Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

Spiritfarer is a saily-aroundy game like Merchant of the Skies, but it doesn’t have the base building mechanic that Merchant of the Skies sold itself on (no surprise there), still doesn’t have any combat, and also there is almost no trading. Instead, while you do sail around places exploring a map of the world and unlocking prows that can break through increasingly implausible barriers is a major game mechanic, the gameplay rests almost entirely on resource and time management. Your boat is sort of a Stardew Valley farm that floats, and while certain resources are only gotten from specific locations – you can’t grow extra wood or ore from your boat, so you’ll need to visit islands for them – others, like fish and farm crops, come mainly from messing around on your boat while waiting to sail from one place to another.

But all those mechanics are basically just to give you stuff to do so that your boat will feel like a community with a daily routine and errands to run and stuff, which is vital, because the basic premise of the game is that you are Charon’s replacement ferrying souls to the afterlife and these souls hang out on your boat between when you pick them up and when you resolve their subplot so that they’re ready to pass on. Since you’ve got things to do on the boat, watering crops, sawing wood at the mill, weaving thread into cloth and so forth, you see them wandering around. You’re in charge of handing out food for them and there is a dedicated hug button, both of which improve their mood (among other, more character-specific things that help give them individual personality), and if their mood is high enough they’ll do certain things automatically. For example, the union leader lioness (oh, all the departed spirits become animals on your boat for some reason – they were clearly human in life, though, so I think it’s just an excuse to have a giant cartoon toad hopping around the game) will harvest ore on her own when you visit an ore island, then process it into ingots, and then give you the result, so long as she’s not in a depressive funk. So you wander around the boat processing raw materials into whatever resources you need more of for whatever quest you’re focused on right now, and you bump into a couple of people who are busy contributing in their own way or just wandering around talking to each other or interacting with objects on the ship like a lazy lion (the lionesses’ husband) who likes to lounge on a couch.

I dimly recall that this game made Yahtzee cry, so I went into it with pretty high expectations. It’s good, but not that good. Yahtzee’s literally-cried moment was with the aging hedgehog named Alice. She died of old age and develops dementia over the course of the game. Now, I wasn’t totally unmoved by this. The tangled snarl of memories in her shattered mind is pretty realistic to how dementia works, and that’s a real thing that happens to real people which means Alice was an effective reminder of what it looks like when someone’s body and mind are slowly worn away until, when I finally led the gibbering corpse to eternal rest, I felt like it was probably for the best. She didn’t deserve to die, but she deserved to go on like that even less, so lesser of two evils, I guess.

I like these characters, but it doesn’t particularly feel like anything is getting resolved. They don’t seem to come to a personal realization about their backstories, they just share them with me and then move on through the Everdoor to whatever lies beyond. It does a good job converting the ship slowly but steadily into a floating graveyard of empty houses that were once occupied by people I knew and cared about, but the emotional climax falls flat. Gwen reaches the Evergate and is bitter about her awful father, but I already knew that. She also talks about how lucky she is to know Stella, the protagonist (they knew each other before Gwen died), but it feels kind of hollow because I was just ticking quest objectives off. Alice awakens from her dementia for half a second at the Everdoor, but only half a second, and barely has time to focus before the fog is back. Summer worked for a major agribusiness and the chemicals she used gave her cancer, which ultimately killed her, symbolized by a giant dragon. The one that made the most impact on me by far was Atul, who simply vanishes after you finish his last quest, in the way of an abrupt death that you didn’t see coming (although even then, only partly – I very much expected that Atul’s final quest would be his last unique quest, and the last one would be the visit to the Everdoor).

All of these characters work well before their emotional climax at the Evergate, and their absence afterwards is felt, but the actual Evergate text feels like aimless rumination on things they’ve already told me. I enjoy the game’s vibe but its emotional climaxes are the part that fall flat for me, and nowhere is this more true than the game’s actual ending, where it turns out it was all just a dream. This is not as hackneyed as it usually would be, because the whole game is about coming to terms with death, so it’s not thematically out of left field when it turns out that the whole thing is a dying dream and the death you’re coming to terms with is your own.

