Chamomile Has A Blog

Don’t read more into the title than it’s saying. Far Cry 3 isn’t a good witch game – but it is much better than you’d expect.

Drake Hollow had witch themes to its gameplay but very little witchery – there was no botany, your familiars serve as quest ATMs and nothing else, and the relationship between crystal magic and buffs is strained by the way it relies more heavily on building a camp full of lobster tanks and pinball machines than on finding crystals for magic power. The Serpent Rogue had a really good alchemy system (and alchemist gameplay is pretty well identical to witch gameplay in terms of the actual game mechanics), but was balanced for such intense resource pressure that experimentation was frustrating and building up ingredients was tedious.

And then there’s Far Cry 3, casually getting 80% of the way there without even really trying. In Far Cry 3, you can gather four flavors of herbs and convert them into various syringes to get buffs. Your standard health potion requires one green herb, an enhanced health potion requires two green herbs and one blue herb, a boost to hip-fire accuracy requires two red herbs and one yellow herb, and so on. The different herbs tend to grow in different biomes, so blue herbs are always found underwater, green herbs are found in thick jungles while yellow and red herbs seem like they grow in more sparse areas, and so on. All of them are found in sufficient abundance that it’s not hard to keep stocked up most of the time, and in any case your primary means of interacting with the world is gunfire, not herbalism, so if you do run out it’s an inconvenience but not a soft game over.

Far Cry 3 does have two flaws holding it back from being a witch game besides the presentation issue that you are definitely not playing any kind of witch. First, the recipes are given to you at certain story points, not unlocked through experimentation. You don’t sit down at an alchemy bench and try sticking two green and one blue herb together to see if it does anything, you just get a certain ways into the story and the greater healing potion recipe just appears in your crafting menu without explanation. Second, the game doesn’t seem to want to give straightforward buffs to things like weapon damage. The herb crafting is dabbling in survival mechanics, not proper magical witchery, so this might be an appeal to realism, except that you have syringes that seal up your bullet wounds and make you fireproof, so it doesn’t seem like that much more of a stretch to have a syringe called an “adrenaline booster” or something and have it increase damage.

There’s even mechanics related to animals, although these ones aren’t nearly so close to what you’d want in a witch game as presented. Indeed, they’re not even great for a survival hunter kind of game, i.e. what they’re supposed to be. As you uncover sections of the map by climbing radio towers, little animal symbols are stamped in various places. Different types of animal hides are required to increase the number of weapons you can carry and your ammo capacity. Exploring the island to find out where animals live is pretty witch-y, doing it to hunt them is pretty survival-y, and doing it to hunt them by unloading a PKM light machinegun on them feels like I’m playing a wealthy mid-life crisis simulator, so, uh, part of the mechanic for evocative gameplay is there, but they didn’t quite stick the landing. In fairness, there is an option to use a bow and there’s even some gentle nudging to do so, since the bow is silent and thus doesn’t alert nearby animals, making it easier to shoot several of them and stock up on materials. Problem is, the bow takes a weapon slot, you unlock weapon slots by harvesting animal hides, and depending on how you feel about LMGs, shotguns, and sniper rifles, the bow is plausibly priority 4 and won’t become a part of your arsenal until you’re nearly maxed out anyway.

A lot of Ubisoft games have copied the hunting mechanics from Far Cry 3 (I say “copied,” but Assassin’s Creed 3 came out at almost exactly the same time, and while I wouldn’t be surprised if people were sharing notes between the two teams, there’s no reason to think the Far Cry 3 team originated the idea and AC3 was copying), but I don’t remember the herb-gathering gameplay so much. I didn’t get super far into any of the other Far Crys, though, so maybe I just didn’t bother with the mechanic and then forgot about it? I’ll see when I get to Far Cry 4+. In any case, it’s about what you’d expect from an Ubisoft mechanic: Easy, evocative, and fun, but held back from greatness by how overly hand-holdy it is.

The Serpent Rogue is a game where you play a plague doctor looking fellow and gather up herbs to brew potions. Its systems are all pretty solid except for one fatal flaw: The resource pressure is obscene to the point that the game is stifling.

