Month: August 2023

I really want there to be more to do in Tin Can, but unfortunately I think the premise has about reached its limit with a couple of hours of gameplay. I could play custom scenarios and longer ones, but it wouldn’t really change anything, I know how to deal with all the disasters and even if sheer fatigue catches up with me in a 45 minute or hour-long scenario, it wouldn’t be any more fun, I’d just need more stamina.

But I do think there’s more you can do with the gameplay. You just have to ditch the escape pod premise and instead have your tiny tin can be a fully functional spaceship that can go places on its own. This is ideally the realm of a full sequel, but if I were actually giving advice to the Tin Can guys, I would potentially release it as a series of free update DLCs instead, because then each update gives you a chance to get the game back into the public eye for fifteen minutes and that’s probably better business than completing every new feature so you can release the whole thing as a sequel. Also, I think structuring this blog post as a series of DLC updates will be more interesting and that’s overwhelmingly likely to be the only way in which these changes are implemented.

The first update is to swap out the distress beacon for a navigation system. You are not holding out in an escape pod until rescue, you are moving from one space station to another. This allows you to add in a series of missions to deliver messages back and forth between space stations. The only gameplay change this makes is that your distress beacon now has a CRT monitor displaying not just a timer, but also a map of the sector with your current route highlighted and how far along on the route you are from one station to another, and if your navigation system is offline it’s possible to be knocked off-course and once you’re back online you’ll have to readjust your trajectory with a little joystick or tuning dials or whatever control is easiest to program. Also, you’ll have some message cassette tape or something (the whole thing has an old-school 60s/70s NASA aesthetic) floating around, or maybe a written message that you can read. It doesn’t do anything, but delivering that thing is theoretically your goal.

The next update adds spy missions and two important new modules shoved in there somewhere: The radio and the radar. The radar lets you see things nearby, like ice clouds, meteorite showers, electrical storms, and other hazards that crowd space to an alarmingly dense degree, but also other ships and any space stations that aren’t on your star chart. Space stations are immobile things (well, they orbit stuff, which is not technically immobile but it’s as immobile as it gets in space) so you’ll only need a radar to find a space station if it’s a secret space station. The radar can easily detect ships with active radar, because ships with active radar are constantly sending out radar pulses to detect things based on how long it takes the reverberation to get back (wait – does that work in space? First of all, yes, for the same reason the sun’s light can travel through the vacuum of space to reach Earth, but also, how many fucking stars and black holes do you expect to swing past in the course of 30 minutes in an unguided escape pod? Don’t be fooled by the grounded aesthetic, this is a pulp game), but ships without can hide themselves in various debris fields pretty effectively. With passive radar you can detect ships with active radar, but that’s about it. Your radio works similarly: Lights you up on radar when sending messages, but is indistinguishable from a rock when receiving them.

Spy missions, then, are missions where you have to eavesdrop on a ship or station or else find an eavesdropping ship. In the former case, you find a good debris field to hide yourself in nearby and then have to reduce heat emissions until you turn invisible, then survive until you finish eavesdropping and escape back to a friendly space station. In the latter case, you go poking around a debris field until you find the enemy ship and demand their surrender (or skip to calling in the space artillery, depending on what tone you’re going for).

Tin Can is meant to be played in VR. It’s perfectly playable and reasonably fun on PC, but it needs to be a VR game which means the Tin Can needs to take place mostly in a small space. That said, it’s already got an opening section where you run around the storage bay of a much larger ship grabbing spare parts before the reactor explodes, so clearly they’re not married to the game being playable entirely in a 5 ft. square area. That means our next update is walkable space stations and a cargo bay. You can now have trading missions. For the most part you won’t be schlupping cargo in and out of the bay by hand, but instead you will have an interactable monitor in the cargo bay and can push a button to load in certain cargo. The gameplay here is that certain cargo has certain requirements. Some cargo are electronics that will get fried if a current from the electrical storm event runs through them so, like critical systems, you have to turn it off as fast as possible once that event starts, others are reptile or plant terrariums that must be kept above a certain temperature or they go bad, others are frozen food or medicine that must be kept below a certain temperature or they go bad, and others are weapons or mining explosives that must be below above a certain temperature or they explode. Cargo pods have independent temperature regulators, but of course, each pod has a separate regulator which needs to be maintained. If the cargo goes bad, it becomes worthless, if it explodes, it takes your whole ship with it.

