Indie Games

Played trough two indies on PS4 recently, but both games are available on most platforms. The first was Tacoma by Fullbright, the makers of Gone Home. At a fundamental level, Tacoma is a very similar game since it also works on the idea of what one could call archaeological storytelling. The player character explores a place and, through this exploration discovers the story that took place in it. If Gone Home was infused with '90s nostalgia, focused on a romantic coming of age story, taking place in a maze-like mansion and the narration was done through environment, letters and recordings, Tacoma propels us several decades in the future on an abandoned space station where things went terribly bad. The station is not the maze the mansion was and its exploration is structured by your handler granting you accesses (the corporation that owns the station hired you to recover data and the station's AI) and while there are a numbers of mails, letters, chat logs to be found, the core storytelling device is that you can activate recordings of the station's crew that you view through augmented reality. This is a very peculiar device that in a way turns you into the spectator of a theater play except you cannot see the whole stage or hear all the actors from a single point. You have to get on the stage, follow the actors around and then rewind it all to follow another character or see things from a different point of view.

The whole mechanism is not very "gamey" in the sense that there is no fail state, no obstacle to your progression that needs to be overcome or moments where the player's understanding of the story is tested (there are passwords and keys that can be found and used but I believe they are all optional). What drives the game is the players' willingness to understand the story and to better know the cast of characters presented to them.

One might not be interested in what the game is trying to do, but what it is set on doing, it does pretty well. The story delivery device is interesting and, while a bit repetitive, it never becomes tedious. The story itself is pretty good even if not overly original ('corporation bad' is an unsurprising trope at work) and the Sci-Fi setting, both in visual design and concept, captures the imagination. That being said, it's difficult to be completely enthusiastic. It feels more could have been done with the mechanisms to involve the player. Surely there must be a middle ground to be found between this, that only requires the player to be a spectator, and something like Return of the Obra Dinn (another case of archaeological storytelling) that requires hardcore sleuthing. It also feels its delivery mechanism forces the story to not be overly complicated nor long, and, because of this, some of the most interesting core themes (AI) are not explored in the depth one would hope.

Lastly, there is something a bit strange which I am not sure is a result of design or activism or both. From a design standpoint, since the player must familiarize with a crew of 6 characters that are mostly seen through outlined virtual representations and that you learn about little piece by little piece, it's important to make them all pretty distinctive in appearance, character and life story. This is achieved very well as very quickly we are able to clearly identify the different protagonists. It's a clear case where diversity helps the storytelling, but in a strange way it does not really enriches the story because the different hopes and issues of this diverse cast are really universal in nature. In a way, that's kinda the point : the gay biologist does not have to be the token gay character in charge of conveying the plight of the gay men. In 2080, he is just a regular father and husband getting shit from the family he tries to provide for. But the strange paradox is that it's weird to paint as normal and not address at all a situation that by all metrics is not : 5 of the 7 human main characters are women, the only two married couples are gay, even including the extended cast (friends and family outside the station) there is not a single white dude in sight (well... the head of the corporation is a white dude)... doing that is strange and feels contrived if it's not thematized at all in the setting or the story. It might not be the intent, but it's difficult not to perceive it as some sort of over-correction ("Too many white dudes in video games, so let's go out of our way to make sure there is none in our game!"). This slightly grating state of affairs does not sour the experience because it does not prevent the characters from being relatable.



The other indie I played through was 198X. This game suffers from what I would call the kickstarter effect : games that have a very cool premise or concept, but in the end deliver the bare minimum. Here, the very cool concept is to tell a coming of age story set in the late '80s through the games a teenager played at an arcade. You get 16bit pixel art galore for all the cut scenes, synth wave in the soundtrack and then several fake late '80s / early '90s games that are slightly altered. A kind of Scott Pilgrim that goes a meta step further (not a graphic novel about a teenager inspired by video games, but a video game about a teenager inspired by video games !) mixed with retro sabotages, what's not to like ? Well.... while the cut scenes work very well and certainly scratch a nostalgic itch, they also seriously test your endurance to overwritten voice-over packed full of clichés (though I enjoyed the neurasthenic delivery). We also never get to sink our teeth into the meat of things, because the game as a whole feels more like a proof of concept than a final product. The story basically ends with a "to be continued" after the exposition (still 90ish minutes to reach that point).

