Month: February 2024

Duskers is a game where you command a team of drones to salvage dead space ships. Drones can be equipped with different modules, like Gather which gathers up resources, Tow which can tow disabled drones, ship upgrades, or other large, valuable things, and Motion, which is a motion detector so you can see whether or not there’s some kind of space monster on the other side of that door.

The basic mechanic of a salvage job is fun and the aesthetic of remotely piloting drones using a combination of console commands and clunky inputs works really well. It takes the low graphics and mediocre gamefeel and makes it part of the immersion – the graphics suck because you’ve got a bad signal from a bad camera. The gamefeel is mediocre because you’re remotely piloting a drone built to be just good enough and not any better. It doesn’t feel like I’m fighting against poor game controls, but like I’m fighting against diegetic poor drone controls because my drone team is whatever I was able to salvage from whatever derelicts were within range, which means none of them were really built to be salvage drones. I’ve jury-rigged them into that role and they’re doing the best they can.

But Duskers is ultimately killed by two problems. First of all, there’s not really any story to speak of. There are five different explanations for how everyone died, ranging from super-pandemic to killer AI to a vague “cosmic event,” some kind of natural disaster that kills everyone at once. The problem with this choose-your-own-apocalypse approach is that we have no means of interacting with the apocalyptic event at all. There’s nothing to do except sift through wrecks filled with totally unrelated hazards looking for text logs explaining which apocalypse has randomly been selected to be responsible for the end of human civilization this time. Salvaging individual wrecks is fun, but I know I won’t be satisfied when I’m done because it never adds up to anything.

The second problem is that it’s a stealth Roguelike. Losing drones means they’re permanently lost, and if you end up with a team unable to gather resources, you just have to start over. The drone modules you start with are randomized and the drones you come across in wrecked ships is also randomized. I could keep playing until I get all five hypothetical apocalypses and there’s achievements for doing so, but starting over and over, hoping for a good set of drones, trying to make a bad set work, just doesn’t feel engaging when I know it’s not really going anywhere. Everyone’s already dead and the mechanism of their death isn’t woven into the game world at all, literally the only difference between the super-pandemic and the AI apocalypse is what logs get left behind. When I discover what happened, I don’t gain a greater understanding of the leaping alien monsters or the hostile security drones left behind. I’m not exploring. I don’t even really feel like I’m salvaging, since it’s not really possible to meaningfully upgrade past what I start with, or at least, not in the first few hours of the game, and if that was going to be the hook, it needed to be up and running by then. All I’m doing is surviving, trying to hold onto what I’ve already got. And that’s boring.

Impire is a dungeon keeper game set in Ardania, the setting of the Majesty series. How does Impire compared to Dungeons 3 and the old Dungeon Keeper games? Mostly poorly, which is too bad, since neither of those were all that great. Dungeon Keeper (and DK2) had promise and Dungeons 3 is mechanically solid but has poor writing and won’t shut up. Impire, by contrast, is slightly more boring mechanically while being just as bad in writing, although they don’t spend as much time on the cut scenes, at least.

In Impire, you play as Baal, a demon king summoned to help the warlock Oscar get petty revenge on everyone who wronged him. Oscar is petulant, entitled, and stupid, and on the one hand that’s a realistic depiction of typical human evil, but on the other hand it’s not super fun to be taking orders from this guy. Baal does at least threaten to skin Oscar alive any time he gets too uppity, but we still spend all our time pursuing this guy’s petty dreams of wealth, power, and lust. You do get a chance at the end to choose between Oscar and Velvet the Phantom King, an ancient ghost you release at the end of Act III (of IV) but who turns out to be good. I went Phantom King because sure, it’s pretty out-of-theme to save the world instead of conquering it, but I was beyond sick of Oscar.

It seems like this was originally supposed to be more of a thing, as a medusa queen and a noble king both make the same offer to Baal at different parts of the story, but he rejects both of them without the player choosing anything. Maybe you were originally supposed to be able to choose between four different factions, the default one for Oscar and then you’d have a chance to swap out for a new one periodically. The last act of the game has two completely different sets of cut scenes (maybe even completely different stages, I haven’t checked what Oscar’s route looks like, but the Phantom King’s route is clearly not recycling cut scenes from Oscar’s because Oscar is dead and the cut scenes feature the Phantom King heavily), so this would require more and more divergent cut scenes the more different versions of each mission there were.

Mechanically, every mission is the same, at least on normal difficulty. First you build up a dungeon, then you send your maxed out army to conquer everything. You’re almost never under any pressure to build quickly, so you can use the exact same army build every time. You have to change dungeon layout a little to deal with different underground terrain, but there’s always enough room for everything you want, so it changes very little.

It’s not unplayably bad, but I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t want to play the dungeon keeper genre thoroughly for academic reasons. The only game in the genre I haven’t played (that I know of – indies are hard to keep track of) is War for the Overworld and the recently released Dungeons 4. For the latter, it seems pretty similar to Dungeons 3, so I feel like I gave that series a chance and it’s the best the genre has to offer so far, but its new installment won’t fix its flaws. I don’t know how War for the Overworld will go, we’ll see if its plot is any better.

