Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Alongside trudging through Act III of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the new game I’ve been playing is DK Island & Emerald Rush, the DLC from Nintendo. It turns Donkey Kong Bananza, which was already a demented and frenetic 3D platformer, into a score-chasing roguelike. As DK collects Fossils and Bananas, and as he does technically optional but painfully required bonus missions, he gains various passive upgrades that allow him to net more emerald ore and stay ahead of a ticking clock. So you figure out which powers you want the most, which powers synergize with powers you’ve already found, and when is best to use your limited number of fast travels.
It’s a surprising mix of genres, even in a climate where roguelikes have been combined with seemingly every other genre under the sun. It’s also not as extreme of a roguelike, at least in the sense that the levels, Bananas, and Fossils all stay the same. At the same time, it also definitely adds a lot to Bananza, which did have a hard endgame and postgame but was also so empowering that much of the game could be finished with barely any fuss. The time limit forces you to pretty much move constantly, and the upgrades push you into making builds. And since your skill tree is reset at the start of every run, you have to basically relearn how to play the basics. I keep forgetting that no, I’m not starting these levels with extra strength or the spin jump. It leads me to playing Donkey Kong Bananza almost like a speedrunner, or an advanced player, and recontextualizes so many of its mechanics, terrain types, and ideas as a whole. While it won’t work for everyone, and even I’ve had trouble doing more than three runs at a time for my review, it’s pretty cool.
And this has led me to today’s prompt: imagine an optional roguelike mode in a favorite game of yours. Sure, it’s a trend, and it’s an easy back of the box feature, but it has affirmed the potential of this to me. See, the last time I replayed Pikmin 4, during the “Olimar’s Shipwreck Tale” mode (which rearranges the treasures and enemies on each map), I felt like Pikmin would be a perfect candidate for a roguelike mode. You could randomize so many things, like Pikmin types, enemies, objects, landing sites, obstacles, and even parts of the level. It would lack the precision of figuring out the optimal ways through a level, but what’s cool about being a mode and not the whole game is that this wouldn’t threaten the classic fun of Pikmin. And that’s why I’m suggesting to treat this as an optional feature. I’d love to see people find ways to twist their favorites… and, maybe, even a way to twist a roguelike.
And, as always, what did you play this weekend?