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everygame · 2 months

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Balatro

Developed/Published by: LocalThunk / PlayStack Released: 20/02/2024 Completed: 22/02/2024 Completion: Finished it with the blue deck, then with the red deck… then with the yellow deck…

Balatro is the first game in a long time that I’ve picked up on a whim. I saw a screenshot (Wario64 posting a deal on it, actually) and it just… chimed. It looked like a screenshot of an Amiga poker game in a magazine, and on discovering it was a Roguelike-like deckbuilder, I thought, “well, I’m always game for one of those.”

As usual, I fell into this completely, playing it to the exclusion of all else, until I felt like I’d “solved” it in as much as I worked out a strategy that worked well enough for me that I doubted I’d spend time looking for others.

After which I still played it to completion one more time. But I’ve definitely gone cold turkey now!!!

Balatro is very, very good. To explain it: It is a Roguelike-like deckbuilder that unlike Cobalt Core, doesn’t slavishly follow the template of Slay The Spire. It’s more like Luck Be A Landlord, really, in that it takes something that previously existed (in this case, poker) and bends it into something largely unrecognisable.

The idea here is really quite unlike poker, to be honest, outside of the fact that you are trying to make up to five card poker hands. For one, you have your own deck, you draw eight cards at a time, and then have a limited number of hands to make scoring poker hands to beat a set amount of chips, with the twist that cards grant differing numbers of chips based on their rank, with poker hands conferring more chips and a multiplier. You also have a limited number of discards in which you can discard up to five cards at a time.

So the idea is, basically, play the poker hand that gets you the most chips and multiplier each time, using discards to savvily maximise your chances of that. But more interestingly, you can also have up to 5 jokers on the table, who provide you wildly differing bonuses. As simple as “gain multiplier for playing a pair” but also more esoteric possibilities, like gaining a bonus for keeping kings in your hand, or even allowing straights to use non-consecutive numbers!

And then there’s also the fact that after every win, you get some money (disconnected from chips, sensibly for the design, weird for the metaphor) to visit a shop and buy cards. These can either add cards to your deck, or change the benefits of particular poker hands, or change the cards in your deck. You can turn a 3 of spades into another king of hearts, let’s say. Or make a card give you a multiplier, or even just turn it into a bit of stone that gives you 50 chips every time you play it (but won’t ever be able to help you score higher on flushes or straights… well unless you get that joker that lets you score flushes or straights with four cards instead of five?)

It’s complicated, and it’s going to take a while to get comfortable with, but once you do, it’s utterly captivating. It’s genius because it breaks the first thing you learn playing a Slay The Spire-like: you start with a 52 card deck, so trying to get your deck small and efficient by destroying cards isn’t going to be possible (I’ve never managed to kill more than 10 cards on a run) and not only that removing cards at random can seriously damage your chance of scoring straights! It instead becomes a matter of working out how to make the deck you have efficient by changing cards and shaping your success via joker modifiers.

There’s also a beautiful spot of risk reward in the design in that there’s no dungeon map or anything, so no chance for bonus granting events. Balatro boils those events down to “oh, you’re just skipping a battle for a bonus” and each “ante” (three games with progressively high scores to beat) you can skip one or both of the first two games to get a bonus. Maybe it’s to immediately add some cards to your deck, or to add a special joker to the next store. In some cases, it’s “ah, I’ll skip this, because I need these cards anyway and don’t have money.” In other cases it’s “oh, if I skip this, it’s a gamble, because my deck might not be good enough to beat the next game, but the reward is so high…”

It’s a bit of genius that adds another layer to the player’s decision making without being overwhelming, and it might be my favourite bit of the design to be honest.

The issue with Balatro, is, ultimately like the issue with most of these kinds of games. After you play it for a while, you find the way to play it that, as far as you can tell, is the optimum way to play it. When I think of Slay The Spire or Cobalt Core, it’s “defense!” with Balatro, for me at least, it seems to be “Flushes!”

(In a 52 card deck, you only have 4 of any one card, but you also only have 4 suits. So it’s far easier to try and reduce the number of cards of a different suit you draw by changing cards suits/destroying “wrong” suit cards than to try and make more aces or anything.)

In addition, while the game does have different classes of decks, they don’t change the deck pool at all, and the more you play the more jokers and card you unlock, which may open up new combos, but it also makes combo you know seem harder to manufacture, and there’s a sense that you could end up with the same issue that I found with Luck Be A Landlord–that it becomes hard to hit a combo early and get to that point where you have an engine whirring away often enough that you’re having fun.

These issues, however, don’t really diminish what a triumph Balatro was for the time I spent playing it. It looks great (although the constantly moving pixels did make my eyes sort of hurt? I wish you could turn that off) and it does do something unique in a space that’s arguably got a bit samey, so it comes highly recommended.

Will I ever play it again? God I really want to actually. But I won’t. Probably.

Final Thought: Something I haven’t mentioned though is that even without unlocking all the jokers, the RNG in Balatro can be absolutely brutal. There’s another unique touch here that every ante’s “boss” gives a unique modifier to the game, and some are a nightmare–for example the one that makes every single card draw face down! (There’s a trick in that the game still presents hands in suit or rank order, though…) And this means that sometimes you’re just going to hit something that is unwinnable unless you made very different decisions significantly earlier (oh you built a deck full of clubs? Too bad, this boss debuffs your entire deck. And don’t get me started on the one that permanently levels your hands down, basically that fucking poison swamp from Shiren…) With huge decks, there’s a bit more frustration here I’d say when you feel like you didn’t manage to get anywhere (or did, and just got screwed) and I suspect it only gets worse on higher difficulties. So like the rest of these kinds of things I’d say: play it as long as you enjoy it, and not a second more.

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#gaming #video games #games #txt #text #review #balatro #localthunk #playstack #2024

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literupture · 2 years

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lol i really be playing Greedfall like “this kinda sucks. but it’s good. but it sucks ass. but it’s fine” over and over again

and then suddenly i realize i’ve spent 10 hours of my day only playing it. aa

i just want!! more!!! Dragon Age!!!!! 😭

like it really is just slightly worse dragon age but with colonialism.... (which it thankfully does not glorify as far as i can tell)

but the romances need MORE. I need more dialogue from my companions. there’s no party banter!!!!! sometimes during quests i’ll be expecting a companion to say something since the topic of the quest is somewhat relevant to them and they just look around while my character talks. other times a character will deliver but it is so sporadic. Vasco is practically quiet during every side quest but i refuse to swap him out. companions in general need more depth to ‘em. ugh

at the same time i want to give this game a pass and even support it a lil more than it might deserve purely bc there’s no other games like this!! like, why?? if you want more dragon age you go play mass effect and if you’ve done all that then your options are the other bioware games which are just jade empire and star wars ig

jade empire i’ll get to eventually but i really wanted a medieval fantasy-ish setting

and i really don’t care for star wars at all so blehh

do people just not really like this genre?? why haven’t any indie devs tried their hand at bioware-style rpgs? like not even a passion project, or a kickstarter, or just some kind of attempt

it’s kinda depressing bc it’s one of my favorite types of viddy james but nowadays everything is a goddamn metroidvania soulslike roguelike deckbuilder

uggghhhh

EDIT: I changed my mind. i love this game despite its flaws

(actually the above sentiments still apply but if anyone goes back to look at this post just know that i do love greedfall now)

#is anyone else suffering in this way #pls god if you're out there revive this genre #or at least give some people the courage to compete with bioware #i am in agony #so yea props to the devs of greedfall. not a perfect game in the slightest (tho there isn't even such a thing)#but it's a decent game and scratches that bioware rpg itch #i think the dev is a small studio as well but obvs overshadowed #i'll end up getting greedfall 2 and even if it's exactly the same at least i'd be showing support for this genre #personal #greedfall

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laryna6 · 3 years

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Some free games that aren’t designed to suck your wallet dry + how they are getting their money:

Night of Full Moon - a dark fairy tale themed roguelike deckbuilder also available for mobile. There’s additional class/mode content unlocked by one-time purchases if you want more (I did), but the free stuff is pretty meaty with four classes and fifteen degrees of difficulty. One of my fav games. I have sunk so many hours into it.

Burn Me Twice - an adventure game about a witch, with investigation and puzzles. Supported by a university.

Helltaker - comedy puzzle game about a ‘harem full of demon girls. There’s a $10 artbook you can buy if you want to support.

Epic Battle Fantasy 3 - part of a series but no real ongoing plot so it’s not a problem the third game is the first available one? Fun JRPG style game, with sequels (that aren’t free) if you want more.

Dark Descent: The Blue Rose - an RPGmaker game. Apparently there are a lot of good free RPGmaker games around, including some notable enough to have large TVTropes pages. I liked a few, but I found they start looking the same after awhile. This is a well-done one if you want to see if they’re your thing.

Grimm’s Hollow - Another freeware RPG, Halloween themed.