The fake games (a beat'em all, a driving game, an horizontal shoot'em up, a japanese themed action platformer and a dungeon crawler) have their moments, but they mostly underline how seemingly rudimentary games are difficult to design properly when it comes to balance and (shout out to Tim Rogers ) friction (roughly : the feeling of corporeality of the characters conveyed by the relationship between player inputs and character movements). Where the game shines is in the few moments the fake games stray away from the norm : it's the camera that slowly pans away from the action in the beat'em all, it's a section of the driving game that is suddenly overlong to allow for a voice over to set in or, to a lesser degree, it's the dungeon master using fourth wall breaking insults in the dungeon crawler. In a cruel way, these just hint at the great game 198X could have been : a fully fleshed experience packed full with clever and productive retro game alterations. Sadly, that game is probably condemned to remain in the hopes and dreams of the backers. What we got instead is just the ok trace of what could have been.

PS: I discovered watching the credits that famous 16bit era japanese video game composer Yuzo Koshiro (people mostly associate him with Street of Rage or Wonderboy, but for me there are lame and it's all about Actraiser) got hired to do the music of the action platformer section. The track did the job but did not leave a lasting impression.

Just played through One-Way Ticket on Switch (also available on Steam). Sometimes curiosity pays off, sometimes it does not. Sadly this was a case of the latter this time. Browsing the Switch online store I stumbled upon that cheap visual novel with a somewhat interesting pitch : a murder mystery on a fishing ship. While I played several japanese-style adventure games over the years (the kind with still images in a window, text under it and menus on the side, like Snatcher, Policenauts, Cobra or more experimental versions of this concept like The Silver Case I reviewed in the Retro thread) I never played a modern visual novel, so I thought : why not give this one a try ? Well... this is not a good entry point into the genre. Let's start with the nice things since there are so few : some of the character designs are pretty good as are most of the backgrounds (that use this kind of very well lit mix of 3D art and drawing pretty typical to visual novels and some anime). The fact the story is anchored (pun!) in some sort of reality is also nice : The tragic events of the story are set in motion by the abuse, corners cutting and exploitation going on on board a long haul fishing boat.

Well... that's it. The rest is a train wreck. I am not sure what is the main problem.... is it the fact the game randomly crashes from time to time ? That's pretty bad. Is it the fact the rare and minor interactions you have during the game feel like a clunky afterthought ? Is it the fact the totality of the game is seemingly translated using Google ? Actually it's worse than that because Google does not make typos or mix up words like 'month' and 'mouth'.... Seriously, you spend your time in this game trying to reverse engineer the translation to try and maybe understand what is being said. It's bad beyond belief when you consider this managed to find its way to the Switch store. As for the story being told, while the idea behind it is ok (things going from bad to worse and the crew slowly but surely killing each others), the execution is poor with a lot of over the top non-sense, verbose psychopaths (something that is even more tiresome in broken english) and some useless super terrible trauma that secretly links many of the characters. Meh. You can add the OMGtwist at the end to the list of the tropes.

In the "this explains that" category, the game is actually made by an extremely small team based in Shanghai on what I must assume is a shoestring budget. Still, it's probably better to not localize your game if the only way to possibly make it economically viable is to only spend a whole $10 on the process which results in such a disgraceful mess.


PS: Not willing to be deterred by this bad experience, I bought Root Letter on PS4. It's a somewhat well reviewed visual novel... we'll see how it goes.

Finished The 25th Ward : The Silver Case. This is the sequel to the japanese style adventure game The Silver Case that I reviewed in the Retro thread. The 25th Ward was originally made for cell phones in Japan and released episodically. With contractual changes and evolving technologies, the game stayed unfinished, became unavailable and pretty much impossible for anyone to play (I guess you could try to buy a vintage cellphone that had the game on it ? Or maybe there is a scene for cell phone games ROMs and emulators ?). But since the remake / re-release of the first game sold reasonably well, Grasshopper Manufacture released a PC and PS4 remaster of the game with additional content added and (pretty critical for most of us here) an english translation !

To explain the setting and plot simply (a tough task!) the first game takes place in 1999 in a city, the 24th Ward, that is a kind of social experiment in building an ideal city that is turning sour, in no small part because the genesis of the city is all about secret political rivalries and population control attempts (and more esoteric things that slowly but surely bring the plot into super confusing WTF territories). The game is split in two, one serie of scenarios follows the investigators of the Heinous Crime Unit that has to deal with the resurgence of an almost mythical serial killer and another serie of scenario follows a former reporter turned investigator for hire that shines a different light of the events of the HCU investigations. The main points of interest of the first game is that the two series have different writers, that the adventure game mechanisms are twisted to the point of satire, that the presentation used mixed techniques (3D, drawings, film, traditional animation) and that it is almost prescient in its themes related to Internet.