As you might expect, this update brings with it an economy. You can now get cash dollars for completing missions with which you can buy cargo cheap to sell elsewhere where it’s dear. Cargo also means you can now supply planetary exploration and settlement, filling up your cargo bay with exploration probes (electronic), food (temperature controlled), mining explosives (volatile), and so on to help people settle uninhabited planets. Maybe also something with space station upgrades, although I’m nervous that will lean too far into electronics-heavy shipments, and you want a good blend of temperature-controlled shipments mixed in with those.

The final update is space combat! Cargo pods can instead be filled in with turrets. Turrets aim and fire themselves automatically at targets far beyond visual range located with radar. Weaponfire lights you up on radar just like active radar does, so you can use passive radar to surprise attack an enemy, but once you do the jig is up. Your three weapons are lasers, which are very power-hungry for poor damage but have great range and double as point-defense against missiles, plus, while they burn through batteries very quickly, batteries can be recharged, missiles, which have finite and fairly large ammo that will take up a lot of space and require regular reloading but have good range and do tons of damage, and railguns, which come with a lot of ammo and also you can toss basically anything in the hopper for more, but have poor range and damage. You want to have some of everything on hand and then once you know what weapons the enemy has, you want to focus on maintaining the turrets that counter those weapons and worry about fixing the others after the battle is over.

With weapons, of course, comes missions for patrolling space to keep pirates or enemy scouts at bay, hunting down specific bounties, and assaulting enemy space stations. This also means we can introduce a territory control mechanic, because it is fun to paint maps blue.

All of these missions stay focused on the core concept of unplugging parts from less important systems to plug them into more important systems while trying to keep your temperature reasonable, seal up any holes punched in your frame, and prevent any of your electronics from shorting out, all in hopes of minimizing the damage to your pod/ship, but they add more systems to worry about and a greater context for completing missions in besides just trying to survive longer and longer times.

Dungeons II greatly improves upon the dungeon heart formula giving me the one thing I always most wanted out of it: The ability to ascend into the surface world to wreck the towns of the heroes up top. Mechanically, it’s competent but unexceptional except for that surface world idea, which is enough to get me through the game so long as it’s reasonably easy, which it is. If there’s one bit of design advice that’s emerged from over a year of blogging through my backlog, it’s that if your gameplay is just okay, make it easy so I don’t have to dwell on it and I’ll still probably like your game as long as it has anything else to recommend it.

Dungeons II’s writing is, unfortunately, absolutely godawful. They got the narrator from the Stanley Parable to narrate things, but they don’t have any material to give him except stale parodies of WarCraft and Game of Thrones. And WarCraft is already an RTS game. Sure, World of WarCraft had completely taken over the franchise for ten years even at Dungeon II’s 2015 release date, but it’s not like Dungeons II is drawing on WoW expansion material for its referential “humor,” it’s drawing on basic plot beats the series keeps revisiting, most of which were established in the second and third RTS games. That would be fine if those games had been single-faction Alliance games so Dungeons II would be providing a chance to play the other side, but they’re not. I could already play the other side all the way back in WarCraft I.

Then there’s Game of Thrones, and the problem there is that it’s just got fuck all to do with Dungeons II’s theme. There are no dungeons in Game of Thrones, so having the undead dungeon lord be a cross between the Night King and Arthas doesn’t really add anything to what a straight Arthas parody would’ve been bringing, and having a bunch of Game of Thrones knock-off nobles in the Alliance doesn’t go anywhere because they’re all unified against you rather than bickering amongst themselves. Digging out a bunch of Alliance NPCs from World of WarCraft would’ve been perfectly fine if all you need is a stream of ten different good guys who you need to intercept as they trickle into the map, defeating them in detail before they can mass up an unstoppably large army, and that’s a perfectly good hook for a mission mechanically. The expansion DLC is even more heavily Game of Thrones themed for some reason. As far as I can tell, the guys making Dungeons II either just really liked Game of Thrones and shoved references in out of pure fanboyism or they were hoping to cash in on its popularity without overhauling the actual content of their game at all.