Witches x Warlocks - a Halloween raising sim/dating sim where you can be male/female/nonbinary dating male/female/nonbinary creatures of the night. There’s a supporter pack you can buy for some extra cgs + an extra route.

Onirim - A pretty simple but tough card game? There’s some expansion packs you can buy (I haven’t), but getting both of them totals two bucks.

#rpg experiences #have played half of these

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za3k · 3 years

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2020 Videogames

In 2020 I’m newly retired, so I’ve had free time. I think it’s fun to do reviews, so without further ado here’s every video game I played in 2020!

I recommend:

(4/5) Among Us – Very fun. It’s only fun with voice chat with friends, so I’ve only gotten to play once or twice. I’ve been watching it more than playing it. Also free to play for mobile gamers–I’m tired of the “everyone buys a copy” model of group gameplay.

(4/5) Brogue. Brogue is an ascii-art roguelike. It’s great, and it has a nice difficulty ramp. It’s a good “quick break” game. I play it in preference to other roguelikes partly because I haven’t done it to death yet, and partly because I don’t need a numpad?

(4/5) Cook Serve Delicious 3. One of the more fun games I played this year. You get really into it, but I had trouble relaxing and paying attention to the real world when I played too much, haha. I own but haven’t played the first two–I gather this is pretty much just a refinement.

(4/5) Green Hell. Price tag is a bit high for the number of hours I got out of it, but I haven’t finished the story. Great graphics, and the BEST map design I’ve seen in a 3D game in a long time. It feels like a real place, with reasonable geography instead of copy-pasted tiles. I love that as you walk along, you can just spot a cultivated area from the rest of the jungle–it feels more like it’s treating me like an adult than most survival games. Everything still gets highlighted if you can pick it up. I played the survival mode, which was okay but gets old quickly. I started the story mode–I think it would be fine, but it has some LONG unskippable scenes at the start, including a very hand-holdy tutorial, that I think they should have cut. I did start getting into the story and was having fun, but I stopped. I might finish the game some time.

(4/5) Hyperrogue. One of my recent favorites. The dev has made a fair number of highly experimental games, most of which are a total miss with me, but this one is fun. I do wish the early game wasn’t quite as repetitive. Failing another solution, I might actually want this not to be permadeath, or to have a save feature? I bought it on steam to support the dev and get achievements, but it’s also available a version or two behind free, which is how I tried it. Constantly getting updates and new worlds.

(4/5) Minecraft – Compact Claustrophobia modpack. Fun idea, nice variety. After one expansion felt a little samey, and it was hard to start with two people. I’d consider finishing this pack.

(4/5) Overcooked 2. Overcooked 2 is just more levels for Overcooked. The foods in the second game is more fun, and it has better controls and less bugs. If you’re considering playing Overcooked, I recommend just starting with the second game, despite very fun levels in the first. I especially appreciate that the second game didn’t just re-use foods from the first.

(4/5) Please Don’t Press Anything. A unique little game where you try to get all the endings. I had a lot of fun with this one, but it could have used some kind of built-in hints like Reventure. Also, it had a lot of red herrings. Got it for $2, which it was well worth.

(5/5) Reventure. Probably the best game new to me this year. It’s a short game where you try to get each of about 100 endings. The art and writing are cute and funny. The level design is INCREDIBLE. One thing I found interesting is the early prototype–if I had played it, I would NOT have imagined it would someday be any fun at all, let alone as amazing as it is. As a game designer I found that interesting! I did 100% complete this one–there’s a nice in-game hint system, but there were still 1-3 “huh” puzzles, especially in the post-game content, one of which I had to look up. It’s still getting updates so I’m hoping those will be swapped for something else.

(5/5) Rimworld. Dwarf fortress, but with good cute graphics, set in the Firefly universe. Only has 1-10 pawns instead of hundreds of dwarves. Basically Dwarf Fortress but with a good UI. I wish you could do a little more in Rimworld, but it’s a fantastic, relaxing game.

(5/5) Slay the Spire. Probably the game I played most this year. A deckbuilding adventure through a series of RPG fights. A bit luck-based, but relaxing and fun. I like that you can play fast or slow. Very, very well-designed UI–you can really learn how things work. My favorite part is that because it’s singleplayer, it’s really designed to let you build a game-breaking deck. That’s how it should be!

(4/5) Stationeers. I had a lot of fun with this one. It’s similar to Space Engineers but… fun. It has better UI by a mile too, even if it’s not perfect. I lost steam after playing with friends and then going back to being alone, as I often do for base-building games. Looks like you can genuinely make some complicated stuff using simple parts. Mining might not be ideal.

(5/5) Spy Party. One of my favorite games. Very fun, and an incredibly high skill ceiling. There’s finally starting to be enough people to play a game with straners sometimes. Bad support for “hot seat”–I want to play with beginners in person, and it got even harder with the introduction of an ELO equivalent and removing the manual switch to use “beginner” gameplay.

(4/5) Telling Lies. A storytelling game. The core mechanic is that you can use a search engine for any phrase, and it will show the top 5 survellance footage results for that. The game internally has transcripts of every video. I didn’t really finish the game, but I had a lot of fun with it. The game was well-made. I felt the video acting didn’t really add a huge amount, and they could have done a text version, but I understand it wouldn’t have had any popular appeal. The acting was decent. There’s some uncomfortable content, on purpose.

(4/5) Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS). Delightful. Very silly, not what you’d expect from the name. What everyone should have been doing with physics engines since they were invented. Imagine that when a caveman attacks, the club moves on its own and the caveman just gets ragdolled along, glued to it. Also the caveman and club have googley eyes. Don’t try to win or it will stop being fun. Learn how to turn on slo-mo and move the camera.

(4/5) We Were Here Together. Lots of fun. I believe the second game out of three. Still some crashes and UI issues. MUCH better puzzles and the grpahics are gorgeous. They need to fix the crashes or improve the autosave, we ended up replaying a lot of both games from crashes. It’s possible I should be recommending the third game but I haven’t played it yet.

The Rest

(3/5) 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel. More fun that it sounds. If you play to mess around and win by accident, it’s pretty good. Definitely play with a second human player, though.

(1.5/5) 7 billion humans. Better than the original, still not fun. Soulless game about a soulless, beige corporation. Just play Zachtronics instead. If you’re on a phone and want to engage your brain, play Euclidea.

(3/5) A Dark Room. Idle game.

(1/5) Amazing Cultivation Simulator. A big disappointment. Bad english voice acting which can’t be turned off, and a long, unskippable tutorial. I didn’t get to actual gameplay. I like Rimworld and cultivation novels so I had high hopes.

(3/5) ADOM (Steam version) – Fun like the original, which I would give 5/5. Developed some major issues on Linux, but I appreciate that there’s a graphical version available, one of my friends will play it now.

(4/5) agar.io – Good, but used to be better. Too difficult to get into games now. Very fun and addictive gameplay.

(3/5) Amorous – Furry dating sim. All of the hot characters are background art you can’t interact with, and the characters you can actually talk to are a bunch of sulky nerds who for some reason came to a nightclub. I think it was free, though.

(0/5) Apis. Alpha game, AFAIK I was the first player. Pretty much no fun right now (to the point of not really being a game yet), but it could potentially become fun if the author puts in work.

(4/5) Autonauts. I played a ton of Autonauts this year, almost finished it, which is rare for me. My main complaint is that it’s fundamentally supposed to be a game about programming robots, but I can’t actually make them do more than about 3 things, even as a professional programmer. Add more programming! It can be optional, that’s fine. They’re adding some kind of tower defense waves instead, which is bullshit. Not recommended because it’s not for everyone.

(3/5) A-Z Inc. Points for having the guts to have a simple game. At first this looked like just the bones of Swarm Simulator, but the more you look at the UI and the ascension system, the worse it actually is. I would regularly reset because I found out an ascension “perk” actually made me worse off.

(5/5) Beat Saber. Great game, and my favorite way to stay in shape early this year. Oculus VR only, if you have VR you already have this game so no need to recommend. Not QUITE worth getting a VR set just to play it at current prices.

(1/5) Big Tall Small. Good idea, but no fun to play. Needed better controls and level design, maybe some art.

(0.5/5) Blush Blush. Boring.

(3/5) Business Shark. I had too much fun with this simple game. All you do is just eat a bunch of office workers.

(3/5) chess.com. Turns out I like chess while I’m high?

(3/5) Circle Empires Rivals. Decent, more fun than the singleplayer original. It shouldn’t really have been a separate game from Circle Empires, and I’m annoyed I couldn’t get it DRM-free like the original.

(3/5) Cross Virus. By Dan-box. Really interesting puzzle mechanics.

