Passing the Buck Chapter 14: Super Game Pass 64

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

Seems treating the last chapter as the last chapter was a bit too presumptuous! While every entry of “Passing the Buck” has been released on a Sunday, there are two days left in March after Chapter 13. That’s certainly not enough time to try a big budget adventure or make an interesting theme. But remember what I’ve said about how you should use the subscriptions you have and that not doing so makes it too easy for the company you’re paying, and how my most important goal was always to wring as much out of this deal as I possibly can? Well, I’m certainly not going to abandon those principles right before the end. So, for one last time (until I potentially revisit this series in the far future), let’s throw out the baby and the bathwater with it.

For the next two days, between Sunday the 30th and Monday the 31st, I am going to play through as many one to three hour games as I can before either my desire to play more games is slaked, my time actually runs out, or, I dunno, I pass out and die. Given all the stupid challenges I make myself do, the bad games and the Cheers% and all that, the latter feels increasingly inevitable at some point in the future. And, since we’re just blasting our way through these without the time to really dive in, each one’s getting just one screenshot and one paragraph. That’s it. This is gaming and criticism as content, and I’m not sure which one of us is getting the worse deal. Probably neither! But we’ll see.

What I played:

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer: Years after the deadly Mindcrash Virus, former Hypnospace user Zane Lofton has released a game: a janky, fast-paced FPS in which all his hangups, fantasies, and obsessions reign supreme. As Zane, it’s up to you to navigate Idaho suburbs, collect weapons, and enact vengance [sic] on the scatological terrors of the Psyko Sindikate.
Superliminal: A patient in a sleep experiment finds themselves unable to wake up and desperate to escape their dream world. The only way to progress through the space’s logic-warping puzzles is by manipulating the size of objects through force perspective, though the complexity and aesthetics of each successive challenge threaten to bedevil the mind.
Bejeweled 2: This update to the iconic Bejeweled features four ways to play. You’ve got your classic modes with and without time limits, an endless mode that really tests your mettle, and a curious puzzle twist that demands you expertly destroy every jewel in the bracket.
Dordogne: After a death in the family, twenty-something Mimi goes to her late grandmother’s French home, which she hasn’t visited since a mysterious summer vacation. As Mimi flashes back to those childhood days, she relives her former adventures through charming mini-games to uncover the mystery of what happened back then—and why that summer seems to have caused a break in her memory.
My Friend Peppa Pig: In this adaptation of the wildly popular Peppa Pig franchise, you’re a new animal friend of the titular pig child and ready to go on an adventure! Fortunately, every spit of land has some preexisting character who’s happy to give you a lesson or assignment.
Little Kitty, Big City: After falling off of their human’s high up apartment, a kitten has to find their way back home. But in order to learn skills, find outfits, and befriend all the non-dog animals of their nondescript city, the cat’s going to have to redefined “precocious” in this cozy 3D “cat-former.”
Feeding Frenzy: This early-Aughts casual game standard is all about size. You start as a small fish, eat what’s smaller, evade what’s bigger, and maybe you’ll get to eat them, too!
Zuma: Another casual game for the list, but this one mixes multiple kinds of unrelated genres and mechanics, from arcade shooters to match 3 games to maybe a bit of pinball. There’s a string of balls inching towards you, and only expert shooting and planned combos will save your bacon.
The Case of the Golden Idol: As an investigator of a sort, you waltz through garish dioramas depicting the moment of someone’s death before piecing together clues, using your “Thinking” mode to rearrange each one, and figuring out the events behind the sordid crime. And yet these cases all weave together as they show the fall of a prominent English house after its appropriation of a strange golden figure…

Sunday, March 30: bought Age of Mythology: Retold Premium Edition and Jusant, started and completed Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer, started and completed Superliminal, started and played an hour of Bejeweled 2, started and completed Dordogne, and started, completed, and got every Achievement in My Friend Peppa Pig.