But that still leaves the problem that none of what you’re doing actually matters. The whole magic trick of fictional narrative is that we pretend to believe something we know is false in order to feel emotions about it. Strip away the false reality and make Spiritfarer a purely abstract game and it’s interminably dull – the gameplay is there to provide space for your boat full of departed spirits to feel like a community, because giving you things to do means there are things you do with other characters. The gameplay on its own is extremely basic platforming, usually of the babby’s first Unity game variety. It’s the animation and the characters that make the game engaging, but then half-ish way through it’s revealed there are actually exactly two characters: Stella, the protagonist, who is every single character except Lily, her sister, whose words from reality occasionally penetrate the dream. In that context, the only thing that matters at all are those conversations and the rare occasions when Stella is having a conversation that advances her own arc. Gwen and Atul and Astrid are all just mirages who matter only to the extent they influence Stella, and while each of them do, they do so very rarely.

The game is also just not as good at being a metaphor for accepting your own death as it is a metaphor for dealing with the loss of others. In large part this is because you are (I assume) a conscious, thinking being who is going to react to death in some sort of way, but corpses are not and do not. The game is very good at depicting life going on without the jovial toad man who taught you how to saw wood or the cynical deer woman who taught you how to weave cloth, gating progression through newer spirits’ stories and higher tier upgrades behind upgrades that require spirit flowers, a resource acquired exclusively from spirits passing through the Everdoor. You can choose exactly when Gwen passes on, but you can’t get through the ice barrier into the winter parts of the map with her still on board.

For your own death, though, the point when you pass on is the point when you’re done playing this video game. You choose to die when you’re all alone (there is, for some reason, one spirit who never passes through the Everdoor, but he still runs out of unique dialogue pretty quickly and fades into the background, so he may as well have left) and have nothing left to do. That’s not how most people experience death at all! That’s the experience of a biologically immortal being who’s outlived the entire human species!

On the other hand, if you completely ignore that frame and pretend the game never abandons its original premise, then it matters a lot whether the departed spirits have a mediocre versus ecstatic time on your boat in the couple of weeks they spend between this life and whatever lies beyond. I spent a lot of time with and had a lot of fun in Spiritfarer, but only by ignoring the twist and pretending the game was really, genuinely about faring spirits, that Stella isn’t dying, she’s dead, and Charon, an actual magical god of passage from this life to the next, selected her departed spirit to take over his job.

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.

Serge has been pulled from his Home World to Another World, an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. A mysterious villain named Lynx has government goons waiting to arrest him when he arrives. After escaping their clutches, Serge tries to track down Lynx at Viper Manor where he’s gotten in with the local government, the Acacia Dragoons, but the raid ends in disaster, with one of Serge’s greatest allies poisoned. Harle, Lynx’s sidekick, shows Serge how to travel between timelines for unknown reasons, which allows Serge to retrieve the cure for his poisoned friend as well as visit the Water Dragon in Water Dragon Isle in his Home World (Water Dragon Isle is dried up in Another World), gaining from the Water Dragon the power to freeze lava. This allows Serge to cross the deadly Mount Pyre to reach Fort Dragonia where Lynx and the Acacia Dragoons have retreated and confront him again.

But this time Lynx is able to hold Serge’s attention on the dragon tear long enough to use its powers to swap bodies. He tries to play it like he’s the real Serge, but Kid’s getting suspicious, so he stabs Kid in the back, uses the dragon tear to throw cat!Serge into a dimensional vortex, and then absconds before the rest of Serge’s former allies can regroup. He assigns Harle to follow cat!Serge into the dimensional vortex and finish him off, then breaks the dragon tear behind her when she leaves.

The good news is that Harle is fully defecting to cat!Serge’s team at this point, and she uses dimensional vortexes to get around timelines, so she can get cat!Serge out of here. The bad news is that Harle is able to use dimensional vortexes because she’s on Team Dragon, which allows her to travel through these vortexes to any timeline that has a dragon tear. Dark!Serge just smashed the dragon tear in Another World, cutting off Harle’s access to that timeline. She can get cat!Serge to Home World, but she can’t get him to Another World to save his friends from dark!Serge. Worse, the fact that dark!Serge has done this suggests he knows Harle is working against him. Lynx has basically won. All he has to do is bring Serge’s body to Chronopolis to shut down the Prometheus Circuit and FATE is back in full control of Another World. At that point Home World doesn’t even matter to him – the plan was always to sacrifice it to Lavos to preserve the time loop in Another World.

But giving up doesn’t feel like a very JRPG protagonist-y thing to do, so let’s have a crack at finding some way back to Another World.