(4/5) Cultist Simulator. Really fun to learn how to play–I love games that drop you in with no explanation. Great art and writing, I wish I could have gotten their tarot deck. Probably the best gameplay “ambience” I’ve seen–getting a card that’s labeled “fleeting sense of radiance” that disappears in 5 seconds? Great. Also the core stats are very well thought out for “feel” and real-life accuracy–dread (depression) conquers fascination (mania), etc. It has a few gameplay gotchas, but they’re not too big–layout issues, inability to go back to skipped text, or to put your game in an unwinnable state early on). Unfortunately it’s a “roguelike”, and it’s much too slow-paced and doesn’t have enough replay value, so it becomes a horrible, un-fun grind when you want to actually win. I probably missed the 100% ending but I won’t be going back to get it. I have no idea who would want to play this repeatedly. I’m looking forward to the next game from the same studio though! I recommend playing a friend’s copy instead of buying.

(2/5) Darkest Dungeon. It was fine but I don’t really remember it.

(2/5) Dicey Dungeons. Okay deck-building roguelike gameplay (with an inventory instead of a deck). Really frustrating, unskippably slow difficulty curve at the start. I played it some more this year and liked it better because I had a savegame. I appreciate having several character classes, but they should unlock every difficulty from the start.

(2/5) Diner Bros. Basically just a worse Overcooked. I didn’t like the controls, and it felt too repetitive with only one diner.

(2/5) Don’t Eat My Mind You Stupid Monster. Okay art and idea, the gameplay wasn’t too fun for me.

(2/5) Don’t Starve – I’ve played Don’t Stave maybe 8 different times, and it’s never really gripped me, I always put it back down. It’s slow, a bit grindy, and there’s no bigger goal–all you can do is live.

(3/5) Don’t Starve Together – Confusingly, Don’t Starve Together can be played alone. It’s Don’t Starve, plus a couple of the expansions. This really could be much more clearly explained.

(1/5) Elemental Abyss – A deck-builder, but this time it’s grid-based tactics. Really not all that fun. Just play Into the Abyss instead or something.

(1/5) Else Heart.Break() – I was excited that this might be a version of “Hack N’ Slash” from doublefine that actually delivered and let you goof around with the world. I gave it up in the first ten minutes, because the writing and characters drove me crazy, without getting to hacking the world.

(2/5) Everything is Garbage. Pretty good for a game jam game. Not a bad use of 10 minutes. I do think it’s probably possible to make the game unwinnable, and the ending is just nothing.

(1/5) Evolve. Idle game, not all that fun. I take issue with the mechanic in Sharks, Kittens, and this where buying your 15th fence takes 10^15 wood for some reason.

(4/5) Exapunks. Zachtronics has really been killing it lately, with Exapunks and Opus Magnum. WONDERFUL art and characters during story portions, and much better writing. The gameplay is a little more varied than in TIS-100 or the little I played of ShenZen I/O. My main complaint about Zachtronics games continues to be, that I don’t want to be given a series of resource-limited puzzles (do X, but without using more than 10 programming instructions). Exapunks is the first game where it becomes harder to do something /at all/, rather than with a particular amount of resources, but it’s still not there for me. Like ShenZen, they really go for a variety of hardware, too. Can’t recommend this because it’s really only for programmers.

(1/5) Exception. Programming game written by some money machine mobile games company. Awful.

(4/5) Factorio. Factorio’s great, but for me it doesn’t have that much replay value, even with mods. I do like their recent updates, which included adding blueprints from the start of the game, improving belt sorting, and adding a research queue. We changed movement speed, made things visually always day, and adding a small number of personal construction robots from the start this run. I’m sure if you’d like factorio you’ve played it already.

(3/5) Fall Guys – I got this because it was decently fun to watch. Unfortunately, it’s slightly less fun to play. Overall, there’s WAY too much matchmaking waiting considering the number of players, and the skill ceiling is very low on most of the games, some of which are essentially luck (I’m looking at you, team games).

(3/5) Forager – Decent game. A little too much guesswork in picking upgrades–was probably a bit more fun on my second play because of that. Overall, nice graphics and a cute map, but the gameplay could use a bit of work.

(3/5) Getting Over It – Funny idea, executed well. Pretty sure my friends and I have only gotten through 10% of the game, and all hit about the same wall (the first tunnel)

(3/5) Guild of Dungeoneering – Pretty decent gameplay. I feel like it’s a bit too hard for me, but that’s fine. Overall I think it could use a little more cute/fun art, I never quite felt that motivated.

(1/5) Hardspace: Shipbreakers. Okay, I seriously didn’t get to play this one, but I had GAMEBREAKING issues with my controller, which is a microsoft X-box controller for PC–THE development controller.

(2/5) Helltaker. All right art, meh gameplay. But eh, it’s free!

(3/5) Hot Lava. Decent gameplay. Somehow felt like the place that made this had sucked the souls out of all the devs first–no one cared about the story or characters. It’s a game where the floor is made out of lava, with a saturday morning cartoon open, so that was a really an issue. Admirable lack of bugs, though. I’m a completionist so I played the first world a lot to get all the medals, and didn’t try the later ones.

(3/5) House Flipper – Weird, but I had fun. I wish the gameplay was a little more unified–it felt like a bunch of glued-together minigames.

(2/5) Hydroneer. Utterly uninspiring. I couldn’t care about making progress at all, looked like a terrible grind to no benefit.

(1/5) io. Tiny game, I got it on Steam, also available on phone. Basically a free web flash game, but for money. Not good enough to pay the $1 I paid. Just a bit of a time-killer.

(3/5) Islanders – All you do is place buildings and get points. Not particularly challenging, but relaxing. Overall I liked it.

(3/5) Jackbox – I played this online with a streamer. Jackbox has always felt a little bit soulless money grab to me, but it’s still all right. I like that I can play without having a copy–we need more games using this purchase model.

(3/5) Life is Feudal – Soul-crushingly depressing and grindy, which I knew going in. I thought it was… okay, but I really want an offline play mode (Yes, I know there’s an unsupported single-player game, but it’s buggier and costs money). UI was pretty buggy, and I think hunting might literally be impossible.

(2/5) Minecraft – Antimatter Chemistry. Not particularly fun.

(3/5) Minecraft – ComputerCraft. I played a pack with just ComputerCraft and really nothing else. Was a little slow, would have been more fun with more of an audience. I love the ComputerCraft mod, I just didn’t have a great experience playing my pack I made.

(3/5) Minecraft – Foolcraft 3. Fun, a bit buggy. Honestly I can’t remember it too well.

(1/5) Minecraft – Manufactio. Looked potentially fun, but huge bugs and performance issues, couldn’t play.

(4/5) Minecraft – Tekkit. Tekkit remains one of my favorite Minecraft modpacks.

(3/5) Minecraft – Valhelsia 2. I remember this being fun, but I can’t remember details as much as I’d like. I think it was mostly based around being the latest version of minecraft?

(4/5) Minecraft – Volcano Block. Interesting, designed around some weird mods I hadn’t used. I could have used more storage management or bulk dirt/blocks early in the game–felt quite cramped. Probably got a third of the way through the pack. I got novelty value out of it, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if I had ever used the plant mod before–it’s a very fixed, linear progression.

(5/5) Minit. This is a weird, small game. I actually had a lot of fun with it. Then I 100% completed it, which was less fun but I still had a good time overall.

(3/5) Monster Box. By Dan-box. One of two Dan-box games I played a lot of. Just visually appealing, the gameplay isn’t amazing. Also, Dan-box does some great programming–this is a game written in 1990 or so, and it can render hundreds of arrows in the air smoothly in a background tab.

(3/5) Monster Train. A relatively fun deckbuilding card game. It can’t run well on my computer, which is UNACCEPTABLE–this is a card game with 2D graphics. My MICROWAVE should run this shit in 2020. Ignoring that, the gameplay style (summon monsters, MTG style) just isn’t my cup of tea.

(2/5) Moonlighter. Felt like it was missing some inspiration, just didn’t have a sense of “fun”. The art was nice. The credits list is surprisingly long.

(2/5) Muse Dash. All right, a basic rhythm game. Not enough variety to the game play, and everything was based around perfect or near-perfect gameplay, which makes things less fun for me.

(3/5) NES games – various. Dr Mario, Ice Climbers. Basically, I got some Chinese handheld “gameboy” that has all the NES games preloaded on it. Overall it was a great purchase.

(2/5) Noita. “The Powder Game” by Dan-Box, as a procedurally generated platformer with guns. Lets you design your own battle spells. Despite the description, you really still can’t screw around as much as I’d like. I also had major performance issues

(3/5) Observation. I haven’t played this one as much as I’d like, I feel like it may get better. Storytelling, 3D game from the point of view of the AI computer on a space station. I think I might have read a book it’s based on, unfortunately.

(2/5) One Step From Eden. This is a deck-building combat tactics game. I thought it was turn-based, but it’s actually realtime. I think if it was turn-based I would have liked it. The characters were a bit uninspired.

(1/5) Orbt XL. Very dull. I paid $0.50 for it, it was worth that.