And also the main antagonist is a demi-god named Krotos, which seems like a transparent reference to Kratos except that Krotos is absolutely nothing like Kratos. He’s an angelic aasimar-y sort of demi-god, and a beacon of goodness and justice who steals word-for-word Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate in the final stage. As of Dungeons II’s release date, Kratos was a vengeful mass murdering psychopath whose character arc had been entirely about shedding redeeming qualities until he destroyed what seemed like the entire world (not until 2018 did it come out that it was actually just Greece) to satisfy his own personal grievances with Zeus and the other Olympians. My only guess is that they thought Kratos was the most badass video game protagonist around, so they used a knock-off of him for the end boss, but then wrenched every other aspect of his character out to cram him into the role their end boss actually needed to play, i.e. a leader of the armies of Good rather than an unstoppable killing machine whose motivations are understandable but wholly selfish and whose legitimate grievances are wildly out of proportion to the collateral damage he inflicts within 15 minutes of the opening credits of any given God of War game (prior to the 2018 Norse-focused game that is infuriatingly called just “God of War” even though it is a sequel).

In the end, while I like Dungeons II’s gameplay alright and there’s not a lot of competition in the dungeon heart genre, the plot is a string of references and parodies that don’t really amount to anything and which I mostly ignore in favor of listening to podcasts. It was fun, but not so fun that I wanted to bother with the DLC when it saddled me with one of those missions where you only control one unit as a mechanism for delivering a bunch of worldbuilding and exposition to set up the kinds of major confrontations you might raise an army for. Your worldbuilding and exposition are shit, Dungeons II, and I’m not going to sit through an entire thirty minute level of them just to get to more of the decently entertaining dungeon heart gameplay, nor am I remotely interested in seeing where your stupid Game of Thrones knockoff plot about the Northlands beyond the Wall might be going.

Dungeons III is at least a little bit better at this. In Dungeons III, the protagonist is Thalya, a dark elf who is your principle general in the fight against Good. She was raised by the main antagonist, a paladin named Tanos, to be all good and pure, but after you juice her up with evil magic in the tutorial, she relapses back into evil (we are told she is relapsing, but never what kind of evil she got up to in the past – sometimes it kinda seems like her original “evil” might’ve just been the original sin of being a dark elf). In dialogue, Thalya gets into arguments with herself between “Good Thalya” and “Evil Thalya.” For starters, this is an actual character, not just a reference to a character from other media with the plot and arc excised leaving a mangled name to dangle from a quest target. But also, the narrator occasionally argues with Good Thalya, and at one point drops the line “stop doing the Therese and Jeanette thing!” This line is kind of opaque to people who haven’t played Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Colon Cancer, but from the fact that it’s a pair you can guess what’s being referred to, and the writing for once has the restraint to just drop the reference, let the people who get it, get it, and then move on without belaboring the point.

On the other hand, in the part when Thalya is first infused with dark power, all her attacks deal either 1337 or 9001 points of damage, and instead of just letting that joke stand, they had to have Thalya shout it out, so the writing isn’t massively improved.

Dungeons III also improves the mechanics to the point of being good without any major qualification. Certainly there’s still minor nitpicks, mostly in that they’re still glued to the same basic mechanics as Dungeons II, that being where you command creatures Dungeon Keeper style while underground, picking them up and tossing them down next to what you want them to do, but WarCraft style above ground, right clicking to move or attack with the pack of units you have selected. Of course, since all your base building takes place underground, there’s nothing to do up top except unit micro, but at least you can do that unit micro with reasonable controls. The Dungeon Keeper style controls just aren’t good and it would be way better if I could just select units and order them to attack like I can on the surface. It is, at least, a marked improvement on Dungeons I, in which your dungeon minions only guarded specific rooms they were placed in and all attacks had to be accomplished exclusively with your dungeon lord, and also there was no surface level so the plot and harder levels mostly revolved around beating up other dungeon lords with surface attackers as a secondary threat.

