you want to display the set.
While the set itself looks fairly spectacular, it does still feel like a bit of a step down from the NES, with its moving TV. That was an impressive feat of engineering, and I had hoped that they would build on that to bring this to life a bit more. Then again, I wonder how many adults actually turn the crank on the NES TV to make the scene move, or whether they just occasionally mention to their friends that it’s possible before accidentally tearing off the crank when they try to show it off (or is that just me)? This might be a more practical use of the parts count.
The Atari 2600 will be part of Lego’s recently rebranded Icons range, which was once called Creator Expert. It’s a way of saying “adult sets” without making it sound like something that should come from behind the counter in a paper bag.
It’s cool, but with the price of Lego going up, and so many other cool, big sets out later this year, it’s going to be difficult for me to justify spending the cash on.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
I love a falling block or tile-matching puzzle game, which is weird because I’m extremely not good at them. Some people have a knack for working several steps ahead, setting up their screen just right so that when they drop a match it cascades into a massive chain of exploding jewels and endorphins. Not me, I mostly just enjoy the simple pleasure of matching, and it helps that a lot of puzzle games (especially Japanese ones from the 90s) have incredible music and off-beat aesthetics.
It’s super interesting to look at how those games ended up coming over to English territories though, when they did at all. One of my favourite puzzle series is Puyo Puyo, where you need to match round little slimes to pop them. It’s a spin-off from the Japanese Madou Monogatari RPG series, borrowing its cast of cute witches and sneaky demons, and usually features a single-player mode where you have to go up against humorous undead adversaries.
Puyo Puyo became an arcade hit in 1992, and was ported to both the Sega Mega Drive and Super Famicom. But how to bring those to the West, where people had no idea who Arle was and famously feared witchcraft? Sega opted to re-skin the whole game to resemble the cartoon Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and named it Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Nintendo made it into Kirby’s Avalanche. As a kid I never really questioned it. Games were weird.
The reason I got thinking about all this is that Pokemon Puzzle League, another good game that shares a similar story, was recently added to the Nintendo 64 Switch app for Expansion Pack subscribers.
Panel de Pon (pictured) is a beautiful 1995 Super Famicom game with a fairy theme, which plays out a lot like a proto Bejewelled; you need to shuffle and match coloured panels.
To make it more attractive to players in the West it was completely overhauled to be themed around Yoshi, from the setting to the music, and was given the name Tetris Attack to imply a connection to the incredibly popular Game Boy game.
A Nintendo 64 version of Panel de Pon was created but never released on the console, instead being repurposed and combined with TV-style animation and voice acting to become Pokemon Puzzle League.