(4/5) Opus Magnum. Another great game from Zachtronics, along with Exapunks they’re really ramping up. This is the third execution of the same basic concept. I’d like to see Zachtronics treading new ground more as far as gameplay–that said, it is much improved compared to the first two iterations. The art, writing, and story were stellar on the other hand.

(3/5) Out of Space. Fun idea, you clean a spaceship. It’s never that challenging, and it has mechanics such that it gets easier the more you clean, rather than harder. Good but not enough replay value. Fun with friends the first few times. The controls are a little wonky.

(1/5) Outpost (tower defense game). I hate all tower defense.

(3/5) Overcooked. Overcooked is a ton of fun.

(4/5) Powder Game – Dan-box. I played this in reaction to not liking Noita. It’s fairly old at this point. Just a fun little toy.

(1/5) Prime Mover – Very cool art, the gameplay put me to sleep immediately. A “circuit builder” game but somehow missing any challenge or consistency.

(2/5) Quest for Glory I. Older, from 1989. Didn’t really play this much, I couldn’t get into the writing, and the pseudo-photography art was a little jarring.

(4/5) Raft. I played this in beta for free on itch.io, and had a lot of fun. Not enough changed that it was really worth a replay, but it has improved, and I got to play with a second player. Not a hard game, which I think was a good thing. The late game they’ve expanded, but it doesn’t really add much. The original was fun and so was this.

(3/5) Satisfactory. I honestly don’t know how I like this one–I didn’t get too far into it.

(4/5) Scrap Mechanic. I got this on a recommendation from a player who played in creative. I only tried the survival mode–that mode is not well designed, and their focuses for survival are totally wrong. I like the core game, you can actually build stuff. If I play again, I’ll try the creative mode, I think.

(3.5/5) Shapez.io. A weird, abstracted simplification of Factorio. If I hadn’t played factorio and half a dozen copies, I imagine this would have been fun, but it’s just more of the same. Too much waiting–blueprints are too far into the game, too.

(2.5/5) Simmiland. Okay, but short. Used cards for no reason. For a paid game, I wanted more gameplay out of it?

(0.5/5) Snakeybus. The most disappointing game I remember this year. Someone made “Snake” in 3D. There are a million game modes and worlds to play in. I didn’t find anything I tried much fun.

(1/5) Soda Dungeon. A “mobile” (read: not fun) style idle game. Patterned after money-grab games, although I don’t remember if paid progress was actually an option. I think so.

(4/5) Spelunky. The only procedurally generated platformer I’ve ever seen work. Genuinely very fun.

(4/5) Spelunky 2. Fun, more of an upgrade of new content than a new game. Better multiplayer. My computer can’t run later levels at full speed.

(1/5) Stick Ranger 2. Dan-box. Not much fun.

(3/5) Superliminal. Fun game. A bit short for the pricetag.

(3/5) Tabletop Simulator – Aether’s End: Legacy. Interesting, a “campaign” (series of challenge bosses and pre-written encounters) deckbuilding RPG. I like the whole “campaign RPG boardgame” idea. This would have worked better with paper, there were some rough edges in both the game instructions and the port to Tabletop Simulator.

(4/5) Tabletop Simulator – The Captain is Dead. Very fun. I’d love to play with more than 2 people. Tabletop simulator was so-so for this one.

(2/5) Tabletop Simulator – Tiny Epic Mechs. You give your mech a list of instructions, and it does them in order. Arena fight. Fun, but I think I could whip up something at least as good.

(3/5) The Council. One of the only 3D games I finished. It’s a story game, where you investigate what’s going on and make various choices. It’s set in revolutionary france, at the Secret World Council that determines the fate of the world. It had a weak ending, with less choice elements than the rest of the game so far, which was a weird decision. Also, it has an EXCRUTIATINGLY bad opening scene, which was also weird. The middle 95% of the game I enjoyed, although the ending went on a little long. The level of background knowledge expected of the player swung wildly–they seemed to expect me to know who revolutionary French generals were with no explanation, but not Daedalus and the Minotaur. The acting was generally enjoyable–there’s a lot of lying going on in the game and it’s conveyed well. The pricetag is too high to recommend.

(0/5) The Grandma’s Recipe (Unus Annus). This game is unplayably bad–it’s just a random pixel hunt. Maybe it would be fun if you had watched the video it’s based on.

(3/5) The Room. Pretty fun! I think this is really designed for a touchscreen, but I managed to play it on my PC. Played it stoned, which I think helps with popular puzzle games–it has nice visuals but it’s a little too easy.

(3/5) This Call May Be Recorded. Goofy experimental game.

(4/5) TIS-100. Zachtronics. A programming game. I finally got done with the first set of puzzles and into the second this year. I had fun, definitely not for everyone.

(3/5) Trine. I played this 2-player. I think the difficulty was much better 2-player, but it doesn’t manage 2 players getting separated well. Sadly we skipped the story, which seemed like simple nice low-fantasy. Could have used goofier puzzles, it took itself a little too seriously and the levels were a bit same-y.

(2/5) Unrailed. Co-op railroad building game. It was okay but there wasn’t base-building. Overall not my thing. I’d say I would prefer something like Overcooked if it’s going to be timed? Graphics reminded me of autonauts.

(2/5) Vampire Night Shift. Art game. Gameplay could have used a bit of polish. Short but interesting.

(4/5) Wayward. To date, the best survival crafting system I’ve seen. You can use any pointy object and stick-like object, together with glue or twine, to make an arrow. The UI is not great, and there’s a very counter-intuitive difficulty system. You need to do a little too much tutorial reading, and it could use more goals. Overall very fun. Under constant development, so how it plays a given week is a crapshoot. The steam version finally works for me (last time I played it was worse than the free online alpha, now it’s the same or better). I recomend playing the free online version unless you want to support the author.

(1/5) We Need to Go Deeper. Multiplayer exploration game in a sub, with sidescrolling battle. Somehow incredibly unfun, together with high pricetag. Aesthetics reminded me of Don’t Starve somehow.

(2/5) We Were Here. Okay 2-player puzzle game. Crashed frequently, and there were some “huh” puzzles and UI. Free.

(3/5) Yes, your grace. Gorgeous pixel art graphics. The story is supposed to be very player-dependent, but I started getting the feeling that it wasn’t. I didn’t quite finish the game but I think I was well past halfway. Hard to resume after a save, you forget things. I got the feeling I wouldn’t replay it, which is a shame because it’s fun to see how things go differently in a second play with something like this.

These are not all new to me, and very few came out in 2020. I removed any games I don’t remember and couldn’t google (a fair number, I play a lot of game jam games) as well as any with pornographic content.

2020 Videogames was originally published on Optimal Prime

#games #review #reviews #videogames #yearly review #cross-posted-from-blog

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brickroaddx · 4 years

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20 Days of Prototypes Challenge Complete!

I’ve just finished my 20 days of prototypes challenge and come up with 10 brand-new prototypes for the next BrainGoodGame (or games!) The idea is to be able to be able to make them quickly and then draw from a larger pool rather than getting stuck trying to “force” one idea. Anyway, I thought I’d describe each to you so I could get some feedback! (Feedback notes and challenge reflections after the list of games). Anyway, here are the prototypes!

A sort-of haiku of 9 of the 10 game prototypes.

“Lawnmower” – A simple real-time game where you attempt to control multiple lawnmowers and keep them cutting grass! You can also play new lawnmowers. This is supposed to sort of capture the feel of Mini Metro. (Non-panicky real-time)

Dividing your attention.

“Blob-Commander” – A game where you pick an “order” die (on the left) and combine it with a “selection” card (on the right) to give an order each turn. So you might “move forward twice with all archers, or move left and attack with all units that are connected in a “blob”. An interesting idea but has problems in terms of “action parsing” or proofreading.

Issue orders to groups.

“Protector” – An idea where you have 3 energy or action points to spend each turn. Most commonly you spend it moving around the map (up,down,left,right), but you can also spend the energy points on cards in your hand. Enemies move after you’re done and can be fast and slow. This one seems particularly open ended in terms of extending it. Lots of possibilities for enemy types, card types and even objectives (although I like the idea of a “there and back again” type objective because if you rush ahead and don’t fight much it’ll be harder on the way back but not impossible). Also tends to have a playful feel at least for me, as I find a lot of the time I can hit the arrow keys by intuition.

Ride forth, playfully!

“Dominion Lord” – The idea here is that for both you and your opponent, the cards in your hand correspond 1:1 with units on the board. So the action funnel is pretty explicit. If the unit is not on the board, the card becomes a “summon” action instead. One downside of this approach is that it seems much more fun to order units “near the front”. Maybe it needs a double move option for guys in the back like XCOM, or a different kind of objective. This is sort of like Undaunted.

Units in a deck.