But Dungeons II and III give you the tools to get around the irritating control scheme, and a properly laid out dungeon basically runs itself while you focus on attacking the surface. Dungeons III makes those attacks on the surface much more satisfying by being far more transparent about how you gather “evilness.” In both II and III, “evilness” is a resource gained by attacking the surface, but in Dungeons II I was never totally clear on exactly how you get it. In Dungeons III there are clearly labeled shrines of goodness and if you kill their defenders they will turn into shrines of evilness, and periodically the goodies will try to recapture them. Likewise, instead of splitting the horde, demons, and undead into three different dungeon factions like Dungeons I and II, Dungeons III makes all three of them available to you even while each of them remains playable as a completely independent faction. You can decide to play as a pure demons dungeon if you want, filling in your limited population points with nothing but imps and spider monsters, or you can go pure horde with orcs and naga, or you can mix and match and probably also add some undead at some point, I dunno, they were a DLC faction in Dungeons II and I haven’t gotten deep enough into Dungeons III to unlock them.

Meeple Station has both a campaign and a tutorial. The problem is that the campaign gives you no guidance on how to build your starting station, and the tutorial is interminable. It’s possible there’s a good space station management sim here once you figure out the systems – legion are the indie devs who make perfectly good games but are so familiar with their own game that they’ve completely lost touch with how to teach it – but the tutorial is like an hour long and boring and the campaign does a poor job of introducing systems piecemeal, but instead asks you to build a basic functioning space station completely from scratch as your very first objective. It’s possible that there’s a good game here if I put in an hour or two figuring out the systems, but I’ve got too many games in my backlog to feel good about rolling those dice – especially when Meeple Station’s premise is pretty similar to games like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included, which are already pretty good games.

Ordinary JRPG protagonist Serge got pulled into an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. Mysterious villain Lynx attempted to capture Serge for unknown reasons, evidently aware he would arrive. Serge chases Lynx down to try and get answers out of him, but in their second confrontation Lynx is able to swap bodies with Serge. Serge, now in Lynx’s cat-person body and sweet black outfit, is cast back into his Home World timeline, except now he is a cat and also all his friends are in mortal peril from Dark Serge. By this point in his adventure, Serge had acquired a means of traveling between timelines using the Astral Amulet. Unfortunately, Dark Serge now has the Astral Amulet.

Fortunately, cat!Serge can get around this using alternate timeline bullshit by tracking down his Home World’s version of the Astral Amulet in the Dead Sea. To that end, he uses his new identity as Lynx to commandeer a boat from the Porre Military and head to the SS Zelbess, a luxury cruise ship where the refugees from the village of Marbule are employed as grunt labor. The former Sage of Marbule knows how to get into the Dead Sea, but he works in the restricted section of the ship and Fargo, captain of the boat, doesn’t want to let “Lynx” back there. You’d think with his military connections that cat!Serge could force the issue, but apparently not, so cat!Serge has to get up to various shenanigans involving the backstory of Nikki…a character whose backstory was explored back when he was first recruited in the Viper Manor episode like a month ago.

Continue reading “Chrono Cross Character Quests: Employees of the Zelbess and the Dead Sea” →

I don’t know what it is about Roadwarden. It has cool monsters and a focus on exploration and its illustrations alleviate the one thing I usually dislike about text-heavy games, which is that it’s hard to keep track of where everything is in relation to each other which can make the setting feel like a bunch of detached vignettes that you’re teleporting between with no intervening space or geographic relation to one another. About half of Roadwarden’s illustrations are maps (the other half are regular illustrations of small locations like a tavern or whatever, which are small enough you can keep the whole place in your head at once from a good description) and solve that problem completely. And for some reason I still just don’t like it.

It kind of feels like it has way too much resource pressure to allow for reasonable exploration, like I have to already know where important resources are in order to stock up before I run out, but I haven’t actually run out of any critical resources yet. It just feels that way. It feels too rustic and desolate even though it’s far more populated than games like Hollow Knight or Morbid: Seven Acolytes, which I liked (in the former case, which I adored). Maybe it’s because it’s too brown? But the game I switched to instead was Darkest Dungeon, and while that’s not as monotone, it doesn’t exactly pop with color, either. Maybe I’ve come to really hate text games? I used to play them all the time and mostly only stopped because it was getting hard to find good ones (I’d run through the backlog of genre highlights built up over 40 years of text adventure games and spin-offs), but that was a while ago. Liking reading much less in your early 30s as compared to your early 20s is usually the opposite of how things work, but maybe?