Lynx is not actually playable. Serge gets bodyswapped into him, because Serge’s DNA is needed to access certain parts of hyper-tech future city Chronopolis for convoluted plot reasons, so Lynx switches bodies with him to get inside. But although Lynx is not really a different character from Serge, he does have a different premise from Serge’s premise. Serge is a kid from a fishing village who gets swept up in greater events. Lynx is that kid but swapped into the body of a well-connected conspirator, and one thing that did always disappoint me about Chrono Cross is that you go around admitting to not being the real Lynx as soon as you meet everyone. Serge seems to consider it a disadvantage to have people think he’s a villain, but Lynx’s main power is that a ton of people owe him favors and he has access to lots of places the public isn’t allowed and Serge fervently divests himself of that power for no reason. So far as evoking that concept goes, though, mostly you just need to rewrite some of the other party members like Norris so that Serge recruits them as Lynx under the pretense of being the real Lynx and then eventually win them over to their cause so they don’t defect when it comes out that he’s actually Serge.

Harle goes out of her way to frame herself as Lynx’s equivalent to Kid when she joins your party, and she has a very thin backstory outside of that. She’s clown-themed, but it would be weird if she did a circus. She’s an infiltrator for the dragons, but since she’s infiltrating she’s not gonna be like “yo, Lynx, let’s do dragon stuff together.” She just wants to help Serge swap back into his own body so that she can follow him into Chronopolis. So Harle’s side quest is assassination. It’s like Kid’s side quest, except more evil, because you’re killing people in their homes and stuff. They’re jerks, though, so it’s still not out of character for Serge to be doing it, and somehow enemies of Lynx who would be a nuisance to Serge while he’s in Lynx’s body.

Sprigg is a weird hag creature of some kind who’s trapped in the Dimensional Vortex for unknown reasons and joins up with you to get back to reality. It’s not clear if she’s from some very different timeline or if she’s just a demihuman from either Home World or Another World (but she definitely doesn’t have a time clone that you can find in the game).

Sprigg actually already has a good side quest in the game as it is, with the only problem being she shares it with another character. Sprigg is a blue mage, capable of stealing powers from monsters, and the monster forms Sprigg steals can then be used in a beast battling arena, where you assemble a party from the monster forms you’ve unlocked with Sprigg and use that monster party to defeat an enemy monster party. The monster arena is run by another character named Janice (we’ll get to her), and you recruit her by completing it, but it’s definitely Sprigg’s quest, not Janice’s, because you go out using Sprigg’s blue mage monster-copying powers to assemble your monster party for it.

Upon arriving back in Home World, cat!Serge is confronted by Radius, the chief of the village who completely kicked Serge’s ass in the combat tutorial way back at the beginning of the game. The tables are turned now, however, and only partly because Lynx has Radius outnumbered three to one. After defeating Radius, Lynx is able to explain that he is in fact cat!Serge, and Radius buys it because of some Force sense mumbo jumbo. I complained earlier about cat!Serge giving away his identity at every opportunity, but this one makes sense since Radius likes Serge and hates Lynx.

Radius then sets up the goal of the next plot arc: To get into the Dead Sea in hopes of using it to cross back across the dimensional boundaries. In the original game, you have to do this because Serge’s body is necessary to crossing dimensional boundaries, but going to the Dead Sea can…fix this…somehow? This feels like there was originally going to be a thing where Serge’s body was important because it lets you cross between timelines and Dark Serge would be using that to advance his nefarious scheme while cat!Serge was stuck in just one timeline, but Dark Serge never travels to Home World. Everything he wants is in Another World, and the purpose of stealing Serge’s body turns out to be that some important gizmos got locked to Serge’s DNA in Chronopolis for some convoluted reasons.

I’m overhauling this (and also some of the events at Fort Dragonia): Cat!Serge can’t dimension hop because the Astral Amulet was on either Serge or Kid’s person so cat!Serge doesn’t have it because his inventory got wiped (this may also add the need to reacquire certain other key items, but we’re already drastically extending the budget of this game, so sure, why not – the only ones I can really think of are the ice breath that you can reget from the Water Dragon in Home World as soon as you get a boat and the Skelly parts, which can be left on the ground in Fort Dragonia where Dark Serge first got his new body and discarded them).