The sequel use some of the same ideas : set in 2005 in a new city-experiment called The 25th Ward, the structure is this time in 3 storylines with 3 writers : Investigators of the Heinous Crimes Units that find themselves ambushed when looking at a strange string of suicide in an apartment complex, a journalist turned investigator - a returning character of the first game - struggles with his memory and a case an anonymous client put on his lap, and, lastly, two members of a secret organisation tasked to covertly control the population of the 25th Ward try to keep their grip on an increasingly confusing and slippery situation. The presentation is more streamlined and a little less ambitious : each storyline uses its own aesthetic and voilà. No animation or film in this one (a shame) and while the HCU line uses the distinctive style of Takashi Miyamoto and the journalist line use paintings (not sure what the technique is exactly.... inks ? watercolor ?), it must be said that that the marker pen drawings used for the 3rd line look super cheap and ugly. If on that front the game is less memorable that its predecessor, it also has its moments of pretty damn cool sci-fi goodness (notably a side scenario with another returning character from the first game that tracks a man that reaches an odd form of post-humanity) and literary flair (a whole scenario that alternates between live journal style blog entries and an ongoing investigation that openly reference a classic of XXth century sci-fi literature - The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr.).

The art-game qualities are once again also to be found in the deconstruction of the adventure game format. At times it's clever but annoying (several "pick the right answer or repeat" sequences or a late canvassing section in a 80 floors building), at other times a good balance is found between being original and enjoyable (a maze like section that is played through i two different ways). Some alterations are also played for laughs (like fights turning into mock versions of Dragon Quest battles), but it's all mostly weird, with the most prevalent aspect being an UI that is deliberately clunky (the menus are polyhedrons you rotate).

So yeah, a mixed bag that is hard to recommend to anyone other than the most curious and daring (you are in for about 20 hours of reading), but, personally, despite all the non-sense and the pseudo philosophical drivel, I would be curious to see another game in this universe, if only because the additional chapter that was recently made exclusively for that remaster and that is set in 2017 is both one of the best part of the game and a kind of departure from it into a realm of anime trope (high school, train stations, paranormal activities), but still with the strange poison that seeps from the cracks of this franchise.

Just played through the main campaign and the challenge levels of Poly Bridge 2 for personal computers. I played the first game a few years back and it's basically more of the same, but with the major flaw fixed, so, yay ! The idea behind the game is pretty simple. Each level is a situation where some vehicles have to go to certain spots, usually across a river, and you need to build a bridge for said vehicles to go safely on their journey. You build a bridge using roads, wood and steel beams, cables, etc and then you run the simulation and see if all goes well or if all hell breaks loose. The genius of such a physics based puzzle/engineering game is that the basic gameplay loop (design, fail, redesign, fail better and eventually succeed) is very rewarding in many ways. The failures range from devastating catastrophes to maddening "almost but not quite" situations and there is a ton of emerging comedy or emerging drama that comes out of it. Also, if in all puzzle games there is a lot of satisfaction when you finally succeed, here there are two additional dimensions : ingenuity and aesthetics. Since the game gives you a lot of freedom, there are many different ways to solve the problems with varying levels of elegance and cleverness and building a bridge that works is one thing.... but one that does so AND looks good ? Such a joy ! Also, if bring everyone safely to where they want to go is enough to complete a mission, the true badge of honor is doing it with a bridge where nothing breaks and under the budget you were allocated.

Pretty fast, the complexity of the tasks ramps up and the definition of what is a bridge gets expended further and further. You place and program hydraulics and split joints, you design ramps, elevators, swings and, if you so choose, strange contraptions that somehow catapult that mini van there and this schoolbus here exactly (even if if upside down after three tumbles).


The main problem of the first game was that the physics engine used some shortcuts that lead to it not being deterministic. This was not an issue in most of the levels, but when things started to have many moving parts and things barely did not work, you could run the simulation over and over for different results until stars aligned. That was more than a little frustrating. This time around the engine is fully deterministic : a same situation will always lead to the exact same outcome. It's good for the peace of mind, but you can still find yourself in situations when some sort of butterfly effect happens : a minute change to the position of an element has cascading consequences that lead to vastly different outcomes, but it's almost impossible to know if somewhere in this family of outcome one will be perfect or if your whole design needs to be scraped.

