Trek to Yomi Review

Trek to Yomi is a side scrolling action game with a Kurosawa aesthetic and a focus on Shinto folklore. I got it on gamepass and largely bounced off it, but I picked it up again and finished it; I like the setting and themes after all, and it seemed worth seeing through to the end at least.

The game starts with you as a little boy named Hiroki, who’s training to be a samurai. Bandits attack his village, his master Sanjuro leaves to fight them off and despite being a small child, Hiroki follows, determined to live up to the values Sanjuro has ingrained in him. Sanjuro is killed, but takes his killer down with him, and the story flashes forward to Hiroki and Sanjuro’s daughter Aiko grown up, together, and important people within the village. A nearby village is besieged by bandits, and Hiroki leaves to fight them, partly to help out said village but also to stop the bandits from reaching his home. Turns out it was a ruse to draw him away, and he ends up with a burnt village, a dead Aiko, and subsequently dies himself at the hands of the same man who took out Sanjuro, having been resurrected somehow. Sorry to rush through that, but despite the important events and time jump, it’s largely set up for the game’s core plot: Hiroki traversing the Shinto afterlife of Yomi, being confronted by his failure to protect his people, and deciding whether to stay behind or leave, and if he does leave, what’s driving him to do so. The Yomi sections largely rely on imagery and atmosphere, with the occasional direct story encounter breaking things up; there’s a particularly strong one where Hiroki is set upon by his village’s other samurai who blame him for the deaths, and he has encounters with Aiko and Sanjuro that test his resolve and his decision to stay or not. Unfortunately, Yomi as depicted here isn’t particularly interesting. The first layer sets a great tone; a village on the water, dark and ominous. People struck by some terrible blight, tearing at Hiroki and yelling about Kegare (the Shinto concept of defilement and impurity), and strange eggs with two spider legs poking out that stab at anyone who gets too close. This strong tone doesn’t last, at least for me; the next layer is comprised of an ethereal village made up of rocks floating in the void. It feels sparse and empty, but in a way that’s uninteresting rather than contemplative or lonely. The final layer makes up for it with a whole lot of skulls scattered all over the place, but it never recaptures the grimy horror of that first section. Also this last layer decides it’s time to have some really easy puzzles that use time travel to fix broken paths and nothing else, which feels like a waste.

The gameplay is fine, but largely uninteresting. Exploration takes place in 3D, while combat is handled entirely in 2D. The exploration leads to increases in health, stamina and capacity for ranged weapon ammo, as well as collectibles I never bothered looking at. The ranged options aren’t especially useful, and the melee combat lacks weight for the most part. The parry timing feels off and actually landing a parry also lacks any real weight. There are combos that are far too easy for enemies to interrupt, so I relied on parrying/blocking then doing the attack that’s two quick, upward slashes. You also have to manually turn around to fight enemies coming up behind you, until after a little while the game throws you a bone and gives you an attack that lets you spin around and strike in one fluid movement. Nothing about it particularly stands out, and fighting enemies on either side can get annoying, unless they decide to just not attack you, which happens sometimes. There are new enemy types introduced in Yomi that are weirdly inconsistent in their difficulty, and there are bosses that don’t make much of an impact. I feel like the story taking place largely in the underworld isn’t used very well. You mostly just fight ghostly apparitions of samurai, which is boring.

Trek to Yomi has some neat ideas, and overall it’s not a bad time, but its potential is largely squandered, the combat lacks weight and the setting isn’t used to its full potential. It’s worth a look if you have Gamepass, but otherwise I wouldn’t bother.

By James Lambert
@jameslambert18

Sniper Elite 5 Review

I like Sniper Elite, for the most part. I don’t like V2’s more linear approach, but I enjoyed 3 well enough, and after buying it in a sale I had a surprisingly great time with 4. Its Fascist Italy setting, wide open maps with multiple objectives and neat sniping mechanics, melee takedowns and over the top gore made it good fun. It turns out 5 was a day one release on Game Pass, so instead of waiting to get the GOTY edition in a sale like I did with 4, I decided to review this latest instalment.

You are Karl Fairburne, a man with an Abe Simpson level military career who’s singlehandedly been a key part of multiple fronts and killed Hitler four times. This time around he’s in occupied France, working to stop some mysterious Nazi plot called “Project Kraken” and assassinate the man at the top; Abelard Moller. The story is largely just an excuse to sneak into some gorgeous French locations and murder Nazis; a hectic, on-going battle in Operation Overlord, landing on a small island and working your way up through a tiny town that’s been turned into a spy academy, a trip to Guernsey of all places; it’s not what I expected from another world war 2 game set in France, in a good way. A pleasant surprise.

Every level is large, open and has multiple objectives, with at least one requiring you to explore and discover it; usually it’s something to destroy or sabotage to help the main allied force, Karl being a lone operative sent ahead. There are multiple starting locations to unlock, and alongside the collectibles are workbenches that unlock new customisation options for each category of gun. That’s the first major change, and improvement, over the previous games; every gun has a variety of magazines, stocks, scopes, muzzles and the like that affect aiming stability, rate of fire, damage and, most interestingly, the amount of noise they make. Unlike most games, supressed weapons still make plenty of noise, calculated in a ring, with a distance in meters explaining how far away enemies will be able to hear it. Supressed weapons help with stealth but usually do less damage, and loud noises can still be used to mask shots, making the new compensators a viable option too. With the right customisations, a semi-automatic pistol becomes useful enough to rival the series’ ever-present Welrod, and submachine guns are no longer only useful for when you’ve been spotted and get into a gunfight. You can also find weapons dotted around the place that can only be used for one magazine’s worth of ammo, so if you don’t have a silenced gun and suddenly decide you want one, the game may well throw you a bone. Overall, the game now plays a bit like a mix between MGSV and the recent Hitman games, but without any social stealth. Fluid (for the most part, Karl gets stuck on scenery sometimes) movement through wide open areas, quick melee takedowns in both lethal and non-lethal flavours, different ammo types and customisation options that affect every gun in various ways, and kill challenges for each assassination target, often not involving a firearm of any kind. On the one hand, this meant I didn’t do a great deal of sniping, because melee takedowns are silent and the game is very lenient about enemies seeing you if you can book it over to them quick enough and slash their throats before they make a fuss. On the other hand, the sniping is as good as it’s ever been, the game facilitates it well, and with the welcome changes, the rest of the gameplay is now as good as the series’ USP, making it a more well-rounded game. The game takes a Dishonored 2-style approach to your level performance too rather than a more rigid, punishing one; a four-point graph shows what particular balance of stealth and combat you went for, and how lethal or non-lethal you were. The new non-lethal stuff is interesting actually; they even have new wooden tipped bullets that knock people out. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will do a non-lethal run some time.

Sniper Elite 5 keeps the series’ main attraction of sniping affected by a player-decided degree of physics and environmental factors and builds a really solid stealth action game around it. As someone who loves stealth games it’s always nice when good ones come along, and I really enjoyed this. The wide open levels with multiple objectives, fluid movement and stealth takedowns, weapon customisation and great sniping make Sniper Elite 5 easily the best in the series, and definitely worth checking out, particularly if you’ve got Game Pass.

By James Lambert
@jameslambert18