Recently I had to travel for a very long time, so I thought to myself, that this would be a great opportunity to finally get my hands on Octopath Traveler on Switch. It’s an adorable-looking game, a top-down, pixel RPG. The central point of the game is that there are 8 characters with their own stories that travel together. So, naturally, I had to get every character to see their stories, right? Now, you could just stick to 1 character and do it in isolation, I suppose, but that’s not how I roll. I must have it all. Every character has an initial story stage that introduces that character.

Long (very long) story short, it takes around 12 hours to get through, what I see as, the introduction to the game from all the characters’ perspectives… Now, there is a way to skip some of this, but the full experience of Chapter 1 in 8 perspectives is freaking 12 hours long. By the end of chapter 1 I was already done travelling, so who knows when I will get around to continuing this grind-fest. But this kinda prompts a question: how much time is a good amount of time for the introduction of the game?

“Hey, you wanna play that latest game that is like Lethal Company? No, not Content Warning. No, not Pilgrim. Yes, R.E.P.O, that is the one!”

The gaming industry currently seems to be on fire when it comes to bigger and older companies with one closure after another. Yet the smaller studios with smaller projects are blooming here and there. Good concepts are being latched on to and quickly iterated. This is, of course, a perspective from the outside since each iteration I try, as a consumer, takes a lot of time and resources to create. The developers usually have only one chance to get things right. The latest in the trendsetting was Lethal Company which gave life to Content Warning, Pilgrim, The Headliners, N.E.P.O (my personal favourite currently). A friend of mine just put out his own solo project Demining on Steam.

And then again, one could argue that the real predecessor to the horror/coop was Phasmophobia (still in early access with a whooping 600k reviews). But by observing this iterating creativity we could safely say that there is a good demand for coop/horror games at the moment. What trend will be next in line? A couple of years ago it was about battle royale…

Imagine being an artist and someone in production telling you: “Now we need you to make 100 different pieces of pixel sushi”. What a dream scenario, personally 😀

This post is mainly a tiny homage to all that pixel sushi in the game.

Dave the Diver was a delight to play – great pixel art, funny references, and multiple game mods with entertaining mechanics that keep the experience fresh. I am pretty sure I will replay this game later, just for the fun of it. Cheers to Korean developers for this cool game.