The potion system is pretty cool. Each ingredient is tied to a keyword, which can be a noun like “vitality” (read: health) or “age,” a verb like “add” or “remove,” or a quantity like “five” or “ten.” If you arrange the ingredients such that they spell out a proper function, you get a potion that does that thing. So, “add five vitality” is a healing potion, “remove five vitality” is a damage potion. Neat! You can also craft weapons like axes or torches or shovels, but these do relatively little damage over your bare fists, much less than crafted potions, and require metal ore resources that are (at least in the early game) hard to come by. So, okay, damage potions are the way to go. You’re an alchemist and you should be brewing your way to victory.

The game’s first boss has 120 HP. Damage potions deal 10 damage each (presumably there’s stronger potions in the game, but I didn’t find any quantity ingredients higher than ten in the three hours I played). So you need to smack him with twelve damage potions while avoiding his attacks or else rapidly recovering with healing potions. So that’s twelve ingredients each of “remove,” “ten,” and “vitality” minimum, plus probably you’ll want two or three extra “ten” and “vitality” to brew up with “add” for healing potions. I forget what “remove” and “add” were because I never seemed to run out of them (one of them is berries, but I forget which or where the other came from), but “vitality” are aloe and “ten” is fish bones. Aloe grows wild out in the dangerous wastelands, and fishbones can be harvested by getting worms out of stumps, then using worms to catch fish.

This is exactly the witch-y gameplay I wanted out of Drake Hollow, with just one problem: You can’t harvest worms and aloe until they regenerate. Using all of the worms a stump produces at once to catch as many fishbones as possible might give me exactly twelve if I’m lucky, but usually it’ll give me slightly less, and then there’s nothing to do except wait for more. Aloe is even worse, because it mainly grows out in the wasteland full of hostile monsters, which means you need to either whittle the random mobs down with your terrible melee attacks or else use damage potions to clear them out and hope that you get enough aloe to balance out your expenditure. There’s other systems for getting pets and allies to help you fight, but they’re very fragile and still require you to expend the same resources you’re trying to gather in the wasteland, so they face the same problem that you will potentially lose resources on net.

I spent three hours exploring the game, figuring out how the potion brewing system works, and then banging my head against resource limitations trying to amass an arsenal. The first part was fun, but the second part was obnoxious. In addition to the frustration of accumulating potion ingredients, it’s also difficult to keep food topped off, which makes everything worse, because the only way to speed up the regeneration of herbs is to sleep, which drains hunger.

Axes and other tools break too quickly, food runs out too easily, and finding the ingredients to brew up enough potions to be effective is all way too frustrating, which is too bad, because this game did all the work of making a great alchemy RPG, but then provided maybe two-thirds of the resources to use those systems.

Drake Hollow is a survival-explore-y kind of game where you are some kind of YA protagonist. It’s really not clear how old you are, the overall proportions are cartoon for a teenager and your talking raven mentor calls you “kid,” but the “your mundane life is not going so well” scroll through the protagonist’s texts mention bills being due, which suggests someone who’s at least in their early twenties, and who knows how old the talking raven is. The basic plot setup is that you follow a talking raven through a portal to another dimension because you just might be the chosen one destined to save them from evil, and upon arrival you get your chosen one-ness confirmed after about twenty minutes. I don’t read a whole lot of YA anymore – does this still happen a lot in YA books? Or is this the work of someone who grew up on 2000s YA books and is now unironically recreating them long after their moment has passed?

Regardless of how up to date with current trends the plot is, it’s a functional vehicle for the gameplay, and the gameplay is okay. The combat is a barely competent (but still competent) Dark Souls-y blocks-and-dodge-rolls kind of thing, but the resource pressure for building the camp is surprisingly intense. Early structures fall apart almost instantly so you have to sprint for level 2 of the tech tree to get permanent shelter and steady access to water supplies, and you do not have a whole lot of time to muck about before your home base starts running out of food or water, constantly pushed to explore and harvest, especially with the additional time pressure provided by the raids.

The world you’ve been isekai’d into is Drake Hollow, inhabited by little plant people called drakes (no particularly draconic feature, so I have no idea why they went with that name) who are being terrorized by an off-brand Heartless shadow plague called aether under the command of something called the Terminer, who is a 17th century witch hunter twisted by dark powers and carrying on an endless hunt for the witch what used to keep this place running properly until she died and it all went to pot. Her familiars have called you in to finish her ritual to kill the Terminer.

