What we’ve been playing | Eurogamer.net

September 2, 2022

Good morning! Welcome to our regular column where we write a bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the past few days. This time: juice, B-Type and a bit of caving.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We Been Playing,
here are our archives.

Poinpy, smartphones (with a Netflix account) Poinpy trailer.

Poinpy is one of Netflix’s premier games, a surprisingly large selection of smartphone treats that are surprisingly easy to miss or overlook, given the streaming giant’s slightly odd rollout.

But Poinpy is also the next game from the creator of Downwell. I’d be tempted to say it’s Downwell upside down, but that sells both games short.

Where Downwell was about to go, well, down, Poinpy is about to go up. You jump, double-jump, and bounce off the wall using swipes, and you can accurately hit the ground at any time by tapping the screen. This is useful because when you hit the ground, any fruit you ate while jumping is instantly converted into juice, to feed the angry monster following close behind you.

It looks whimsical, and the simple colors, clean lines, and chirping music certainly make it easy to read. But in reality, Poinpy is extremely stressful. This monster really wants juice! Specific juice made from specific ingredients! And there are timers that run while you work! And we have to keep moving! And and and!

Poinpy is a blast, then. Not always an explosion of joy. I love it.

Chris Donlan

Tetris, Game Boy We don’t need much of an excuse to release the Tetris Effect trailer.

I picked up my Game Boy for a feature we released about a week ago, but haven’t really been able to put it down. I mainly played Tetris, and this week I rediscovered a lost classic – lost to me anyway. Tetris Type B.

Over the years, I’ve mostly played A-Type Tetris, which is the classic marathon game. But B-Type is an absolute stunner in its own right. It’s a 25-line game based on high scores, and it lets you set not only the speed of the drops, but also the amount of trash you have to manage on the screen.

The trash can is where this mode comes to life for me. It’s a headache in itself, a siren call to cast aside best practices and land you in serious trouble. I play it now and am always tempted to try to clean up the junk while I get my 25 lines – so my attention is divided and disaster strikes quickly.

What I really like is the way the trash appears on screen, this procedural landscape reminiscent of asteroid fields or the delicate underwater coral ridges a navigator might have to pass a boat.

Tetris really is the game that keeps on giving, I think. B-Type gave me a fresh and new feeling.

Chris Donlan

Spelunky 2, Switch Il Buco – such a treat.

I watched the wonderful Italian film Il Buco over the weekend. He did a fantastic double bill with Nope, and that’s also a fascinating thing in itself: slowly and almost wordlessly, he tells the story of a 1960s caving expedition into one of the most deepest in the world.

There’s a glorious moment in there that can’t get out of my mind. The cave system itself is accessed through a kind of gash in a field where various animals graze. At one point, people are playing football on the field with an old heavy ball, and the ball goes down the hole. For a moment we watch it vibrate around the entrance to the hole, then it falls, falls, falls into darkness. No neighbor returns this ball.

Inevitably, it made me want to play Spelunky. But which one? In the end, there was no choice. Spelunky 1 may be the most cohesive game, but Spelunky 2 makes me feel like I’m deeper underground.

And the point that seems furthest away is not the furthest at all. Wave pool! There are many levels below, but this eerie, dank landscape filled with hopping undead, chunks of coral, and chunks of gold speaks to me like no other level. I think I was reading Piranesi when I first played it, Suzanne Clarke’s novel about a house with a sea trapped inside. Even if I mixed the memories, the two places are inseparable. Underground seas, with little chance of escape.

Piranesi is a great novel, oppressive and rather sickly at the best of times. Il Buco is a great movie. And Spelunky 2 is the surprising point where the Venn diagram overlaps. Not bad for a lazy holiday weekend.

Chris Donlan