“Farmer Dan” – This one is about moving around a single avatar on a map again (like #3). However here, as you move around a couple things can happen. If you move into a grass space, you “till” it, making it ready for new crops. If you move into a weed rock or stump you work on clearing it (some take more than one action). Then you have tetris pieces in your hand representing both crops and watering actions that you try to line up with the shapes on the board you have cleared with your farmer. There is a whole efficiency game about farmer actions, about lining up the crops properly and trying to refill water without wasting it. Pretty interesting. What this one seems to need is longer strategic arcs or something to “build towards”. Not quite sure what that might be.

Farming with tetris pieces.

“Deus Lines” – This one is fundamentally about building out action chains on the board. You place buildings that have an action on them and also allow your workers to “turn” as they activate them. Crucially, each turn you place a building and then send a worker in, but you can only send a worker from each side once. You can reactivate abilities by cleverly positioning your turns. Sort of a riff on the Deus/Wingspan “action-chains” type of thing. This one is pretty complex though to get started with, so needs some simple goals to work probably.

A maze of chained abilities.

“Minos Mana” – This one is roughly about building off of matched colored pieces on the board to make shapes. So sort of like Through the Desert network building and sort of like Minos Strategos (or Tash Kalar) shape building. Needs more definition to what shapes you’re trying to build, and whether those are explicit goals, or patterns that always work, or cards that you draw. Has a couple cool twists. One is that you pick up new dice off the board as you go. Two is that the enemies spawn based on an intersection of row and column, and it alternates whether the spawn row or spawn column switches. Three is that you are working against the “enemy score” and they score by capturing your placed pieces. Therefore there is an upside for spreading out (more patterns) and a downside (more vulnerability).

Patterns of elemental mana!

“Dungeon Beans” – Called “beans” because of the name our group uses for Bohnanza, which is a game where you can’t re-order your hand. The premise here is that you have a set amount of energy. Playing the left most card in your hand costs 0 energy, but each card to the right costs 1 more (so it’s more expensive to skip ahead). You can also always just do a “default” up down left or right move/attack by discarding the leftmost card. This one also seems super extensible and easy to see as a full game. It takes a lot from roguelikes/broughlikes in terms of structure (slay enemies, be efficient, get to the exit). Seems to be a lot of room for deckbuilding, card types, treasure, monster types, etc.

It’s hard work to skip ahead!

“Card Maze” – This one is about moving on a grid using standard playing cards. If you match “suits” you get to move and go down a card. If you match “rank” you get to re-draw at the end of the turn. If you match both you get to draw 2 (plus one card). You can also collect totems on the board that let you discard and re-draw your hand. Once you collect 3/4 totems you head for the exit. Already quite fun and very extensible with enemy types, different suits, special powers for Jacks (there are no Jack spaces on the board), pickups, starting characters etc etc. With the playing card metaphor I think it is a bit more approachable than most BrainGoodGames for non-strategy gamers. Very intriguing!

Matching feels good!

“High Seas” – The final prototype is kind of the inverse of the previous. By stepping onto ocean spaces you draw the indicated card. You’re trying to make sets of cards, runs, basically typical poker card hands and use them to “battle” other ships. Lots of ways this can work, and it’s fun to collect the hands and scout out the best cards to collect and asses the diminishing returns (you have limited time, can’t take em all and have to make your way north!). I have some ideas about how different enemies can work, different pickups and sub-goals and selling big sets at “markets” for a lot of points. Goal being have X money and get to “port” at the north of the board to bury your treasure/buy the port/retire etc. Promising!

Cannons are loaded. Full house!

So those are the 10 prototypes from the 20 day experiment! It took about 2 days for each prototype, and the process ended up mostly being

Day 1: Brainstorm ideas by reviewing design notebooks and mix and matching game mechanic cards that I’ve drawn up/seem interesting to explore.

Day 2: Make the digital implementation of the prototype.

One thing that stuck out to me was that my prediction of how promising each prototype would be was often very far from my evaluation after making it. Some were much better than I thought they’d be, others much worse. Takeaway: you gotta make em and see. Don’t get hung up looking for the “perfect idea”, because it’s hard to identify!

The goal of the digital implementations was mostly to assess each idea for how promising it seemed, and how easy it would be to take it from the current state to a released BrainGoodGame. I have ideas about the potential of some of them, but I’m curious what you guys think with just the gifs and the basic descriptions to go on. Which ones jump out at you? Let me know on the Discord or on Twitter.

If you’re interested in the games I end up making with these prototypes, please sign up for the BrainGoodGames mailing list here.

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bmaxwell · 4 years

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Top games of 2019

For much of the year I thought I might have a hard time building a solid list of 10 games. As it turned out, I could have made a top 20 without much trouble. So it was a good year for games, but maybe there weren’t many 10/10 classics for me. I did have BT’s, BB’s, and even a BD-1 though!

First up, my Old Game of Year: Yakuza 0

The dichotomy between Yakuza 0′s melodramatic main story and its silly tongue-in-cheek side missions made the game an absolute joy to play. One minute you’re dealing with warring Yakuza factions and torn loyalties, and the next you’re doing minigames like karaoke, bowling, RC car racing, and darts, and then you’re helping a dominatrix find her confidence or helping a human statue sneak away from his post to go take a much-needed shit. All throughout you’re also beating the shit out of legions of street thugs and yakuza dudes using kicks, punches, bats, bicycles, salt shakers, teapots, and whatever else is handy. I fell in love with this game in a way I very much did not expect.

Also good ”old” games: World of Final Fantasy, Ni No Kuni 2, Steamworld Heist, Odin Sphere Leifthrasir

Best Music: Death Stranding

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The game’s score is good, but the licensed music was key in some of Death Stranding’s best moments. The above song starts playing during your first journey in the game, and the tone is just spot-on perfect. Death Stranding works for me in a similar way that American Truck Simulator works for me. When you’re barely surviving a long trek, and a peaceful, melancholy song starts playing just as you reach the top of the hill and finally see your destination? Just perfect.

Also excellent music: Sayonara Wild Hearts

Most disappointing: Control

Well, I got fucking Alan Wake’d by Remedy again. Fantastic atmosphere and setting for a game, cocked up by repetitive, boring combat. So much about Control is so very good. I love the mystery of the janitor and the main character, the Twilight Zone/X-Files vibe of the agency and the Oldest House. The game’s architecture is arresting, and the writing is excellent.

But for me it was undone by the combat which quickly became a tedious, thing I had to Get Through to see more of the good stuff, and the more challenging fights became something I just didn’t want to engage with anymore. The checkpoint system and maps weren’t helpful, and I received too many optional side quests that I couldn’t complete because I hadn’t found the necessary traversal power yet. I loved so much about the game, but the moment to moment playing of the game was frequently not fun for me.

Ultimately it felt like a game that did not respect my time. The game desperately needed an Easy setting so I could just blow through the bits that I didn’t like. Like Alan Wake, I expect to be pulled back into it and then bounce off again at least two more times.

And now, the games that were in the running for the top 10 but missed the cut:

Dicey Dungeons:

You roll dice and spend them to activate equipment, gaining more equipment as you go. It’s a close cousin to deckbuilding games, but a little lighter and more forgiving. Slotting dice into cards feels good though. The variety in characters and cards help give this game good replay value. Give me randomized cards/gear, and characters to unlock in a run-based game and I’m a happy guy.

Judgment:

Yakuza minus Kiryu and Majima, with some investigation minigames thrown in. It’s pretty good! Most of the new detective minigames feel like they get in the way (tailing people is just silly, taking photos doesn’t work great). I never really felt strongly compelled to stick with it though. I miss the charm of Kiryu and the grime of 80′s Kamurocho. It’s an excellent game I might have enjoyed more if I hadn’t played Yakuza first.

Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Everybuddy!:

This port of a Nintendo Wii roguelike is one that I missed in its original incarnation. It’s got the “I move - all the enemies move” turn-based gameplay that I love, and classes to unlock. All of this is very much my shit. It’s goofy the way that Final Fantasy games are, and the design feels older than it is (I thought it was a PS2 port before I looked it up). But hey - give me stuff to unlock and the old “I move - you move” gameplay and, again, I’m a happy guy.

Ring Fit Adventure

This game is getting me to exercise just about every day. It’s not a great video game (nor should it try to be) but as a workout tool it’s wonderful for someone like me who has trouble finding the time and motivation to go out of the house and exercise.

Untitled Goose Game

You are a winged angel of chaos in this joyous little game. I found the gameplay itself to be pretty shallow and lacking, but it’s a wonderful sandbox to play in. Tormenting people is great fun, and the way the goose animates is just perfect.

Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown

This was the PSVR game that stood out the most for me this year. It’s a tactical RPG complete with a DM that narrates everything, tiles to move your characters around on, and card-based combat. It’s a charming game and I hope they make more.