You know 2D Soulslike Metroidvania’s? Grime is one of them. It does have a very interesting setting and aesthetic. It’s rooted in the idea of creatures being shaped from clay or soil, like the way Genesis says man was created from the earth. So there’s NPCs with vaguely humanoid bodies and misshapen, boulderous heads, and they make a pilgrimage alongside you towards a place where sculptors (also made from stone) chisel them into more slender, evenly proportioned, human-looking forms. Also, you play as a black hole. I’m not really sure what the significance of that is, if anything, but your head is a black hole and your XP is mass that you get from defeated enemies and you get more powerful as you gain mass. The rest of your body is a sculpted stone humanoid body, and a bunch of NPCs get angry at you because you didn’t have to do all the usual groveling before the cult of the sculptors to get yours, it just kinda happened, but also you have a black hole for a head.

This is a cool theme, but it’s hard to find anything to say about the game besides that it is indeed another Metroidvania and it’s got a cool vibe about stone being sculpted into flesh and also something about black holes whose relation I’m not entirely sure of. Definitely I feel like this game gambled on having a community that cared enough to piece the lore together and lost. There’s definitely some discussions of it lying around, but there sure ain’t no Mossbag videos tying it all together. Still, like most of these games, you can get a rough idea what’s going on just by paying attention at all, even if there’s no obessive lore deciphering looking over every nook and cranny to make sure we got everything.

Granted, it probably doesn’t help that the controls inexplicably broke halfway through the game (the right analog stick is no longer working, which is critical to gameplay – it works fine in other games, so it probably isn’t that the controller is broken), and it doesn’t say great things about it that I didn’t care enough to put much effort into fixing it. Into Regrets because it’s literally unplayable. I’ve definitely played and enjoyed worse Metroidvanias, but Grime isn’t doing enough new things for me to try to fix it for more than 30 minutes.

I don’t generally do the question-as-title thing, because I’d rather be straightforward with my opinions. If I think Cook Serve Delicious 3 is good, my title will be Cook Serve Deliciosu 3 Is Good, if it’s bad, the title will be Cook Serve Delicious 3 Is Bad. I make this title a question because I’m not sure. I liked Cook Serve Delicious 3, but I had a lot of trouble with it the first time I played.

That was before I was trying to actually finish games, and by the time I’d circled back around to it, a different bundle had gotten me the entire series, not just the third installment, and I wanted to play it from the beginning not just because I like seeing a series evolve over multiple installments, but also because I was hoping that CSD3 might be more playable if I already knew some of the recipes from the first two games. I was mostly correct: Significant gameplay overhauls between CSD1 and CSD2 means that a lot of the recipes from the first game were altered, so it turns out I could’ve skipped that one (it was still fun, though, so whatever), but CSD2 has pretty similar mechanics to CSD3, similar enough that the recipes are the same, so my cooking skills from CSD2 translated to CSD3 without issue.

And from the starting point of already having the muscle memory for a lot of these recipes, getting into CSD3 was easy. I think it improves on CSD2’s mechanics by replacing side dishes with holding station food. While side dishes extend a customer’s patience for how long it takes you to prepare a main dish, holding station food is prepared in batches. Some customers order a holding station food, others get a special order. Each special order has to be created individually, but a batch of 10 (or however many) holding station orders can serve 10 customers. Whereas in CSD2, harder menus were ones with very few or no side dishes so you couldn’t extend the timer on your main orders, in CSD3, harder menus have lots of both holding station orders and special orders. I like this better, it’s more satisfying to nail a menu with more foods. The addition of cut scenes with Whisk and Cleaver, your robot helpers, make it more compelling to get through the game. Everything is at least a little bit better in CSD3.

But is CSD3 a better game, or is it an expansion pack masquerading as a sequel? Is the audience for CSD3 people who want a good CSD3 game, or is it people who beat CSD2 and want more? I found CSD3 hard to get into before I’d played CSD2. That was before I was trying very hard to finish games at all, so maybe it was just a problem of mindset, but I seriously doubt I found CSD2’s initial learning curve to be to its detriment. I wrote at the time about how it would’ve been better off if it’d had CSD1’s unlocking recipes, where you unlock recipes for a specific type of food (for example, different combinations of toppings on a hamburger) one or two at a time instead of all at once, allowing you to learn the recipes piecemeal. I did, eventually, after two full games, start memorizing several of the CSD2/3 recipes, but it came much more naturally in CSD1.

So on the one hand, Cook Serve Delicious 3 was a lot of fun for me, because I experienced its worst feature back in CSD2, and because that worst feature was a learning curve, that means it didn’t exist for me in CSD3. But I don’t know if I would recommend CSD3 to a friend, because it has that mountain to climb at the beginning, and it’s not actually any fun to climb that mountain. Intentionally failing to make a good difficulty curve does not mean your game has more depth. It means you’re bad at game design.