Also pretty fun and interesting, there is an indirect multiplayer element to the game. For each level there is a leaderboard by budget (note that it would be interesting to have leaderboards based on other criteria , because now it's dominated by contraptions that rely on unlikely accidents and abuse of the engine) and a gallery where you can marvel at the other players' solutions (be it because of their genius, their luck or their stupidity !). Also, the game allows you to design levels and share them on a workshop for infinite content.

Since the studio behind the game are apparently not the best database handlers in the world and the game had a lot more success than expected, the leaderboards, galleries and workshop don't work so well and the tools to search through those are not exactly stellar, but nothing that a patch or two cannot fix and, more importantly, nothing that detracts from the basic pleasure of the game that is tackling its 64 levels and their 64 "challenge" counterparts.



Note that this trailer contains a lot or super crazy contraptions that are not what you do in the main game, but rather example what can be done in the sandbox / workshop.

Played through Adr1ft on PS4. It is also available on PC (my understanding is that it has VR support on PC but not on PS4 ? If you care about VR more than me - so more than not at all - I'll let you find out !). It's a first person space suit navigation / survival game... you wake up in a damaged space suit in the middle of a wrecked space station and try to find a way to go home. This is a pretty good looking game and there is something always satisfying about controlling a character in these low or zero gravity games. That being said, Adr1ft did not really work for me, probably because it felt like the team did not fully commit to an idea and as a result the game just does the bare minimum and collects low hanging fruits. It could have been a thrilling action game, like the video game version of the movie Gravity, but the game world is static (the catastrophe happened and is over, it is not ongoing) so there is no feeling of urgency (oxygen management is more of a light tedium even with a suit that must be made out of papier-mâché - the slightest of bonks degrade it) nor set pieces. This makes the game go at a constant and slightly boring pace (or deliberate pace if you want to be nice). It could have been a kind of narrative forensic game (trying to understand what happened) and it is in a way, but this is no Return of the Obra Dinn or even Tacoma. No special gameplay mechanic or original delivery system here : it's the age old audio logs and e-mail exchanges. This is not exactly engaging gameplay-wise and on top of that the game does a very poor job at making us care for any of it as it feels extremely secondary to the main objective : getting back home safely.

The getting back home safely part is also not exactly delivered in the most thrilling of way. It's basically an almost linear collection of fetch quests that don't even have the courtesy to have some variety or surprises (through the game it just offers one slight deviation from the laid out plan). Four times, once for each aisle of the wrecked station, you navigate to a computer, generate a computational gizmo and bring the gizmo back to the center of the station. You have HUD way points, a minimap with arrows pointing to the next objectives, and environmental design that tries to visually guide you to were you need to go (debris trails, blinking lights, etc). It's nice an all, but since the whole game is about getting from point A to point B and then C, etc, all this assistance makes it slightly boring when it works and frustrating in the rare occasions it does not. It's very possible though that during development they tried to go environmental only and/or to make it a kind of challenge to reach your destinations and that it simply proved too confusing or frustrating instead of puzzling in a good way.

To end on a positive note, there is something in the game that reminded me of ICO. In case you are not familiar with the game (something you should try to correct as it is one of the best game ever made), it takes place in a giant castle and from time to time you reach vantage points from which you can see areas of the castle you previously explored. It gives a sense of scale and a sense of place that really add to the game's world, but, and possibly even more importantly, it also gives a sense of time, a sense of an ongoing journey, because seeing all the places you were before also reminds you of all you had to do to reach where you are. There is a bit of that in Adr1ft, especially in a moment near the end where, for the first time, you get to see almost the whole space station in your field of view. It's both an impressive vista and an opportunity to reminisce on what you went through.

EDIT: Oh I should add it's not a full price game (it's in the sub $20 range I think) and that it took me 4ish hours to beat, but I went straight to the finish line.

EDIT 2 : Trailer that makes it look a bit better than it really is

Played through Root Letter on PS4 (also available on almost everything). Note that there is a version of the game called Root Letter : Last Answer that, if I understand it correctly, is the same game but offers the option to replace all the digital backgrounds and drawn characters by photographs of places and actors.

So yeah, this is a japanese style adventure game or a visual novels as the cool kids call those (if you want to be a super hipster you can call those yarudora) : a menu on the side, all the text on the bottom, a big image for the setting and windows on top of it for details or characters with some limited animation here and there. Often, and it is the case here, all characters dialogues are performed by voice actors. Using this general format, you can make tons of very different games, depending on how linear or branched you want the story to be, how much puzzle solving skills you want to require from the player to progress, if you want fail conditions or not, if you want to add original gameplay mechanisms or not, etc. In the case of Root Letter, we get a mostly linear story (not even a chain of sausages - freedom between choke points) that require a low level of puzzle solving skill but with a couple somewhat creative mechanisms. Let's review all that.