Luigi’s Mansion 3

This was my first game in the series, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It’s a charming game, and the variety from floor to floor. I could forgive the wonky control scheme, but I think there’s just a low ceiling on how much a cutesy, family-friendly Nintendo title can resonate with me these days.

Dragon Quest Builders 2

Dragon Quest and Minecraft had a baby. This was my favorite game of the year for turning my brain off and checking things off a list. I’m not sure Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a Great Game, but it’s wonderful gaming comfort food for a Dragon Quest fan.

Void Bastards

Void Bastards might be this year’s Dead Cells - a run based game that never quite hooked me, but I’ll keep coming back to it. The developers really did a lot without a lot of variety in the way of art assets. It’s a satisfying, often funny shooter (admittedly not my jam). What a terrific name though.

Steamworld Quest

The Steamworld series is an impressive, weird thing. I’ve never seen a series change genres like this; they started with Steamworld Dig (Metroidvania) then made Heist (a tactical combat game) then another Dig, and finally this year they released Steamworld Quest - a deckbuilding RPG. Customization and unlockables are among my favorite gaming buzzwords, and they’re here in spades.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

More of a visual companion set to a pop album than a conventional game. This is for me what Rez was for a lot of folks. Most stages are autorunners where you’re collecting hearts, dodging obstacles, shooting giant wolves, and fighting lesbians while racing atop motorcycles. It’s a story about love, heartbreak, and finding yourself, told through music and images. Nice to have a game that feels like it was made specifically for marginalized folks.

10. Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie’s best trait is its earnestness - an increasingly rare thing in 2019. It’s about an artistic being pursued by bullies in a run-down town. He finds a magic brush that lets him paint friendly monsters into life and also paint magical landscape scenes onto buildings in an effort to bring life back to the town.

The themes of the game and how they’re handled feel a little after school special to me, but the game has a lot of heart. And the gameplay loop of creating monsters, painting buildings, and unlocking new types of things to paint never got old because it’s so damned beautiful. And you have a lot of room to be creative with how you paint. The game is not challenging, and I think the experience is better for it. There is some light platforming, puzzling, and combat, but none of it ever got frustrating. A wholesome game like this was a very welcome thing this year.

9. Indivisible

Indivisible is a odd mashup of platformer, RPG, and fighting game that blends those well enough that I can't easily put it into any one box. For me, it’s the closest to a fighting game I’ve played in probably 20 years. It has launchers and finishers and timed blocks. You collect a big old army of people you can swap in and out, the writing is smart. The platforming parts are the weakest part of the game, as some of the jumping challenges can feel uneven, and there’s a lot of “I see what I have to do, now I just need to try over and over until I execute”

The setting (Asian mythology as a backdrop) and combat felt unique enough to keep me going, and the game has a charm and personality. I like how the main character is a well-intended fuck up that has to atone for her mistakes, somewhat reminiscent of Mae from Night in the Woods.

8. Children of Morta

This is an action RPG with character progression where you are playing members of a family. The gameplay is solid, and the game drip feeds story and character interaction between runs. It’s a well-narrated and charming thing. The writing can be funny and often touching. There are story bits like the uncle crafting a pair of daggers for Kevin, who falls in love with them. Mary - his mother - takes them away for being too dangerous, and she doesn’t want her boy putting himself at risk helped me feel invested in the characters and story more than most ARPG’s.

The movement and combat feel snappy, and there are plenty of skills to unlock so you always feel like progress was made even when a run falls short. There are plenty of little secrets and tchotchkes to find in the dungeons, and between runs you can see the family members doing their own thing in the house where they live together. It’s a refreshing take on the action RPG genre.

7. Outer Worlds

I remember when The Outer Worlds was announced at The Game Awards. None of this checks any boxes for me: sci-fi setting, shooting, wacky characters. You can make your character DUMB and get special dialogue choices! Humor in game very rarely works for me, and this sounded like it was going to be that jaded, shitty Rockstar brand of humor. Hard pass from me.

Enter Xbox Game Pass. The Outer Wilds Worlds started getting positive word of mouth and it was included with Game Pass, so I figured I may as well give it a go. I encountered something I didn’t expect: really terrific writing.

I turned the difficulty down to its lowest settings and mowed through the game, savoring the tongue-in-cheek dialogue in a world where corporations own literally everything. The first character you meet is hiding out in a cave because he’s been wounded. Not too wounded to give you the company’s sales pitch though! It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice.

The whole “corporations are in charge” bleak humor hits more than it misses, but the real star of the show is your companions. They are generally convincing and feel like real, fleshed out characters and not simple tropes. Each companion character gets their own interesting set of side quests (except for the dumb boring robot companion). My first companion Parvati’s story revolved around mustering the courage to pursue a romantic relationship with a woman. They wrote Parvati as an asexual character, and it felt natural and not forced - not an easy task.

It leans into being a dumb video game in all the right ways and made me care about the characters more than the story. The story’s cynicism wore thin eventually, but the game ended at just about the right time and didn’t overstay its welcome.

6. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Jedi Fallen Order lies at the intersection of 2 things I admire more than enjoy: Star Wars and Souls-likes. It’s also EA doing their best to show that they can release a AAA Star Wars game with no microtransactions after the tire fire that was Star Wars Battlefront II. This game is an excellent make-good for EA, though I’m sure it’s more “We had to do this to restore consumer trust in us” than any real change of heart.

This game, at the time of this writing on a base PS4 anyhow, has some jank. Textures would often pop in after a second or two, I had a Stormtrooper get stuck in place like a statue, and I had a couple of hard crashes. Despite all of that, I kept coming back to the game every night until it was finished. And it impressed me enough to put an EA Star Wars game in my top 10. You win, universe. The combat was a good balance of fun shit like force-pushing dude off a cliff and tense one-on-one battle where parries and dodges are needed to get by.

The game’s story is what kept me wanting to see what was next. It’s a game set in the Star Wars universe with the confidence to resist reminding you of the characters and places you know from the films, and it’s better for it. I found myself invested in the fates of the characters. While the main character is more or less a blank cipher for the player, he’s still a better protagonist than Anakin Skywalker because I didn’t actively dislike him.

5. Bloodstained

New games succeeding as remakes or homages with goofy videogame-ass videogame stuff was sure a theme this year. Bloodstained is so ridiculous in so many ways. A lady asked me to bring her a specific piece of armor to honor one of the fallen villagers. When I did so, she tearfully thanked me then gave me 3 pizzas as a reward. The paintings on the walls will often come to life and attack you; those paintings are all portraits of people who backed the game on Kickstarter. One of the enemies resembles a giant house cat, another is a giant domestic dog. NPC’s repeat the same dialogue, such as a quest giver named Lindsay who says “Kill those murderers DEAD!” every time you speak to her.

And there is a metric ton of shit to find, collect, and craft. Most of the gear you equip looks goofy as hell. And the more new skills and gear you unlock, the more overpowered and broken you feel. The dialogue is corny as hell and plays things straight, which is the only way a screwball game like this actually works. The combat feels good. Experimenting with the powers and systems is a blast, and uncovering the map and secrets is satisfying.

4. Fire Emblem 3 Houses

- Despite being extremely my kind of shit on the surface, I’ve never done more than dabble with a Fire Emblem game. When I heard people invoking Persona and Harry Potter. I mean, a strategy RPG with relationship stories set in a school environment checks too many of my boxes to ignore.

What surprised me with the game is how much I came to really know the students in my house.* I felt like I knew Bernadetta, Dorothea, Ferdinand, Edelgard, and all the others. Alternating between exploring the school grounds, choosing lesson plans, having tea with a student, and leading them into battle was a nice way to mix up the experience. Training them in skills based on which character class you wanted to promote them to was a nice touch.

3. Death Stranding

Death Stranding has all of the batshittery it was rumored to have: Norman Reedus hiking around with a baby in a jar, poo grenades, tar squids, and people with names like Die Hardman, Mama, and Fragile. Kojima has about as much subtlety as David Cage with the metaphors and themes of the game. Cell phones latch onto you like handcuffs, and Likes are much sought after to the point where people are addicted to them. The game is all about reuniting America and forging connections. You play as a man named Sam. He’s a porter who works for the Bridges company. His name is Sam Porter Bridges.

Sam is playing a major role in reconnecting the country by hand delivering packages from city to city as well as reconnecting the country up to wifi. Continuing with the games themes, Sam has a touch phobia. It’s a game about isolation and introspection, and about the need for connection with one another. Hideo Kojima makes for damn certain that you know that when you play the game. It’s a little like David Cage, but with less cringe and more weirdness.

It’s an introspective game full of small moments. Sam curling up under a structure that another player has built, exhausted and cradling his jar baby as a melancholy song plays is the kind of moment that doesn’t play well in a demo or a video, and won’t resonate with everyone. Those of us it does work for, however, are in love with the experience. It takes the hard-to-describe appeal of a game like American Truck Simulator and adds a decidedly human element to it. There is comfort to motion and travel. We like to be rocked, or transported in a vehicle as babies. It’s the simple comfort of motion, and a way to connect to our world. There’s something to that.