A spinoff of Hypnospace Outlaw—making this the only time I’m engaging with a series through more than one game in “Passing the Buck” unless you, like me, count the individual The Walking Dead episodes as games—Slayers X is a strange thing indeed. While Hypnospace was imaginative and concretely improved the video game canon, this is, well, a gag game. It took the second-most memorable character from that game, teenage edgelord Zane Lofton, and imagined the kind of video game the sulking, dorky, arrested adolescent might make. So, a boomer shooter. The thing is, Slayers X is actually pretty fun. Okay, it’s really fun. There’s a decent variety of weapons that all feel great, the level design is wildly imaginative, the soundtrack slaps, and there’s a lot of interactivity. Zane can play with a lot of objects in the world as the protagonist, a version of himself who’s also a super-assassin, comic book artist, and CEO. At the same time, the quality is about the only concession to this being a modern, professional release, as the game never breaks character. Even developer Tendershoot is acting under the pseudonym “Big Z Studios” in an act of kayfabe. The humor is… well, there are literal poop enemies. The dialogue is a pitch perfect take on angsty teenagehood. It will probably test your patience. Overall, I’m left wondering if this is a game that appeals, or is meant to appeal, to anyone except me. So I guess I’ll treat it as exactly that! I’m not sure I’ll ever come back to Slayers X in the future, but fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get.

Image: Source Gaming. The surprisingly light on jank Slayers X.

Superliminal is kind of a throwback in its own way, as it’s something of a Portal clone after that field dried up. You grab objects and make them larger or smaller, allowing all manner of incredible size-changing puzzles. Each chapter also throws in unique ideas, like objects that copy themselves when you grab them. There’s a seemingly evil lab, an overarching mystery, a sweet final message, and some fun if slightly derivative corporate lingo comedy. I liked Superliminal quite a bit, but I do think there are some things that hold it back. The basic growing and shrinking mechanic is cool but hard to work with, especially when it comes to enlarging your objects. It’s also more opaque than Portal; the levels are harder to parse, and I accidentally cheesed my way through the first few puzzle rooms without ever understanding how the size changing actually worked or learning that I could make objects larger. Still, when it’s on, which is often, it’s on. Puzzling and pretty art direction is all over the place, and even though I tried capturing plenty of striking images, so many were lost. Alas.

Image: Source Gaming. Normally, you’re supposed to be about the size of that running stick figure’s lower leg. Incidentally, the stick figure is also reminiscent of Portal.

I’ll admit, though, that I immediately regretted my decision to start Bejeweled 2. Like, it’s fun, but it’s also Bejeweled 2. I’ve played it, you’ve played it; it’s gaming calories. In my zeal to find as many games as I could with a runtime of under three hours, I picked one of the least critically interesting games out there. And after doing a quick look online to see how many levels it has (the answer being “hoo boy, too many levels!”), I decided to just play it for an hour. Played a bunch of Bejeweled, tried the neat but a bit too inscrutable Puzzle Mode… I gotta level with you, I can’t imagine wanting to actively buy a standard match 3 game these days. Interesting twists or mashups, sure, but not this on its own. Too ubiquitous. Like, it’s good that it’s on the service as part of a deal with EA’s separate service, alongside the Mass Effect Trilogy and skate and almost everything they’ve made since the late 2000s, but this will not challenge your tastes or understanding of game design. Granted, that’s not required of any game and probably wasn’t a problem when this one came out. It was a follow-up to a game that was big online and on XBLA. But this moment really helped solidify how I’m learning from my mistakes even mere hours before the end. Playing this in attempt to goose the numbers was patently ridiculous.

Image: Source Gaming. Not fixing what wasn’t broken.

Dordogne is good, but I wasn’t really liking it for a decent chunk of the experience. It’s a standard cozy game, made interesting with its art style. The game uses an incredible impressionist look, so painterly that I found myself repeatedly shocked by the ways it manifested in level design, prompts, and overt changes to reflect the main character’s emotional state. The graphics are the game’s most compelling and unique feature by far and carries the story, characters, and gameplay. What made me less invested was that everything else. Its Florence-esque prompts, its writing, its tone, and its plot points all felt intensely familiar. When this feeling came up, my conclusion was that most of the games I was able to play in this category had to be cozy games and casual games and that they all blended together, and while that’s true to an extent, it’s not actually, not in practice. Plus, this series has shown off how those genres can feel incredibly different. With Dordogne, maybe the problem is that it came out in 2023 in an increasingly crowded genre, and that its aesthetic differences don’t feel as strong without more interesting mechanical ones. However, I was impressed by its ending, which felt distinct and powerful enough to be worthwhile just on its own. Obviously, no spoilers here; do try to play it yourself. Of the moments from this title that will stick with me, that’ll be one of them, alongside the kayak rides down the river that just immerse you in brushstrokes and color.

Image: Source Gaming. I suppose one more mild criticism is that the impressionist art can sometimes make it a bit unclear of what’s walkable and what’s not. Still, it’s an impeccable look.