The game is about a 30 something guy who, when about to move, finds a pile of letters from 15 years ago. Those are from a penpal he had during his highschool days. Much to his surprise, he notices there is one of the letter he never read and in it the penpal, a girl named Aya Fumino, confesses to a murder. The main character decides to go to the hometown of his penpal to try and find her and understand what happened 15 years ago. In a structure that s not unlike the Ace Attorney serie, each chapter of the game is roughly split in two half. In the first half you gather information about someone Aya mentioned in her letters and in the second half you confront the person to make some of the truth come to light. The comparison with Ace Attorney is not very flattering though, because the investigation part is extremely linear and the interrogation part does not require much thoughts (also the plot is not as convoluted and the tone offers only some mild comedy here and there). For flavor more than gameplay, the interrogations also have some moments where the main characters goes into "max mode" where you have to pick quickly the appropriate out of changing options. This is more pointless and tedious than anything else, since picking the wrong line just makes you repeat the (luckily short) sequence.

SPOILER ABOUT THE WAY TO REACH THE DIFFERENT ENDINGS (BUT O STORY SPOILER) There is a somewhat clever yet frustrating narrative/gameplay device at work though. During each chapter the main characters reads one of the letter from Aya and then tries to remember what he wrote in return. We get multiple options that sightly change the content of the next letter we read. The slightly frustrating part is that these choices are actually the only non linear elements of the game and they decide which last two chapters you will get. Even more annoying (but I guess typical for this type of games), you need to replay through the game to get access to some of the choices that get you access to the "best" ending which is the canon story where everything falls in place
END OF SPOILER

It not too great... linear story, light on puzzle, not particularly well written, pleasant art but nothing special (and some stuff is reused), some nice music but that you hear over and over again, slightly grating "sponsored by the tourism office of Shimane" vibe (not unwarranted because it actually is sponsored by the tourism office of Shimane or something similar !)... but still there is something that works. The themes of the story are pretty relatable with a cast of 30 year old being compared to their teenage self. How did they change ? How did they stay the same ? What happened to their hopes and dreams ? And the mystery, while not super elaborate or full of surprises, still kept me engaged through the 10ish hours it took me to play through the game (reached one ending and then used a walkthrough to rush to the final two chapters for the best ending).

EDIT: Not embedding the trailer because most of it uses anime style visuals that are not used in the actual game !

Played A Monster's Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions) on PC. It's an indie puzzle game made by Alan "Draknek" Hazelden & friends. Draknek (and friends, though I am not sure if it always the same ones) is known for several very well designed puzzle games released in the last few years. Namely, Sokobond, A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and Cosmic Express. A Monster's Expedition is a kind of spiritual successor to A Good Snowman, as we once again control the same minimalistic yet expressively animated black blob of a monster, pushing stuff around in a tile based world. No more snow ball rolling and snow men building this time, it's all about visiting an outdoor exhibition set on a bunch of tiny islands. The thing is that to travel from island to island, you have to build makeshift bridges or rafts by cutting trees downs and rolling logs around. The fundamental idea is that pushing a lying log from the side makes it roll until it hits something (or falls in the water), but pushing it from one end lifts it and put it vertically (allowing you to push it down in any direction). This core idea in itself allows for a number of clever manipulation puzzles, but A Monster's Expedition (AME), in the spirit of the brilliant Stephen's Sausage Roll (SSR), adds layers upon layers of subtilties and complexities to the puzzles, not by giving the character new abilities or adding brand new items to interact with, but by creating puzzles where new situations can arise and new behavior discovered in these new situations. This is all kind of great and clever, but there is a pretty big caveat.