Anyway, since all I’m doing with Roadwarden is blinking in confusion as to why I don’t like it, I’m combining it with the August Humble Choice post in order to wring something of reasonable length out.

Disco Elysium is one of the big names used to draw people in and maybe look at the smaller ones while they’re here. I’m starting to enter an era where I’ve been getting new games through Humble Bundle almost exclusively for long enough that sometimes I actually don’t already have the big name, but this is not one of those cases. I’m not getting it because I already have it.

Chivalry II is a multiplayer first person slasher about mass battles in a Hollywood medieval aesthetic. It’s in the second big name slot, so presumably it’s very good at doing that for people who care about that sort of thing. I am not those people.

Road 96 is some kind of branching story paths game about a road trip across a fictitious authoritarian regime in the year 1996 with the ultimate goal of escape. It’s a love letter to a bunch of filmmakers which makes me very strongly suspect this is one of those games that should’ve been an animated film except those struggle to get funding on Kickstarter.

Trek to Yomi is a black-and-white game that’s doing its best to be a playable Akira Kurosawa film. Unlike Road 96, it’s got hack-and-slash gameplay so I doubt it’s an animated film in disguise, but its only gameplay feature appears to be “sword.” This game is selling itself purely on aesthetic and I’m not that into the Akira Kurosawa aesthetic. They’re great films and all, but not so great that filming Japan in black-and-white immediately releases dopamine into my system.

Arcade Paradise is about a bunch of hipsters who start an arcade or something? It’s a love letter to arcade games and I’m not a huge fan of arcade games. Like, they’re alright, but they’re time killers I play on my phone when I don’t have access to a computer.

SuchArt is a “genius artist simulator.” It seems like its main selling point is that you can actually do a art in the game and sell it for bazillions of space dollars to upgrade your space house and influence the war of robots vs. crabs on the surface of the planet. I’m not actually good at art, and while I doubt the game’s AI can analyze that at all, I wouldn’t really enjoy scribbling some random colors onto a canvas and then being told that I’ve revolutionized the art world with my stick figure in blue and yellow.

Tin Can is a first person sim game about being in a spaceship that is having a bad time. The idea is that you have to fix the damn thing by picking up parts and putting them in the right spots, but your health is indicated by audio cues for things like your heartbeat and your breathing, so your first alert that you are dying of CO2 poisoning and should probably make a priority of repairing the oxygen recyclers is that your breathing gets more labored. Exactly one person has played this on How Long To Beat and it took them about five hours, which is long enough for this concept not to overstay its welcome, so I’ll toss it in the backlog as something I can play in a lazy afternoon.

EDIT: And indeed it took less than five hours to complete. Tin Can’s clearly supposed to be a VR game and it might work really well in that context. You’re in a small escape pod grabbing things and plugging them into where they need to go before you run out of air and die. Even as a PC game, it’s okay, but it suffers a bit from the only gameplay mechanic being to pick a thing up and put it back somewhere else. You unplug broken parts to replace them with fixed ones, slowly cannibalizing every system that isn’t absolutely necessary (like taking apart the main lights to rely on emergency lights, or dismantling the main computer and its convenient all-in-one-place problems monitor to instead run around checking each system monitor individually) to use the spare parts to fix critical systems like your oxygen recycler and your gravity generator.

It’s not a terrible concept, but it could use more polish in a lot of different places.

Hot Brass is a game about playing a SWAT officer foiling assorted crimes. You pick your equipment and do some kind of top-down stealthy shooty gameplay. It’s pretty heavily equipment focused and looks like it might be a decent game, but SWAT teams in particular have not exactly been endearing themselves to me lately. I don’t feel the need to give this game a fair shake on its mechanics until someone pays me to do so and I know I’m not going to have fun playing as a SWAT officer in regular real life America (some kind of Judge Dredd cyberpunk thing works out fine for me, both because it’s easy to take the author’s word for it that SWAT teams are a good idea in the fictional world they have created to support that premise and because cyberpunk settings frequently leave it vague as to whether or not you’re supposed to be the good guys in the first place).

The only pick-up wound up being Tin Can, which I finished within 48 hours of picking it up, which has got my backlog back down to 164.