I love seeing this level of ambition and weirdness from a major AAA release.

2. Disco Elysium

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

I thought of Dr Gonzo of Hunter S Thompson fame early and often while playing Disco Elysium. It’s an easy connection to make; you wake up face down on the floor of a demolished hotel room. You have a wicked hangover, wearing nothing but your undies. Your necktie whirls around the ceiling, attached to the ceiling fan.

I got sloppily dressed and staggered out my door, where I was confronted by an attractive woman in the hall. Some primal part of my character thinks it’s a good idea to ask her to fuck; you crudely do so, and it goes the way you might expect. I was fresh off of playing The Outer Worlds, so I was used to any dialogue prompt associated with a skill being automatically a positive thing. As it turns out, your character gets all sorts of a impulses that aren’t always in your best interests. This first interaction put me off a little bit, I don’t want to play a game that’s trying to be cool and edgy. As it turns out, this isn’t really that.

In Disco Elysium, you play as a cop sent to sort out a murder where a body was found hanging in a tree behind this hotel. Seems that, after 3 days, you’ve managed to run up a hotel bill that you can’t pay for, frighten the patrons by threatening to shoot yourself in the head in the hotel before you lose your badge and your gun. Another cop is sent to assist you since you’ve accomplished exactly nil after 3 days. He’s from another precinct and doesn’t know you, so you haven’t burned up all of your goodwill with him yet (unlike everyone else in your life).

At a glance, it’s a Baldur’s Gate-style isometric RPG with a modern setting. In practice, it’s a lot more than that. First off, the game has no combat. Or rather, no conventional combat. Any physical encounters (which were exceedingly rare in my play) are handled through dialogue choices determined by how you’ve built out your skills. And the way the game manifests your skills is smart and feels organic, not forced.

The skills aren’t the usual RPG fare. There are 24 of them, consisting of stuff like Visual Calculus, volition, Pain Threshold, and Shivers. As you might have guessed, 24 skills in a game with no conventional combat means there is a LOT of writing in this game and just as much variance from one play to the other. My detective was a highly emotionally sensitive guy, able to pick up on what folks may be hiding, very in-tune with the cosmos, and deeply introspective (upsettingly so?).

It’s a detective RPG with a healthy dose of political intrigue, class warfare, and nihilism. Disco Elysium feels like an actual adult game, and not in the “look at all this violence and titties” sense. The best comparison I have is Planescape Torment.

1. Resident Evil 2

- What a complete game. This was my first Resident Evil game and I am in love with it. The game drops you into a hostile environment that slowly transitions from a horror show with danger around every corner to feeling like a space that was very much mine. Creeping around an unfamiliar environment in the dark with a flashlight and limited ammunition, as it turns out, is fun as hell.

The combat is slow and deliberate in a way that made the action feel satisfying and not cheap; when I did encounter enemies that moved quickly and suddenly, it got my heart rate going. And my arc with Mr X from pure terror to minor annoyance to acceptance as part of this undead infested police station I call home felt pretty special.

He is an indestructible character that follows you endlessly like the Terminator. You’re faster, but he is relentless. Hearing his heavy footsteps somewhere in the vicinity was a nice atmospheric touch. I had a couple of instances where I was running from something, turned a corner and collided with this 8 foot tall beast.

Resident Evil 2 is just the ideal dose of scariness, and gets all the dumb videogame-y parts exactly right. It feels like a Metroidvania, a world filled with locks and keys where the secrets are drip-fed to the player. Creeping through an unfamiliar area with only 2 shotgun shells and 5 pistol rounds left was a deliciously tense experience, one that other games rarely give me.

The game’s second playthrough felt a lot more different from the first than I’d feared. I’ve never really played another Resident Evil game, and I’ve never had any interest in horror games. And now here I am anxiously awaiting next year’s RE3 remake.

*Black Eagles, baby!

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scarabic-enterprises · 5 years

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GOOD MORNING FELLOW INTERPEEPS! I DOOMED US ALL! | Bad North - Part 5 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2gVINmGRUT4 . In this video I play Bad North, A tactical Rogue-Lite tower defence game where you collect squads of soldiers to upgrade and defend your islands. Enjoy! . LIKE, SHARE AND SUBSCRIBE if you enjoy my content and hit the BELL icon to stay up-to-date with my daily videos! THANKS! . ►GET YOUR SCARABIC MERCH HERE: https://streamlabs.com/scarabicgaming/#/merch . ►DONATE TOWARDS SCARABIC ENTERPRISES HERE: https://streamlabs.com/scarabicgaming . ►Follow me on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/scarabicgaming/ . ►TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Scarabicgaming/ . ►INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/scarabicenterprises/ Thanks for watching! EDITING PROGRAM: Hitfilm 11.2 CONSOLE: Xbox One X GAME CAPTURE: Elgato Gaming/OBS Studio MICROPHONE: Blue Yeti Nano WEBCAM: Logitech C920 STORAGE: Seagate MOUSE: Razer (Naga Hex V2) KEYBOARD: Logitech K120 COMPUTER MONITOR: LG LAPTOP: HP TELEVISION: Samsung TV HAIR: Schwarzkopf Live Colour COMPUTER BUILD: Samsung SSD NVIDIA NVIDIA GeForce NZXT Intel I7 ASUS ASUS Republic of Gamers CORSAIR Microsoft Windows 10 #game #gaming #gamer #youtube #youtubevideo #youtubevideos #youtubers #youtubegamer #instagram #insta #goodmorning #deckbuilding #survival #punkfashion #punkstyle #punk #punkrock #xboxgame #xboxgames #badnorth #strategy #strategygame #strategygames #rpg #rts #fantasy #roguelite #roguelike #realtimestrategy #addictive (at Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/B43fQtJHQOQ/?igshid=157z46nmgm09q

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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15 Underrated E3 2021 Games Not Enough People Are Talking About

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Despite being a somewhat quiet year for the show, E3 2021 was filled with so many new titles and updates to previously announced major projects that it’s hardly a surprise that many smaller games featured during the show ultimately went overlooked and ended up being somewhat underrated.

Yet, this is so much more than a list of games that let us celebrate little studios and individual developers. At a time when Covid-19 production delays threaten to push so many major games into 2022 and beyond, these 15 titles (and so many more) could end up working their way into upcoming game of the year conversations just as they remind us that new ideas aren’t dead: they’ve just gone indie.

From wizards with guns and spiritual Thief sequels to cosmic horror punk RPGs and escape room deck builders, these are the 15 underrated E3 2021 games that not enough people are talking about.

15. Wizard With a Gun

You’re going to see a number of Devolver Digital games on this list, but few E3 titles from any publisher or developer made as good of a first impression as developer Galvanic Games’ Wizard With a Gun.

Described as an “online cooperative sandbox survival game,” Wizard With a Gun looks like a blend of Don’t Starve and Enter the Gungeon. Aside from the incredible name, the thing that stands out most about this game is the ability to combine magic and guns to craft some truly wild weapons. Interestingly, it may actually be possible to push your experiments too far and craft something that will hurt you more than your enemies.

14. Gloomwood

I’m a huge fan of developer New Blood Interactive (probably best known for 2018 horror shooter DUSK), and Gloomwood could just be their best game yet.

Gloomwood is a stealth survival horror game that, in many ways, effectively serves as the Thief sequel fans have been begging for. The game’s Steam demo showcases its tremendous potential, but the title’s E3 2021 extended gameplay preview suggests that the best is yet to come.

13. Replaced

There’s a good chance that you actually saw this game considering that it was featured fairly prominently during Xbox’s E3 2021 show, but it’s pretty much impossible to give this project enough love.

While most people are (understandably) focusing on Replaced’s wonderful pixel art visuals, the few glimpses of action gameplay that we see in the title’s debut trailer suggest that this is going to be so much more than an artist showcase.

12. Bear and Breakfast

Bear and Breakfast was actually quietly revealed last year, but I’m more than happy to use its brief E3 2021 appearance as an excuse to hype up this wonderfully wholesome game with a potentially dark twist.

Bear and Breakfast presents itself as a kind of sim/builder game starring colorful and friendly woodland creatures, but both trailers we’ve seen so far suggest that there’s something darker at play that only reveals itself as you expand your cabin empire and dive deeper into the forest.

11. Harold Halibut

Somewhere between a Wallace and Gromit cartoon and a Wes Anderson movie lies the weird and wonderful Harold Halibut.

This stunningly beautiful project may just win you over with its stop motion visuals alone (which were handcrafted in real life and digitally scanned into the game), but it’s Harold Halibut’s classic adventure gameplay that could prove to be its best feature.

10. Lake

Lake is another one of those games that we actually heard about before E3 2021, but this is one of those projects that just keeps looking better every time we see it.