For all their similarities, there is a huge design difference between SSR and AME. In SRR, you had a kind of overworld, a hub to enter each individual puzzle level. The overworld itself was a sort of huge and light puzzle and there were here and there minor interactions between the overworld and the puzzles, but, 99% of the time, when you entered a level, you knew you had all it took to solve it, knew exactly what it was you tried to achieve and, once done, knew it was in the bag and time to go bang your head against another problem. In AME, the overworld is not a hub, it's the puzzles. There is a kind of fog of war that clears island by island, but the network of bridges a raft routes you build is not a linear one, some islands can only be partially "solved" until you reach them from another direction, many have different solutions, sometimes you need to bring a log from an island to another, etc. The consequence of this, is that when you reach a new island, you are not sure if you can solve it yet, you are not exactly sure what it is you are trying to do (you can attempt to bridge to different islands in different ways and not be sure initially if these ways are possible to achieve or not). And once you have found a solution, you are not sure if it was unique or if the game actually required another way to deal with the situation for you to be able to explore all islands. On top of that, maybe the optimal solution was just not available yet. In a way, in AME a puzzle is never "in the bag." Examining the overworld map, you find yourself wanting to revisit past islands, reset them, and find new paths. Also, while you can see what is left of the fog of war looking at the overworld map, there might be parts of islands you discovered but could not reach, so you don't have a clear sense of what is actually done and what is actually left to do.

This constant uncertainty could be for some players I am sure a source of excitement, providing a sense of wonder and mystery. To each their own OCD I guess, but for me this design philosophy is almost unbearable. I need to do things and be done with things, not constantly feel like everything is possibly unfinished business and nor always wondering, when I struggle with a puzzle, if it is actually possible to solve it yet. I still reached the end of game (which is reaching a particular island), but I can't harness the will to try and find everything there is to find considering how unclear the path forward is.

On a side note, the tone of the game is all very charming, with each exhibited item having a little humorous description. The comedy is based on the items being relics of humanity and the monsters making erroneous assumptions about them that double as satire (like having a training bike described as a laundry hanging device). It got a chuckle out of me here and there, but I must confess I was not really in the mood for those, considering how riled up I was by the design.

Even if in the end the game left a bitter taste in my mouth, much of the 16 hours I played it were entertaining as it is only in the last third of it that I started to see the big picture. And again, it bothered me greatly, but some might love it.

Diving into the bottomless pit that is my Steam backlog (I am sure many can sympathize) I played through Betrayer. It was originally released in 2014, but a mix between my crappy PC and probably crappy coding made it nigh unplayable back then. Fast forward to today and it's smooth as butter with everything set at max on my new PC. The game is set at the intersection of horror, adventure, action and stealth or something. You find yourself stranded on the shores of the New World and discover that the forts and encampments of the British settlers are abandoned, that zombified Spaniards are roaming the land and that, considering the arrows and tomahawks you find, the locals must be unhappy about something !

The meat and potato of the game is that you explore the land, avoid, stealth kill or fight monsters and through clues and discussions (mostly with ghosts), you learn what happened.

There are many problems though and I am not sure which one should be at the top of the list or even if it is a list since things are weaved together. I'll spare you the two billion words essay, but let's just say the combat is simplistic and not satisfying, that fighting almost always has a cost, be it in health or ammunition (though enemies can drop some and you can collect back your arrows if you find them and they have not broke or despawned). Enemy AI is also super simplistic. It goes to "don't care" to "I am going to kill you and won't stop until I die" aggro'ing just about everything in shouting distance. So basically you have a choice between very tedious stealth killing (the only original mechanic, which also provides the world with a nice feel, is that wind gusts from time to time, covering the noise you make), or all hell breaking loose, which can easily result in a death, which repopulates the whole zone in a new way, with the added bonus of you having no money and less ammunition. I assume the devs found it deliciously Dark-Soul-esque, but they missed the part where the combat in Dark Soul is satisfying, that there is no randomization of enemies and that you can easily navigate the map at little to no cost once you get used to it and get better at the game. To make things even a little more tedious, death is not the only thing that repopulates the whole zone randomly : fast travel does too and LIGHT SPOILER AHEAD so is switching between the light and dark world END OF SLIGHT SPOILER. As a result to the annoying design, I changed the difficulty setting to the easiest possible and mostly punched enemies to death to save bullets and arrows !

The adventure side of things is also not overly interesting, at least when it comes to mechanisms. There are clues you gather and notes you find, and these unlock small discussion trees with ghosts allowing you to uncover the many sad and dramatic stories that happened in the settlements. For the adventure side of things there are also difficulty options. You can for instance remove indicators on the map, or remove your location on the map. I did not play that way. Even if you do though, to prevent you from wandering aimlessly, there is a "listen" key generating some ghostly sounds in the direction of the nearest point of interest. With headphones it's easy to orient yourself that way, but you can also toggle some visual indicators in the options. This sounds really like a case of wanting to design something (exploring to find clues), realizing it does not work (aimlessly wandering is not entertaining), designing fixes for the perceived problem (sound cue to not wander aimlessly, map indicators, etc) and not realizing the crutches make the game mindlessly repetitive : hit "listen", go where it points, "listen" again, go further, find clue, repeat. Move to next zone when there is nothing more to hear. For my money, the real fix would have been a lot harder to implement : make it so the investigations are logically structured in a way that the player can deduce what area must be explored to find more information.

