When is a review, not a review? (New Side Quest #2)

Games Played: Mika and the Witches Mountain (2024), The Outer Worlds (2019)

When I moved from TheNerdRock to CraigPlaysGames, one of the things I told myself is that I wouldn’t force myself to talk about every game, especially if I didn’t finish it. There are times where I do want to talk about a game but can’t find a good way to talk about it, such as the case with Super Mario RPG last year. Here, I have two games that I did enjoy, so why can’t I review them?

First up was Mika and the Witches Mountain. Now I can’t say I was “Excited” for this game necessarily but I had played the previous game from developer Chibig, Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara and thought it was decent. It was a different sort of game, more of a straightforward 3D platformer which felt fun to play but didn’t do anything revolutionary. The difference between that and Mika then is that the former was fun to play while the latter was easy to play.

If you need the quick synopsis for Mika and the Witches Mountain, Mika is a witch in training who gets booted from the Witch school at the top of the mountain. In order to get back, she’ll need an expensive new broom and to afford that, she’ll need to become the island’s new postwoman. The developers say that it’s inspired by Kiki’s Delivery Service but as I’ve not seen it so my only frame of reference is this being a much poorer A Short Hike.

The game doesn’t even lean into the Witchyness of anything either. Could replace the broom with a giant flying squirrel or something and you’d have a solid fantasy setting. The game has environmental themes and uses ancient ruins for set dressing but doesn’t explore any of it particularly. It’s like a team of writers didn’t know what the others were doing.

It’s starting to sound like I really didn’t like the game but I still played it all the way through and got the platinum. As with a lot of these cosy adventure games, they’re easy to play because they’re a step above being disengaged and bored but are otherwise inoffensive and bland.

The Outer Worlds then is a harder one to analyse because for all intents and purposes, I genuinely quite enjoyed the game… as I was playing it. Reflecting upon it, I suppose it was quite a vapid experience. The fast food analogy comes up a lot – tastes good but you’re hungry not long after but I think it’s apt here.

Every bit of praise I could level at the game has an equally damning downside: Combat is really fun thanks to the satisfying gun play but the game is so easy that I didn’t have to engage with any of the mods beyond putting electric one a gun for a slightly easier time against robots. The weapons were also easily disposable as soon as “Gun but better” came along. The game offers you freedom to explore with optional planets and varying questlines but everything leads to the exact same destination and most of the game can be skipped over without any consequence. Everything feels inconsequential by extent.

The Dialogue and Theming of the game are probably its strongest suites, being dry and witty. It is fairly one note in its anticapitalistic theming but it does have its amusing lines. The problem is there’s not a character that stands out as particularly memorable save for maybe Phineas Welles, your sole motivator and link to the narrative. The companions are a mixed bag too, Parvati easily being the most interesting and probably the most interesting in the game but she can’t carry it alone.

The Outer Worlds was fun, in a word – nothing meaningful or whatever. Didn’t fancy the DLC, still looking forward to the sequel which can hopefully remedy some of the issues. Mika and the Witch’s Mountain was okay, not as good as Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara. There, two smaller review like opinions.