You explore new islands to rescue new drakes, clear the islands of aether to free up supply chains, harvest resources to build buildings and keep your drakes taken care of, and save more drakes, putting additional supply pressure on your camp, requiring more buildings (and that you continuously feed in resources that your buildings can’t produce on their own, most notably, food – you can have farms, but they don’t produce seeds, so you must constantly go out and find more seeds). The off-brand Heartless show up to raid you periodically, so you have to defend your camp from being beaten up. So long as you keep your inventory of weapons up to par with the current strength of the Heartless, there’s no need to upgrade your camp defenses, as the Heartless will never attack in such numbers that they will deal significant damage to your resource buildings before you can run around and smack them all. If you have no defensive buildings whatsoever, the Heartless usually manage to smack two or three buildings down each raid, but replacing them is a minor hassle, not a major setback. It is, however, very satisfying to build a bunch of drake bunkers surrounded by walls and just hang out while the drakes pincushion all the Heartless with blowdarts.

Continue reading “Drake Hollow” →

Back on schedule! The March Humble Choice dropped on the 7th, and if all goes as planned, this post will be going up on the 8th. What’s in the box?

BioMutant is a post-apocalyptic kung fu RPG where you play as some kind of hyper-intelligent mutant raccoon. It kinda looks like someone looked at the basic concept of Rocket Raccoon, i.e. a mutant raccoon who’s ferocious in combat, and decided to make an entire video game about just him. I am definitely on board to give it a try.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is the sequel to a game I kinda liked but never finished, because that is how I used to play basically all video games. I’ll go ahead and toss the sequel into the backlog, but I’ll make a more final decision about whether or not to actually bother with it after I’ve played the first one (or especially if the first one gets banished to Regrets).

Edge of Eterntiy is a sci-fi/fantasy anime-aesthetic game that’s probably a JRPG? I have similar reservations with Edge of Eternity as I had with Encased: I like this genre, but do I like it so much that I will still want more after I get through all the famously spectacular headline games? Like Encased, I’ll toss Edge of Eternity into the backlog just in case the answer is “yes,” but there might be a purge coming sometime in the future if I wear out on this genre.

I was just recently thinking that I’d like to get Hero’s Hour sometime, but with the shockwaves of the OGL crisis hitting my income in February, I’ve really had to consider even $5 purchases lately. And now here it is in a Humble Choice I paid an annual subscription for like eight months ago. It is a strategy game in the same very broad genre as Heroes of Might and Magic, but the details of the mechanics are very different, with the individual battles happening in realtime and with minimal intervention from the player, placing the emphasis much more firmly on the turn-based strategic/logistical gameplay (the individual battles seem like they could probably be resolved with a three-second calculation, so there’s some risk that the spectacle will wear out its welcome, but I’m game to check for myself).

Please, indie games, I am begging you, stop making Roguelikes. I love the aesthetic of Rogue Lords. I would’ve been super happy to play this game for 5 or even 10 hours. If it were a proper RPG promising me 35 hours of new content over the course of a single campaign, I would be even happier, but if the devs just don’t have that much content in the budget, then fair enough – give me the 5-10 hours. The Tim Burton-esque vampires-and-demons aesthetic will not carry me through 35 hours of repetitive Roguelike gameplay. I would’ve played this game if it were shorter!

Demon Turf is also in the “looks neat, but it’s too long” category, although in this case that’s only because it only looks kinda neat. As far as I can tell, the devs didn’t stretch their game out with mechanics designed to wring the longest possible playtime out of the smallest amount of content. It’s just a game for people who think a cutesy demon aesthetic platformer is a good way to spend 30 hours of their life, and I am not in that demographic.

Golden Light is a procedurally generated dark comedy survival horror Roguelike where there’s a talking bicycle and it’s super funny, you guys, just trust me, it’s hilarious, bro, come on. The marketing talks a lot about its comedic tone but doesn’t tell a single joke. Well, it does have a list of things you can eat or throw in the game that includes “Meat Apple,” “Fat Lips,” and “Corrupted Fetus,” so I guess the joke is that it’s all edgy and transgressive and stuff? A casually transgressive bite can make a joke pop, but it’s not a punchline by itself. This game’s sense of humor sounds interminably dull and it’s a Roguelike, because nothing punches up humor like seeing the same content slightly remixed dozens or hundreds of times.