You know I am an optimist at heart so I like to conclude on positive notes. The first is that the radical aesthetics of the game work pretty well. It's in 3D, but in black + white + red. It's not ground breaking or anything (there was that action game on Wii that used it also... google-fu says it was called MadWorld), but it is well executed. The dark sections are also appropriately creepy and tense, with a sound design the cranks eerie to 11 in a stereotypical but still efficient way.

The second thing that I enjoyed was the writing of the dialogues with the ghosts. The idea is that the ghosts don't remember clearly what happened to them. They only remember fragments of past events, so they would say a line that is a fragment you can understand one way, but later, when you found some clues, that same line will be inserted after or before another and take a whole different meaning. Obviously this technique loses a bit of its impact once you expect it, but it's still pretty elegant and clever and also something that is only possible in a form of interactive fiction.

That was that.... 100%'ed the story elements, playing 90% of the game in the easiest way possible for something like 8 hours of play.

The late shift have been playing this and it looks neat:

I dig the dwarf fortress style stockpiles. World art is cute but I am not a fan of the character art. The mining looks cool and it might actually have interesting metallurgy stuff. Not sure yet I can't really tell from watching streams.

Going to get it when some friends get together for it maybe in a patch or two.

It is good! The stockpiles work well with the land claim system. Big stuff like big chunks of stone you carry by hand and they don't go in the backpack. Or I think from watching streams they can be loaded into vehicles.

Research involves consuming craptons of resources. Like farmers study a bunch of food, masons stone, smelting iron etc. It then gives you a book that poops out a scroll when you use it. I'm not sure how many uses the book has.

SWG style cross dependencies are really high, and I like that. Smiths are going to need engineers to build rockers and crushers to purify ore for smelting. Tailors make better backpacks. Carpenters make special workbenches that everyone needs etc.

Powered stations run off mechanical power like waterwheels or windmills. I spent some time trying to find axles / gears / joints etc but it just sort of magically transfers power to stuff in range.

There's a diet system with vitamin/carb/fat/protein but it isn't obnoxious or annoying the way it was in Atlas. Good food boosts xp, and as you work at stations it consumes it from your fat belly. I wasn't bothering any of the local wildlife for the first few days but I eventually got short of protein from the campfire charred veggy stuff I was eating so I shot some fish with a bow.

Trees seem to take a really long time to grow back. The first couple days I couldn't figure out how to plant seeds, but I saved every seed I found. When I did figure it out I went on a planting spree. It looks like temp, soil moisture and such are all modeled.

This was funny:


I was chopping a tree into smaller bits to carry and it knocked me way up in the air. I think the tree fell in a wedge and was flipping out with vidyagame physics.

It's goooooooooooooooooood. Started a server with some friends on friday. Lots of fun cooperation happy elven tree time goodness and dwarven underground action.

So the Eco server, we've got around 8ish people. Around 4 play alot, with the others kind of trickling in 30min to an hour a day.

We discovered that on medium collaboration, which is recommended for small groups, the 7th skill point is around 5 days real time. The time doubles with each one so the next is 10, then 20. Our engineer has 3 things left to unlock to fight the asteroid with, but the math is such that one or maybe two of them will be too late.

What happened was just basic impatience. He needed iron to do some research and the miner/smith guy was not around, so the engineer spent skill on mining. Then realized he couldn't do anything with it so spent on smelting. And he'd already blown a point on masonry so he could make rooms (instead of asking the mason for help).

All that dabbling means they are just now getting to mechanics. The people that specialized carefully needed parts from engineering 3 or 4 days ago, so it held up the other players quite a bit as we had no way to advance (don't ask me why I need iron axles to research masonry). One of our carpenters dabbled alot too so we are pretty much entirely screwed unless some new player shows up and focuses hard on what we are missing.

It is a game about collaboration but really people would rather just do things themselves. It reminds me alot of EverQuest with the hassle of getting a group so people would just run a second account. The game sort of effectively lets you 2-box, but then massively penalizes it for themselves and the other players. Kind of interesting.

So if you play with a small group either force some kind of law limiting extra skill lines with an admin or something, or go with low collaboration.

