Sonic Frontiers does something really weird with its final boss fight and I wanna talk about it.

Obviously, mechanical spoilers follow. No narrative ones, though.

Read more...

When I bought a Steam Deck, I wasn’t too concerned about its specs or compatibility with new stuff. As a rule, I don’t exactly rush to play the latest AAA releases. But sometimes I want to play a newish big-ticket game that happens to be significantly worse on Steam Deck.

Sonic Frontiers was one of those games. It’s perfectly playable on the Deck and the graphical issues didn’t get in the way of the experience I wanted, but they did make me laugh when I saw that there was a photo mode.

I do love it when games allow for creative expression that you can capture as persistent play artifacts, but it’s hard to get excited about setting up photo ops when the platform I’m on means the resulting image will cap out at 720p with limits on draw distance and texture quality and possible glitches.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough that it would be remotely worth buying a new gaming PC or current-gen console, but it happens enough to be annoying. It’s another reason to hope that the Steam Deck keeps doing well and becomes a widely-targeted platform by the AA and AAA studios and not just the indies.

So, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was pretty good. But playing it also awoke my long-dormant Sonic fixation and made me want to spend more time with those characters.

The problem is that as a rule, Sonic games are not the kind of game I want to play these days. They tend to be built around mastery challenges, which was great for me when I was learning perseverance but not so much now at a time when I’m uninterested in friction and failure. I just want to chill with Sonic and friends, but Sonic games have no chill. (Yes, there was one RPG, but it was terrible.)

But! It just so happens that the latest mainline Sonic game, Sonic Frontiers, is an open-world game apparently taking some cues from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It has tons of chill!

So I picked it up and am loving it. I’d expect it to be divisive - games that branch out from the formula in crazy experimental ways are normal for the Sonic franchise, but this feels like a more radical departure than usual. And it certainly has flaws, as expected for the first installment with a new structure and gameplay approach, but it hits me in just the right way for what I’m looking for. Some reviewers call the open world empty and desolate; I find it peaceful and calm. Some complain that the platforming segments are isolated and decontextualized; I like that I can approach them on my own pace and schedule. Some complain that the most-traditional elements of the game, the cyber space levels, are so short; I like that they are so manageable and I can generally achieve all of their objectives after just a few tries and then switch to whatever other kind of gameplay I’m in the mood for.

I think this is yet another reason why it’s borderline meaningless to try to assign review scores to games as though their quality and enjoyability are objectively quantifiable, instead of just clarifying what kind of experience they provide. Frontiers is not an objectively great game, but it’s great to me, today. If I’d tried it some years back or even when I was just in the wrong mood maybe I would have dropped it quickly.

What games did I correctly dismiss years ago that I’d actually really enjoy today?