It takes about an hour and a half to get all eleven Achievements in My Friend Peppa Pig, an adaptation of a television cartoon I’ve never seen (and only knew existed after downloading this about two months ago). You shouldn’t even need to use a guide, and pretty much every Achievement is tied to something on the critical path. And yet, it took me four hours to beat this utterly insipid game. Part of it was my own slower pace, but by far the biggest reason was that I kept watching into the same unskippable cutscenes. Every time you talk to a character or go to where you triggered a cutscene, the exact same dialogue plays out. Every single one. Quests, too. It is maddening to drive a car from one room to the next, something you’ll probably have to do a dozen times, and see Peppa’s family have the same two minute conversation with construction workers. For all that I hate referring to any time spent playing a game as a “waste,” because it’s a fundamentally bad way of interacting with art, these parts actually were. That “1 1/2 hour” runtime will mock me for as long as I live. Look, one of my favorites from last year was the gorgeous and imaginative Snukfin: Melody of Moominvalley, so it’s not like children’s entertainment has to be shovelware. You know what? Forget this railroading, boring nonsense. Let’s talk about Snufkin! I mean, what graphics, and that Sigur Rós soundtrack? To die for. I also love its message about community and ecology as connected, as opposed to the way Peppa Pig throws out the most uninteresting lessons or truths. The gameplay is perhaps a bit simple compared to more traditional mainstream titles, but unlike this you actually have things to do, like playing instruments. Snufkin is also miles better than Peppa or this game’s self-insert OC. On that note, I was a wolf, since I’m Wolfman, but I felt underdressed without the beret even though I thought the bare ears looked better.

Image: Source Gaming. I feel a bit mean being so hard on this, and I’m sure it’s on brand, but you don’t have to make kids’ entertainment this didactic or slow or limited.

Monday, March 31: started and completed Little Kitty, Big City, started and completed the campaign in Feeding Frenzy, started and completed the first three stages in Zuma, and started and completed Chapters 1 and 2 in The Case of the Golden Idol.

Combining the animal mischief of Untitled Goose Game and the structure of a 3D collect-a-thon, Little Kitty, Big City is a cozy game whose most interesting swings are in the mechanical. The eponymous kitty (who I named “Basket, the Unyielding Paladin” in the ending cutscene) collects trinkets to give to a crow, has missions and collectibles that give them outfits, and even gets upgrades for climbing. You viscerally gobble down a fish to improve your max climbing stamina; let’s see Link do that! It’s all part of an overarching goal to climb all the way up to your apartment, but the game is so chill that it instantly gives you access to the sidewalk after hitting the credits. And while I’m theoretically in “beat the game” mode—a state of mind that I’ve repeatedly abandoned over the course of these two days, but such as it is—it was hard not to find more places to climb and more things to do. The unnamed Japanese city is full of stuff, and it definitely rewards poking about in a feline way. I like 3D platformers, and this is a good take on the genre. My main criticism here is that the first hunt for baubles is a bit demanding; you have to earn twenty-five before the sandbox opens up, but while most games of this sort give you options, I couldn’t find a single spare one. And I was looking, believe you me. Exploring the world of Little Kitty, Big City is great and really brought out my evergreen desire to sift through worlds in search of adventure. One side effect of a project like this is that because you’re focused so much on sampling and beating, some games and genres are a bit harder to incorporate. Games without a fixed ending, games that need a lot of time, games that aren’t really suited for this in some way. I’m a bit sad about bouncing off a few titles for that reason. Fortunately, the short runtime, the fun gameplay, and the plethora of secrets made this one gel with the format as much as it gelled with my tastes.

Image: Source Gaming. If nothing else, and the game is fun besides, Little Kitty, Big City really nails the energy of a capricious, silly cat.

When I started putting this list of super short games together, the PopCap Games felt like bonus points. Just a bunch of short titles! After all, Plants vs. Zombies is excellent, and Peggle was a highlight of my February. Damn, should I have bought Peggle 2? Anyway, Feeding Frenzy and Zuma are a bit like the B-list after those series. Feeding Frenzy was less interesting but more easy to get. You’re a fish. The goal is to eat smaller fish and evade larger ones until you’re larger than them. Various twists exist, like mines or incredibly obnoxious fish that make you dizzy if you eat them. I spent the entire campaign ready to point out how it was obviously influenced by Katamari Damacy, but… it actually came out one day before Katamari. Good thing we took that trip to Wikipedia for the dates, huh? It’s a fine time waster, but it’s far from PopCap’s best on either style or substance.