Radius says the Acacia Dragoons took this dimension’s Astral Amulet into the Dead Sea with them when they all disappeared, so getting the Astral Amulet means getting in there, which means getting a boat, and also getting the old Sage of Marbule to tell you how to get into that place, because the Dead Sea is kind of famous for being somewhere you can’t get into.

Radius already has a section of the main plot that focuses on him and his story. It doesn’t have any unique gameplay, but Radius’ thing is that he was one of the four Dragoon Devas, the most elite warriors of the Acacia Dragoons, who retired and became the village chief of Serge’s hometown. For the most part, his schtick is that he used to be El Nido’s premier badass and now he’s coming out of retirement for one last job, so an episode that focuses on his character arc instead of introducing new gameplay is fine – the game already has a combat system.

That episode is skipping ahead a bit, but the Dead Sea turns out to be sealed by the evil power of the cursed sword Masamune (Home World Masamune, that is – Another World Masamune is still with Dario waiting for the Glenn/Riddel/Karsh side quest to catch up to it). Masamune’s counterpart Einlanzer is on the Isle of the Damned where Radius and his fellow Dragoon Deva Garai left it. Radius was always second best to Garai, probably because Garai is fifteen feet tall for some reason, so Garai got Einlanzer. During an expedition to the Isle of the Damned, Radius discovered Masamune, and the cursed sword corrupted him into attacking Garai, using its power to kill Garai and become the greatest of the Dragoon Devas by default. Seeing Garai die snapped Radius out of it long enough to abandon both Masamune and Einlanzer. Evidently someone else got their hands on Masamune in the meantime (probably Lynx – it seems like the same Lynx is active across both timelines, and he has incentive to keep people out of the Dead Sea, since it’s a potential access point to his home base in Chronopolis), but Einlanzer is still in the Isle of the Damned, guarded by the ghost of Garai.

Zappa is a blacksmith who mostly sells to the Acacia Dragoons. In Home World, he’s going out of business because the Porre Military doesn’t buy from him and the Dragoons all went and died in the Dead Sea. He decides to join your party to find out what happened to them, which allows you to forge new weapons and armor wherever instead of having to go to a blacksmith’s shop for it. In the game as it is, Zappa’s final technique doesn’t require any forging and his final weapon requires forging only in the same way everyone else’s does. In this one, we’re very slightly tweaking it so that his final technique is unlocked after you forge a bunch of max-level weapons for other characters.

Van is a bored rich kid who’s taken up painting to the frustration of his wealthy businessman father Gogh in Another World, but here in Home World he’s a practical penny-pincher who’s trying to escape the poverty that Gogh’s obsession with art has brought about.

Van actually already has a side quest, but it’s just to pour a bunch of money into him. The obvious place to go with Van is a tycoon game. You can move into the empty space left behind by Zappa closing up his forge and turn it into a shop, then manage inventory and advertising and so on to make money with it. Because the game has other means of making money via adventuring (indeed, the opportunity to make money by looting monster corpses for valuable parts is why Van joins your party in the first place), you can never fully go bust. The worst that can happen is that you have to pour a bunch more money from combat loot into getting yourself back in the game.

The shop could sell elements or weapons or armor or some other thing sold by actual shops in the game, but I like the idea that it’s an art shop, which also allows you to go around collecting art from artists which Van copies stroke-for-stroke for inventory (and probably you can eventually hire some generic painter guy to do it for you for increased efficiency). You can have a half-dozen art sellers across both dimensions and one of them can be Another Van, which can further his character arc.

You first meet Home Van in the same scene as the existing game, where a rich guy offers to buy one of Home Gogh’s paintings and he refuses because the rich guy doesn’t really appreciate it. Home Van joins up with your party to make money. Home Gogh pops in to see Home Van’s shop when you first open up and then again when you’ve acquired some fraction of the available paintings, mainly just to give two beats to this bit that establish that Home Gogh keeps coming to Home Van’s art store to window shop and Home Van is rude and bitter about shooing him out because floorspace is for paying customers and working artists only. The scene is here to set up both that Gogh visits regularly despite his strained relationship with Van, and also implies that Van still wants the validation of his father’s support and to buy his father’s paintings for his store, which is why he keeps bringing it up, even if it’s with a “this is my store so if you’re not here to sell me paintings, get out!” attitude.

