Metal Gear Solid 5 mashes up with Spelunky for one of 2023’s most rewarding roguelikes

If you have even a passing acquaintance metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, you probably remember its Fulton Recovery System. To supply the base-building element of the game with personnel and equipment, you haul those items out of the open world by attaching them to balloons that sail offscreen for convenient transport to the headquarters of your rogue paramilitary operation. By any measure, and especially by the measure of an obsessively detailed military stealth-action game, it’s an insanely silly flourish.

In fact, it’s so silly it fits right into the genre of the cartoon mr sun’s hatbox, As if he always belonged there. Because in this roguelike platformer developed by Kenny Sun, you lead a rogue paramilitary operation unconcerned by the limits of the government or their laws (after all, you are a delivery person for a company called “Amazin”). The difference is that you work from a client’s basement to retrieve stolen packages, undertaking missions that resemble dangerous 2D platforming levels. spelunki, Completing these missions helps fund your operation, giving you both an arsenal and army to use through mission rewards, black-market purchases, and balloons attached to any useful-seeming items and characters. There are supplies that you may encounter along the way. ,

quite the opposite metal Gear, you don’t play as a single character. Instead, you personally control a randomly generated blob—person(s) for any given mission, where they may very well die permanently. The characters are primarily distinguished (in addition to various ironic nicknames) by their personal qualities, traits, and quirks, which completely change the game on a per-mission, per-agent basis. These variables are further complicated by the wide range of equipment available, which includes ping pong rackets, shark hats and plates of bouncy flan, in addition to a typical selection of firearms, explosives and sharp objects.

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Image: Kenny Sun/Raw Fury

Especially in the early hours of the game, many of the character’s traits are undesirable, and you’re essentially forced to work around what you have. An Agent can have the surprisingly useful “Tazer” attribute when he touches any guards. But they may also have “dry eyes,” which causes the screen to black out every few seconds because they have to blink too much.

Much of the game involves strategizing around these quirks when possible. For example, upon snapping a guard’s neck, the “Guilty Conscience” trait sends your character flailing around in an uncontrollable panic for a few brief but potentially crucial seconds, during which they avoid a trapdoor or another guard. Can be mistaken in sight. To circumvent this, you can take care of killing exclusively (and possibly more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to a secluded area, where it will be available to your assigned agent for any reason. It is safe to remove the aftershocks after the kill.

But it’s easy to lose track of these strategies in the heat of the moment or in the pile of units and equipment available, and the chaotic chain reactions that result. mr sun’s hatbox Very special For example, I accidentally arm my agent with my boomerang, which immediately activated the “weak bowels” trait when hit, which I then discover is a guard investigating the origin of the brand-new stench. brings On another mission, I learned the hard way that the “forgetting” trait removes the indicator of the single character you want to keep alive.

Image: Kenny Sun/Raw Fury

The result is a particularly out of control complete fun spelunki Sessions with the additional wrinkle of steady progress; Base-building cleverly forces you to not only keep track of your equipment stores but to consider your personnel and which of them you might lose. Consecutively selecting a specific agent for missions will increase their level, giving them more health, while they grow out of unusable traits to become more useful. But that agent becomes more valuable over time, to the point where that combo of helpful properties makes it difficult to justify the risk on anything but the most difficult and critical missions, if at all. Furthermore, mechanics such as skill trees are based on the levels of the characters you craft to perform those tasks – a seasoned level-7 operative will contribute more to skill tree research than a level-2 newcomer. The game leads you to stick your best units with desk jobs while risking more unpredictable agents in the field.

in the process, mr sun’s hatbox Brilliantly answers the age old question of how to engage players instead of taking risks and becoming exclusively familiar with the new mechanics. By encouraging you to follow the chaos of the court, it creates a gameplay loop where lots of intense, inventive moments stem from hilarious failure. It is the rare game that is as interesting to lose as it is to win.

mr sun’s hatbox was released on April 20 on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code provided by Raw Fury. Vox Media is an affiliated partnership. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Play Gamez’s ethics policy here,