Image: Source Gaming. There’s a very natural gameplay loop in Feeding Frenzy, which explains why I was willing to eschew my “play for an hour” plan and push ahead to the final level.

Zuma, meanwhile, feels like a more solid part of the company’s canon. You play as a cute frog idol and shoot at a string of colored balls rolling quickly towards your goal. It’s like someone took a match 3 game like Bejeweled and insanely decided it should be a shooter. This isn’t a bad move, though! You’ve got the big chains of explosions and the time pressure and the scary, impossible shots. I enjoyed the hour-plus I gave the game. It was clear from the start that the time limit was going to work for it a lot better than trying to play through every single level, and that left me able to enjoy Zuma‘s pleasures without committing myself to several hours of largely the same gameplay. Maybe using these casual games was a bit of a cheat and maybe they weren’t that interesting to write about, but I’m happy this one got to be in the final set. It was nice to finally see what the deal was with this strange-looking cover art on the Game Pass storefront. And nicer to actually play it. PopCap really was a master of the form.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s actually quite hard to really nail the shots, though that’s also kind of inherent to the design. You get better at it over time.

And finally, The Case of the Golden Idol, the game I was most sad to have not touched. Given all the comparisons I’ve been making today, I hope it’s not too reductive to dip into the well one last time, because it’s kind of like… Obra Dinn meets supernatural Gosford Park as depicted by MS Paint? I guess? There are these immaculate dioramas depicting the moment of someone’s death, and you poke everywhere you can to find clues, names, and other information. Eventually, you have to put all the relevant pieces together in forms that reveal the killer. The strange pixel art feels far afield of most pixel graphics, creating something equally cartoony, classy, and deliberately off-putting. It’s got Return of the Obra Dinn’s excellent system where you have to give exact details for everything—maybe a seating arrangement or a gambling scorecard—to get confirmation. There were one or two puzzles I wasn’t enamored with, but the vast majority are top tier. It feels great when the final few clues are sussed out, and I suspect it’s even better (and the puzzles more manageable) if you play with a friend. And the mystery has been exciting, with this creepy magical idol and this recurring cast of only slightly less creepy rich weirdos. Chapter 2’s mystery in particular suggests that the plot’s going places, so I’m definitely buying the game… on Nintendo Switch, as I want to do with Chants of Sennaar and Hypnospace Outlaw. The system is just perfect for these kinds of puzzlers. This is exactly the kind of game I love, and trying it and ending on a good stopping point is perfect.

Image: Source Gaming. I imagine that the graphics are gonna be hard for some people, and it took me a bit to acclimate. But they’re really special and elevate things.

After setting Golden Idol down, I uninstalled it and every other Game Pass game in my library. No more purchases, no more downloads. I’m not sure exactly when the subscription ran out. Maybe it ran out before I started writing the majority of this piece on Monday night. Microsoft’s various notifications seemed to imply that it was ending on Monday night.

Outro: So FYI: the first and last reviews on Sunday were the only ones actually written on Sunday. I did the rest on Monday night, along with almost everything else. That was something I avoided for the rest of the project. I’d say it was because I was busy in some transcendent state of playing, but that’s not true. My computer was down to thirty percent in the afternoon, so I waited a few hours until it was charged before going back. I felt a bit bad giving up that kind of time, since it would’ve been entirely possible for me to just play while letting it charge. I still feel bad, and obviously, that’s absurd. I played five games that day and four afterwards. If you look at the current Game Pass releases A) that have a runtime of around three hours or less and B) I’ve never played before, it’s clear that my picks weren’t just the best available, they were kind of the only ones available. Maybe those three hours could’ve been used to play Contrast, a very stylish game that got middling reviews, or sequels to Peggle, Zuma, and Feeding Frenzy, whose reviews would’ve been boring for both of us. And anyway, my plan clearly worked, since it had seven games in place before I added Zuma and Golden Idol on Monday morning.