I haven't tried it on low but I suspect it is like Conan or any other survival game where anyone can do anything and nobody trades anything.

12 days left and we might just make it. One thing I didn't factor in is food. Good food can give you a big xp multiplier. Also houses improve over time with little nicknacks and rugs and statues that also boost xp. So We now have all the major skill lines covered.

All we need now is to find alot of gold and make a mountain of steel ingots.

Yesterday the blast furnaces got out of hand or something went wrong somewhere. Pollution stacked up and killed off alot of trees and such. We still aren't sure what went wrong.

Well we made it. Our engineer quit and I had 2 skill points so I picked up mechanics and electronics and we just mined and mined gigatons of ore. Oil field stuff was a nightmare.

Our oilfield guy works a heavy job and could barely log in so We tried to get 2 nice oil fields set up with 10 pumpjacks each on the weekend. He only had a little time so we rushed him around laboring everything up and stuffing him full of food.

Then after he was gone we realized most of the jobs were broken. The job couldn't "see" the materials nearby in stockpiles and nobody online could connect disconnect the stockpiles to get them going. This was a big 300 barrel job at an electric machinist bench and 11 of the pump jacks at the oil fields. We had like 3 days to go.

We ended up cheating me a skillpoint in oil, using an admin tool to destroy and replace all the bugged pumpers/benches and me redoing all the busted jobs kind of pretending that the oil guy had done them.

Here's the first oil field we did. It looked even worse here before as we weren't filtering the turds coming out of the refinery.


The recipes make it look like you get empty oil barrels back after you process stuff into plastic or epoxy or rubber so that with the little enhancer plugins at level 3 you should stop losing barrels with each batch of stuff you make. But they reduce the output of barrels returned proportional to the level of the plugin module thing, and it doesn't show that on the UI anywhere.

I think in earlier patches before they did that, with a level 4 or 5 plugin the refinery would actually crap out extra barrels, so they fixed it in this hamhanded mmo team style way. We wasted alot of time trying to figure out why we were losing barrels.

I don't want to spoil any ending stuff, but we are sort of savescumming. We made a save today and are going to allow the meteor to hit tomorrow just to see what happens.

Random shots of me being a terrible driver:

ah kharzettes tractor driving abilities continue to shine.

The meteor strike was really cool. A few of the guys wanted to try and salvage the world but it was really messed up. We did a backup of both so we might end up doing that at some point but I think everyone is jumping over to Valheim.

Free from the deadline I just want to make some of the cool modern stuff. None of us had anything better than steam trucks, and a few of us were still using the stone tools we started with. We had to put all the focus on the endgame to make it, though in hindsight I think maybe building a digger might have gotten us there faster.

Since the event was over the owner kicked the difficulty down to low (collaboration) so skillpoints are fast to arrive. I can build most stuff myself now.

This is in early access now:


This is super relaxing and comfy but a bit buggy:


I can't tell if it is just purely delivering mail, or if it is going to turn into a Hentai or Dating sim or something. There's a Lumberjack and you know what that means.

this is a good place to put the Nextfest demo thoughts.

Wartales. -tactical combat mount and blade. was pretty enjoyable for a fairly short demo. def going to keep an eye on this.

Terra nil- way more advanced from the previous versions I've seen streamed. relaxing game. A but concerned on challenge and depth. was super easy, and seems like it would be very repetitive. enjoyable... if theres more.

Little witch in the woods. talk talk talk. dunno if terrible localization, or if that was in the original language too. actual gameplay is a bit more tedious then fun.

death trash- suitably weird. not sure how much roguelike it is, or all precrafted world. intriguing. would need to see more. might be more comparable to an Ultima I suppose. could not get the timing on dodge rolls... was always too early.

len's island. -didnt love. used keyboard/mouse. was rough. probably supposed to use a controller. platforming in a game like this. no thanks. harvesting was not enjoyable.

the immortal mayor. - seems like its a quite deep town builder. something to keep an eye on for sure. currently however, like 50% translated... so.. rough.

nimoyd- a survival, minecraft, terraria thing... interesting. ui and controls a bit rough.

blacksmith legend. oddly enjoyable, blacksmith shop game. dunno how deep it ends up. kindof basic. hard to justify paying for it.

common'hood- seemingly well crafted squatters making a communist utoptia in a stolen building game. so fucking woke. lol. cant even burn the place down, do drugs, or assualt the others. looks well made, but no way am I going to get past the idiotic premise.

sea of craft- a water based vehicle physics game like besiege, etc. also about 40% translated. not impressed.