Another Van speaking to Home Van gets an appreciation for his father when he realizes that if his Another Gogh hadn’t dedicated himself to business and made a ton of money, Another Van would be too poor to focus on his art. Seeing that Another Van, free from financial worry, instead spends all his time painting, Home Van realizes that if he didn’t have to worry about money all the time (an all-consuming pressure for him) he would want to be a painter like his father. Home Van mentions that Another Van is lucky to have a father who gave up his own dreams of painting for the sake of his son, and Another Van complains that his father doesn’t have any dreams of painting, he only ever cares about money. The maid is more invested in Another Van’s paintings than his father is.

Upon returning and putting copies of Another Van’s painting in the store, Home Van paints his first original work: Two Fathers, a contrast between Another Gogh, opulent but distant, and Home Gogh, warm and close but irresponsible. Home Gogh comes in the next day, sees it for sale, and between the subject matter and father-son psychic bullshit, can tell Home Van painted this one himself. He offers to trade the painting he wouldn’t sell to the rich guy at the beginning for a copy of Two Fathers, and Home Van scolds him for his poor business sense to trade an original painting for a store copy, and trades the original Two Fathers for Gogh’s painting instead. Gogh’s painting doesn’t show up in the store inventory, just hanging on a wall, and the next time you open up shop, a customer comes in and asks if there’s copies of that one for sale anywhere, and Home Van explains that it’s not for sale because the original artist is an irresponsible snob who hates having his work copied. This is where you get his ultimate technique, but you also get the option to pour money into buying a nicer house for Gogh at this point.

Also, in the original game, Van’s level second-tier technique is painting themed while his level thier-tier ultimate technique is money themed (his first-tier technique is boomerang themed because that is his weapon), and I am reversing that because that is the opposite of how Home Van’s character arc works.

You can find Funguy in Home Shadow Forest where he gorges himself on mysterious mushrooms and turns into a myconid. I don’t super like how much I’m leaning on the crafty-survival tech tree for so many characters (Razzly and Doc both use it already and another character is coming), but using survival-y mechanics to scavenge for something to counteract the mushrooms is the obvious way to go with this guy and I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this gimmick character. You’ve already got so many party members at this point that I struggle to imagine anyone ever used Funguy unless they’ve already beaten this game multiple times and are doing an obscure-characters playthrough. Since Funguy got transformed in black-aligned Shadow Forest, his cure is going to come from a combination of finding the poison mushrooms there and some kind of counterbalancing material from white-aligned El Nido Triangle.

Norris is a part of the Black Wind espionaige wing of the Porre Military. In the game as it is, he’s just kind of hanging around the ruins of Viper Manor and joins Lynx for funsies. In this version, he’s seeking command of all Porre forces in El Nido, due to a combination of two factors: First, that this version of the Porre Military is much more ascendant so there are fewer enemies to spy on and less opportunity for advancement in espionaige as opposed to military governance, and second, since El Nido Archipelago is already subdued it’s a less critical position and seeking command over the entire thing is more reasonable.

Norris is concerned about the Acacia Dragoons, who ventured into the Dead Sea and never returned. Even a small fragment of survivors could cause trouble for the understaffed occupation forces in El Nido. He has a plan to keep the locals pacified in the event of a Dragoon return by giving them something to lose – if living under the Porre Military is kind of nice actually, that not only helps dull people’s anger at being conquered but also gives Porre something to take away if the locals get on their nerves. He’s seeking Lynx’s recommendation for the position of commander to implement this plan, stresses that he would still be available to help Lynx in his mission to track down the Dragoons in the Dead Sea, and is generally ready to pitch this case hard at what he expects to be a hostile audience, and is kind of taken aback when Lynx (actually cat!Serge) is like “yeah, totally do that, do you need me to sign something, or…?” With Lynx’s recommendation, Norris gets the job, and Lynx gets a boat to go track down the former Sage of Marbule on the SS Zelbess to figure out how to get into the Dead Sea.

Norris’ minigame, then, is a little civic management sim. Radius reprises his role as tutorial-giver in Arni before Norris is installed as governor of Termina, then there’s additional maps that focus on cramped building conditions in the smaller village of Guldove and on Sky Dragon Isle (empty land here in Home World because the Sky Dragon hangs out in Another World), plus Marbule once you finish Nikki’s side quest and get it repopulated. In Marbule, the gameplay gimmick is that Norris has committed to following the Sage of Marbule’s directives so in addition to limited space you also have some pretty specific objectives to satisfy.