As Pokemon steadily decays, a number of indie games are trying to step into the void. Monster Crown is one of those, and they’re one of the ones that’s growing up with the audience, presenting a darker story of sadistic rulers and looming tyranny. The aesthetic is pretty similar to gen 3-5 Pokemon, though, which seems like it’d be kind of jarring. I wonder how much of this comes from people who cut their teeth on mods? In the context of a modding scene, you expect to see large chunks of the game to be recycled from the original, which means new assets have to be made to match the old ones, so the aesthetic is set in stone unless you’re doing a total conversion. Under those circumstances, I’m perfectly willing to tolerate an aesthetic/story tone mismatch. Monster Crown is a new game with new assets, though, so if it’s a darker story, then how come it still looks like regular Pokemon? It’s a poor imitation of the Pokemon style, too. The game doesn’t seem to have much else to sell itself on besides being a darker take on Pokemon and it doesn’t seem to be doing either of those things especially well, so definitely giving it a pass.

I’ve also backed up to February to get Witcher: Thronebreaker after all on recommendation from a friend. My reason for vetting it out was pretty flimsy to begin with. I’m happy to use even flimsy reasons to vet games out of the backlog in general on the grounds that running out of games in my backlog is not much of a threat right now but letting duds pass my filters to waste my time with a bad game happens semi-frequently, but if the game comes recommended then that tips it over into the backlog.

Or at least, I’m going to try to get Thronebreaker. Something’s gone wrong with the CD key, so it might end up out of the backlog on grounds of technical difficulties.

Not counting Thronebreaker (yet) or Hero’s Hour (which I was excited to play, dove right into, and turns out it doesn’t have a campaign so it only took me two hours to “beat” by completing a duel scenario – I’ll probably play more of it, but there’s no particular endpoint to strive for), that brings me up to a surprisingly manageable 171. I’m still hovering around 170, but like I was back in December, but given the circumstances of January and February, that’s probably a good sign.

Bonus round! Two posts this week as I get us caught up to February.

I found Pathfinder: Kingmaker to be a huge disappointment. It uses Pathfinder mechanics, and yet it’s clearly designed to be played in realtime, with combat encounters so incredibly dense that they begin to drag even in realtime and which are absolutely interminable when turn-based. The game demands a pretty steep level of min-maxing even on lower difficulties and its controls suffer from unintuitiveness born from the fact that they’re aping a tabletop game normally conducted in spoken language where having twelve options each individually very niche didn’t mean you started running out of intuitive places to put the commands on a keyboard. Pathfinder is also a system that goes hard on complexity to try and wring as much engagement out of playing one character as possible, a system which translates poorly to running a full party of six. Its popularity kind of baffles me, since I’m pretty sure it reached beyond the core Pathfinder audience.

The game in the Humble Choice isn’t Kingmaker, it’s Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but seeing as I didn’t like Kingmaker, I’m not bothering with Wrath of the Righteous, which was a weird AP to pick to begin with. While that one encounter hasn’t ruined it for everyone forever, it’s not a super popular AP overall, either (and OwlCat wisely chose to omit that encounter completely, but you’d still expect the fact that it has Paizo’s worst writing ever in it to factor into the choice of that AP over the many others in Paizo’s library). Kingmaker is Pathfinder’s most popular AP by a country mile, but after that I would’ve gone with Rise of the Runelords or something.

I swear I am not taking the piss when I say that Fallout 76 is part of the Humble Choice. Fucking why? They do offer it in a package with Fallout 1, so if I didn’t already have Fallout 1 I’d probably claim that one and just never install Fallout 76. I’m baffled why they bothered adding Fallout 76 at all, though.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is an isometric take on the Witcher. I’ve already got three Witcher games, though, and I don’t feel a powerful need for a fourth that’s incongruent with them. This is a nitpicky thing to disqualify a game over, but I’m trying to lean on being more selective in order to keep the expansion of the backlog as limited as possible to games I will most likely enjoy.

Othercide has a very cool black-and-white noir Sin City-ish aesthetic that I really dig. It’s some kind of tactical RPG about superpowered all-female hero squads called Daughters fighting spooky monsters of some sort or another. Details on the plot are thin, so this game is selling itself to me on pure aesthetic, and if it were 5-10 hours long, that might’ve been enough. How Long To Beat says it’s 20-30 hours, though, and I don’t like the aesthetic enough to give it that much time.

Shady Part of Me is some kind of puzzle-y sort of game where you control a little girl and her shadow, and the shadow can interact with the world in some kind of way. It looks kinda cool, but I don’t much like puzzle-y sort of games.