This entire scheme was this wild idea of pushing myself as far as humanly possible right at the end. It was meant to be exciting and crazy and punishing and powerful. And materially, I got exactly that. Nine games! Buy it didn’t feel that way, mostly surreal. Stuff just happened, and kept happening, even with the downtime. This feeling got more intense (if you can call a sense of odd, airy, serene ennui “intense”) on Monday, largely because of Golden Idol. This game got stuck in my mind, for a few reasons. It’s a mystery game inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, a particular favorite. It also was something I missed for reason I cannot understand. My assumption was that it came on after “Passing the Buck” started—which is not the case! According to a less than one minute online search, it was added in July. So it inaccurately symbolized my not paying attention to the new games added over the past three months, but what’s important is that I had months to play a game obviously and seriously on my wavelength and just ignored it entirely. No idea why. To be clear, there’s not a game I’d replace it with; all of them were worth experiencing, even the bad games or the ones that didn’t work for me at all. So with mere hours left, we pounce on it, comfortable knowing that that it doesn’t matter that I don’t have time to beat it! I got to try this weird pixel murder mystery! And that was the point of this project all along: trying things.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m just happy that this secret finale worked so well, even beyond my expectations, but also sad that it ended so easy? The grand, final, exciting super finale was… fun but pleasant? Yeah, it feels weird that something that was intended to create friction didn’t actually add it, so now the only friction is putting all of the writing part of this until late at night.

Anyway, here’s the final list of games. Underlined if I beat the main story:

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day
Persona 3 Reload
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Dead Space (2023)
Ori and the Blind Forest
Chants of Sennaar
Gears of War
Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved for Help
Crackdown 3
Cocoon
Darkest Dungeon
Fable II
Hypnospace Outlaw
The Walking Dead Episode 3: Long Road Ahead
A Little to the Left
Resident Evil 3
Botany Manor
Peggle
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
The Evil Within
Minecraft
Lil Gator Game
The Walking Dead Episode 4: Around Every Corner
Inscryption
Planet of Lana
Avowed
Doom Eternal
Maneater
The Walking Dead Episode 5: No Time Left
Still Wakes the Deep
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Citizen Sleeper
Hi-Fi Rush
Dead Cells
Day of the Tentacle Remastered
Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition
Terraria
Powerwash Simulator
Age of Mythology: Retold
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Farming Simulator 22
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Jusant
Mirror’s Edge
Kunitsu-gami: Path of the Goddess
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
Crysis
The Big Con
Deathloop
Fallout 4
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Diablo IV
Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer
Superliminal
Bejeweled 2
Dordogne
My Friend Peppa Pig
Little Kitty, Big City
Feeding Frenzy
Zuma
The Case of the Golden Idol

Woah! Look at how far that went! And it’s the perfect: the Nintendo Number. That was definitely a lot of the appeal, getting to play more games in three months than most people play in three years. And thirty-seven were beaten, a bit over half the total. Though it’s a bit unfortunate that Avowed was the only one from this calendar year. Again, I really should’ve kept an eye on incoming games and not just the list I wrote up at the start of the project. But I’m sure there’ll be plenty of good games this year. We’re gonna have a console launch!

For the past few weeks, I’ve entertained the idea of restarting “Passing the Buck” some day in the future. Honestly, it’s not a bad idea. It allows me to see a ton of games and try ones I normally wouldn’t, it holds my attention at a time where my mind drifts easily to dark and despondent places, and it fills up a chunk of the year. I’ll never do it in a three month burst again, but just one will be easy. What I can say with full confidence is that it certainly won’t be for some time. This was an exhausting experience, and I’ll be glad to not deal with it for some time. Of course, I was planning to end this paragraph by complaining about the last few days and all the pain they brought, but I’m just going to have to live with remembering how this the secret final chapter went. Chill. You know, the series also started chill. Over the next few weeks, it would slowly get more intensive and harder in various ways. Exhaustion both physical and mental started setting in, even with all my little life hacks to stave it off. With most of the time gone, I had to reframe my perspective, meaning that although the fatigue stayed, I was once again happy. We ended with the same kind of positive vibes we started with.

And I’d like to keep that going with a nice, long rest. Obviously, I’ve still got old articles to finish and new ones to come up with, maybe even one or two for games I played in this series. Writing’s a pleasure and something I’ll always want to do. But things will be calmer by a long shot. Well, mostly. In literally one day, we’re getting the presentation on Nintendo Switch 2! We’re a Nintendo blog, about to see Nintendo’s newest generation and trajectory. Historic times. The timing is beyond magical and for me, it’s either heavenly or hellish. The fun never stops here at Source Gaming! But I’m more than happy to get my down time in and give whatever games I play the time they deserve.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!