If you can get past its Hallmark movie premise (a young woman leaves her big city job to return to her small town home and deliver mail), you’ll find that Lake’s large world, branching storylines, and diverse cast of characters may just make it one of the most compelling narrative experiences on the horizon.

9. The Anacrusis

The most logical reason more people weren’t talking about The Anacrusis after Xbox’s E3 2021 show is that the multiplayer co-op FPS was arguably upstaged by two bigger, somewhat similar titles: Back 4 Blood and Redfall.

Were it not for those titles, I suspect that more people would have instantly fallen for this ‘70s sci-fi-inspired shooter with roguelike and dungeon master elements. The Anacrusis promises to offer hours of replayability, which should make it a perfect addition to the Game Pass library.

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8. Loot River

I understand if your brain is wired to ignore the mention of another roguelike dungeon crawler, but Loot River has already found some ways to distinguish itself from some considerable competition.

The highlight of this game so far is undoubtedly its level manipulation mechanics which add a compelling puzzle element to what may otherwise be a more standard entry into the genre. Having said that, even as a standard genre entry, Loot River looks like a lot of fun.

7. Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart is another one of those games that weirdly almost suffered from its prominent place in the Xbox E3 2021 showcase as it was flanked by larger titles that garnered most of the attention.

However, nearly every aspect of this game we’ve seen so far is, at the very least, compelling. Atomic Heart’s physics and power-based shooter gameplay looks like a blast, but it’s the game’s alternate 1950s Soviet Union setting and Fallout vibes it gives off that really has us intrigued.

6. Death Trash

Speaking of Fallout, you probably think that The Outer Worlds 2 and Fallout 76 are the E3 2021 games that will come closest to offering a proper new Fallout experience. However, Death Trash may just be the game that realizes the potential of so many of the little things that make that franchise great.

This cosmic horror punk rock action RPG so perfectly captures the spirit of classic games like the original Fallout titles and Shadowrun that it’s hard to look at it and not wonder how it was possibly assembled by a single developer. This labor of love should absolutely be on your wishlist.

5. Sifu

There just aren’t enough martial arts video games in the world. I’ll never understand why that’s the case, but it’s just one of those sad facts of life.

While Sifu impressed us when it debuted during a PlayStation broadcast earlier this year, the game’s E3 2021 gameplay trailer ensured it will stay on our radars. Sifu’s intense melee fights and environmental interactions could just make it the go-to experience for starved martial arts fans everywhere.

4. Demon Throttle

Recent years have gifted us with a number of notable retro action games, and Demon Throttle looks more than ready to join the ranks of exceptional experiences like Shovel Knight and The Messenger.

This top-down co-op shooter is currently garnering attention for its physical-only release strategy, but it’s the game’s chaotic action and outlandish humor that will really make you want to add it to your shelf.

3. Inscryption

The deck builder genre has offered some of the most quietly compelling video game experiences in recent years, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever seen a deck builder as intriguing as Inscryption.

The creator of 2016’s bizarre and wonderful Pony Island brings us this strange little game that combines elements of the deckbuilding genre with escape rooms and psychological horror. I can’t imagine how all of those incredible flavors are going to be mixed together into something cohesive, which honestly makes me that much more excited to see what this game is all about.

2. Trek to Yomi

If Ghost of Tsushima didn’t quite give you a full dose of your Kurosawa-inspired video game fix, then you have to check out what Trek to Yomi promises to offer.

Trek to Yomi’s black-and-white visuals and samurai setting are obviously welcome Kurosawa callbacks, but it’s the way the gameplay references everything from Limbo and Mark of the Ninja to Bushido Blade that instantly shot this one near the top of our shortlist of underrated E3 2021 games more people should be talking about.

1. Immortality

With Her Story, Telling Lies, and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Sam Barlow has firmly established himself as one of the most exciting and daring writers in gaming. Now, Barlow returns with E3 2021’s most underrated and overlooked game, Immortality.

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Granted, we don’t know much about Immortality, but between the intriguing (if vague) premise that sees you explore three lost films starring a now missing actress and Barlowe’s outstanding track record, there’s no world in which fans of story-driven games won’t want to keep a close eye on this one.

The post 15 Underrated E3 2021 Games Not Enough People Are Talking About appeared first on Den of Geek.

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lemonadeflashbang · 3 years

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Ring of Pain Thoughts/Review

I do not like this game. That’s actually why this review is so quick after Children of Morta- I played Ring of Pain for maybe six hours today, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t like it. So unlike most of my other reviews, this isn’t going to be as comprehensive. I’ve only encountered the final boss once, and didn’t beat it. This game likely does have more to it. But the game isn’t filled in the right places for me. First, let’s get into the things I like. The theming is great, the art is gorgeous (it seems like all indie games have gorgeous art nowadays), the music doesn’t get repetitive- all of the aesthetics are there. The game concept is also neat. It’s a game where you navigate around a ring of cards- defeating enemies, collecting loot, healing, etc., The loot comes in the form of slotted equipment that modifies your stats and sometimes has an extra ability, creating a lot of variety. In theory, that is. More on that later. Ring of Pain is a hard game. I died on the first room more than once. I’m sure I’m not the only one. The game is punishing, and there’s a higher than average skill floor to this game than most others. That can be fun for the more hardcore crowd, who isn’t as likely to give in to frustration. But let’s get into the stuff I didn’t like. The game is hard in the sense that it’s absurdly punishing. You’ll die for small mistakes, or even die if you didn’t even make a mistake just due to the room layout. Sometimes, picking up an item is even a mistake. I once picked up a “room shuffles on enemy explosion” and the exploding enemies chain jumped me around the room, dealing damage to me and landing me in front of an aggressive monster who attacked me on the spot. I was killed from full immediately. My mistake there, of course, was picking up that item. That’s not the only item that will just get you killed. Many early game items reduce defense... which will absolutely get you killed. Most of my progress in the game came from finding out when to say no- which was a lot of the time. Lots of the items aren’t just not helpful, they are active detriments. And many items happen to have stat penalties on top of the bonuses. But you can’t really try to min-max these, since you don’t have agency over what kind of items you’ll be seeing. You end up becoming a generalist more often than not, and because you’re a generalist you’re forced to continue being one- since you don’t have the hyper offense or hyper defense required to start dumping stats. Enemy designs are also very limiting here. Some enemies have insanely high defense, so doing special damage is your best bet. But special damage only comes from items, and often highly synergistic ones... in a game you can’t really build around easily. So it’s rare that runs actually feel super different. Enemies are different, sure, and sometimes you luck into a cool item combination- but most of the time it feels like you’re just doing the same thing over and over and hoping that enemy placements are different enough. The variety on the player side isn’t there. The difference between my runs was heavily impacted by RNG. That doesn’t mean there’s no skill involved whatsoever, but it’s not a great balance. Take Slay the Spire as an example. An experienced player will beat the base difficulty basically every single time. Most normal players won’t. There’s enough room for skill progression and player agency that a player can secure a win even though the artifacts, cards, and enemy orders are all random in that game. As you bump up the difficulty, this starts to drop off- but of the 20 difficulty modifiers top players only start losing consistency past about 15 of them. In other words, the skill ceiling allows for player agency to be the primary determining factor for player success in 15 out of 20 of these difficulty levels- again in a game with a huge amount of random variation! This happens in a game like that because players can strategize in advance (via the map) and because broad groups of cards fall under similar strategies- such as single target burst, AoE, defense, etc., so that a player can ensure they hit the tools they need when they need them. And if they fail to get those tools? They can course correct. The most random items, artifacts, offer bonuses and synergy opportunities and can certainly help a run, but don’t determine it most of the time. Ring of Pain lacks this agency. You can’t really determine what you need- most items come from chests which are sealed completely off. The ring like structure means you can’t plan a good route- and “go left” vs “go right” is usually a matter of “is there something super scary in the way” vs “what’s the shortest path.” Many of the item effects are useful only when you have very high values in a particular stat- but again, you end up being a generalist most of the time. There’s an item that grants you +10 speed, but reverses how turn order is determined- and you can get this early. Even grabbing it early, I was never able to build around it and forcefully lower my speed to make use of it. It ended up just being another trap item. Similarly “Activate X on parry” means I need a ton of defense- but of course I also need a way to actually kill monsters, forcing me to invest heavily in speed and hp if I don’t wan to bleed out all over the place. I found I could activate some of these towards the end of my run- but that’s just because all my stats were becoming outrageous so it didn’t matter. So unlike other roguelikes with lots of player variety, and high skill ceilings where players can navigate the world to victory consistently despite being given different tools and obstacles every time- Ring of Pain ends up being a test of frustration more than anything else, where the biggest obstacle of all is your luck with enemy types and placements. Unlike most of the other games I’ve reviewed, I would not recommend this game except to perhaps the most hardcore deckbuilding enthusiasts with lots of time and patience to burn.

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