Weekly Recap: A Walk With Yiayia Review and Soccer Story Review

What's up, and welcome to the Single Player Experience, the podcast that helps single player gamers manage their video game backlog. I'm your host, Sebastian Malden, and my main quest is to help you manage your ever growing video game backlog by letting you know which single player games are worth your time and money so that you can have the best single player experience. This episode is a single player experience weekly. This is where I batched together all the video games that were talked about during the week into one episode that you can get every single Friday. Now let's start the show. Sometimes in life, it's the smaller experiences or events that stick out the most. Like for example, going to the store with a friend or cooking a meal with a loved one. It might seem like an everyday mundane thing to do, but these are often the events in our lives that we look back on fondly. Everyone has memories and moments like these. The game, a Walk with Yiayia is built around a moment, just like the ones I mentioned earlier. The game is centered on the main character, simply taking a stroll around the neighborhood with his grandmother Despite the game's smaller scale, it delivers big in everything it sets out to do. The game has a distinctive black, white, and gray tone mixed with a cute mixture of 2D and 3D retro art styles. As you play through the game, the settings kind of change up a bit, but every place you encounter is very well designed. Throughout the walk and your talk with your Yiayia which by the way translates to grandmother in Greek. You learn about your family and you learn about your Yiayia's past the writing. Here is where the game truly stands out. Each chat is memorable and emotional, like the stories we hear from our own relatives. Yiayia's Stories teach lessons and remind you that people have layered pasts The game also has mini games and side quests that kind of break things up The side. Quests are simple, but completing them gives you a nice interaction between the grandson and Yiayia The mini games also offer a nice variety and intertwine with Yiayia's story really well. You're gonna probably like some of the mini games more than others, but overall it's a pretty good. time So overall this game took me about an hour to complete. It's an experience that hit me hard in such a way that I spent the rest of the day thinking about the game. I'm not gonna lie to you. It's not often that I find myself tearing up while playing a game, but this one got to me as someone who lost his own grandmother, I found the game to be a delightful reminder of the small, everyday mundane moments that I had with her. So should you play a walk with Yiayia Yes. That's the simple answer, especially if you're a gamer who loves cozy games. Story based games or just smaller scale experiences then absolutely yes, despite only being a 60 minute experience. This game punches well above its weight. If you're a person who loves good storytelling, good writing, excellent visuals, then this is a game that you should definitely check out. If you're a gamer that likes any of those elements that I just described, then you should definitely check out a walk with Yiayia I've been following soccer story ever since I became aware of this game. I've been watching trailer after trailer of this game, and I really couldn't figure out why I was so interested until recently. Recently, I've discovered that I've always been interested in the melding of genres when it comes to sports games and RPGs. These are two video game drummers that I'm fond of, and so far I've liked the games that I played with this mixture. Recent examples of these kind of things are games like Dodge Ball Academy and Golf Story. Those are two games that I think are critically underrated, and I had a lot of fun with these games. So the moment of True finally came and I finally got my hands on the game. And here are the big questions that I really had going. Would soccer stories stand out in the sports RPG genre and is it a good single player experience? And would I recommend that other people play soccer story? After playing the game, I have all those answers, so let's dive into it. So, for a little more background, I just wanna let you know that this game was developed by Panic Bar and published by no More Robots. So in this game, you play as soccer Story's version of Kevin Bacon from the movie Footloose. Instead of dancing being banned in this world, soccer is banned by agency known as soccer. Inc This is the result of an incident known as the Calamity. After the Calamity Soccer Inc. Closes access to every aspect of soccer in the entire world. The clubs, the peewee, soccer games, everything, everything is shut down, that's soccer related. So now it's up to you to assemble a team and take down Soccer Inc. And bring back the glorious. sport Of soccer. So as you can probably tell by that description, the narrative is ridiculous and leaves a lot to be desired, but it works well enough to set the tone of what you can expect with this kind of game. The writing in general leans more towards the wacky side of the pitch. For example, you see this with the weird dialogue with the people around the town. The crazy side quest that you have to do and the footloose style main. plot I did get some laughs at the dialogue here and there, but this tone and writing simply won't appeal to everyone. Something that is very appealing though is the game's art style. Visually you can't help but to be reminded of the older Pokemon games. When you look at this game, especially when you look at the games in menu and character sprites the art style really took me to the glory days of trying to take down a gym leader. Honestly, it's probably the best overall aspect of the. game Let's talk about the gameplay. Now. The gameplay and soccer story is simple, yet fun. It is refreshing that even though you are quote unquote, the chosen one, you don't have any special set of powers or abilities. No. You're just a member of your team trying to win a quick four minute four versus four game of soccer. Another thing that really stood out to me is that this game is really fun, despite the fact that the games controls are relatively. You're just really limited to being able to run, shoot, slide, tackle, and pass. That's pretty much it, and honestly, this is where the game shines, the quick matches that are so engaging and fun. I wish that more time was spent on the pitch as opposed to interacting with the people of the town and all the little side quest. The town is fun to explore and all, but I missed playing soccer games. I wish that there was more balance between the two aspects to be honest. In some RPGs, the game revolves around the act of grinding to get stronger, thus better. In soccer story though, you simply do quest and side quest to earn money, thus improving your team stats and skills. The skills that you can upgrade are your shooting energy, speed, and your strength. This helps if you want to a hundred percent the game by doing Side Quest. Some of these side quests can only be completed by upgrading these skills. On the other hand though, it's nice that you can fully max out these aspects, but you honestly don't need to to overcome the main story. If you upgrade a few times, you should be able to mow down the main plot of the game. I feel like that's a real plus for the people who just wanna streamline the. All that said, let's talk about one of my main flaws with the game. The side quest get old very quickly. The main reason is because most of them feel like simple fetch quest, which I get it, it's a staple of RPGs, but the games have to make you feel like you're doing something worthwhile and meaningful without making it feel like a chore. Soccer story fails in this regard. For example, in the first couple hours in the game, you're sent to hunt down five carrots, overturn five trash cans, and break six box. Some of these are main quests, so you couldn't even opt out of doing them. But these are examples of quests that happen very often in the game and don't really feel notable are fun. They just feel like bloated content to make the game unnecessarily longer. Quests like these are so abundant in the game that it takes away from what actually makes the game special. The games charm and gameplay. If you can get through the first four hours where the game is trying to introduce all of its gameplay mechanics by making you do all these meaningless fetch questing, you get to a really good aspect of the game. But I feel like the first four hours and the wave of fetch quest are gonna be a huge hurdle that most people just simply aren't going to be able to overcome. It's a shame because without that aspect, I feel like there's a lot of good treats about this game. The gameplay is really fun, and the game features a really dope art cell. Unfortunately, the game's writing and the wave after wave of fish quest prevent this from being the best possible game that it could have been. So those are the video game recommendations of the week that you should consider adding to your video game backlog list. If you want me or my community of gamers to give you feedback on your backlog list, then join us in the single player experience Discord server. Once you're in, feel free to share your backlog list or talk about good single player game experiences that you've had lately. The link to join the free single player experience Discord server is in the show notes. This has been the Single Player Experience weekly recap episode where I break down every single game that was talked about during the week. And come see you every single Friday, and I hope to catch you next Friday for the next week's recap episode. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.