Scourgebringer is a “fast-paced free-moving roguelite platformer” and has already committed the twin sins of being a Roguelite and not capitalizing Roguelite. It’s named after the game Rogue! That’s a proper noun! Words derived from proper nouns retain their capitalization, that’s what nationalities are capitalized!

But also, while the game looks kinda fun, I’m really over Roguelites as a mechanic. If you view a long playtime as a positive, then Roguelites are a great way to stretch limited indie resources to make a game 10-20 hours long. But I don’t want your indie game to be stretched out to 10-20 hours long! I would greatly prefer an all-thriller no-filler 2-5 hour game that nails its premise in one evening and then gets the fuck out of my backlog before I have a chance to get bored with it.

Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel needs to see me after class about that title. Not only is the first word spelt wrong, but the name in that title looks suspiciously Welsh. It’s about exploring a spooky hotel with monsters in it, and its first several animated .gifs and accompanying explanatory text describe an investigative game that almost looked like it was in the Why Did Silent Hills Have To Die?! genre, but apparently you do have at least some ability to shoot monsters with a machine gun. I’m getting flashbacks to Industria a bit here: A first-person shooter with a mechanical focus on resource scarcity and a strong emphasis on its atmosphere and aesthetic. Industria wasn’t good, and Fobia’s longer, too, at twelve hours compared to Industria’s five. I’m putting Fobia in the backlog, but I’m also planning to play on the lowest difficulty available and drop it at the first sign of frustration. No muscling through an annoying puzzle or combat encounter in the hopes that there might be a solid experience under the rough edges, I tried that with Industria and all it did was waste an extra two hours of my time.

Five Dates is an FMV romantic comedy about a guy having zoom calls with potential dates because I guess some television-y types got super bored during the pandemic and had to figure out some way to keep their careers on life support through lockdown. Fair enough as a career move, but it holds no interest for me.

This has brought me up only to 172 games, although I’m also opening up these bundles much later in the month than usual, so I might still be at 172 when the first Tuesday of March rolls around and offers up a couple more games.

I was a wee bit distracted in January, but now I’m dusting myself off and going through the January Humble Choice. This means it’s way too late for someone to decide based on my description whether they want to buy it, so I’m really just kinda spinning my wheels about what kind of games I add to my backlog, but hey, it helps fill out the queue.

Doom Eternal is this month’s headline game, which means you already know how it works. I’m giving this one a pass because I’ve heard it’s a difficulty spike compared to Doom 2016, and a game like Doom is a game I want to breeze through effortlessly. If I weren’t giving it a pass, I’d probably already own it.

Tribes of Midgard is some kind of build-y explore-y game themed around vikings fighting off mythological monsters, and this is hitting my twenty cliche pile-up alarms way too hard. Backlog’s too big to let something like this in when I’ve already got plenty of build-y explore-y games, especially when this one has an emphasis (like many of these games do) on PvE multiplayer. I like PvE multiplayer, but the reality is I’m never gonna find a group.

Encased is a post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi isometric RPG with tactical combat. I’m worried that this will, like build-y explore-y games, end up becoming something I wear out of long before I get down through the layers of the backlog to reach also-rans like Encased, but I haven’t hit that point yet so I’ll stick Encased in the backlog just in case this genre turns out to be like Metroidvanias where I just never get tired of them.

Olliolli World is a skateboarding platformer game that looks mediocre. I don’t normally put a huge emphasis on strong visuals, but a game with this premise can only hope to lure me in if it’s got a really strong style, and while Olliolli World is clearly trying to do that, I’m not vibing with the result at all. Pass.

Grow: Song of the Evertree is some kind of Animal Crossing knock-off with less of a cutesy animals aesthetic and more of a fantasy aesthetic. It’s not full on dragons and wizards (from what I can tell), but the general tech level caps out at the 18th century and it’s all very pastoral. If executed well, this could be a fantastic cozy game, so I am absolutely down to give it a shot.

Conan Chop Chop is some kinda mobile game? This is one of those things where it’s clearly totally dependent upon its IP to carry it, and while I like Conan, I am wise to the trick of slapping a good character/setting on a bad game.

Hokko Life is another Animal Crossing-esque game, one that looks like it’s got a much bigger emphasis on interior decorating? I suspect there’s definitely an audience for that, but I’m not in it. I can only sink so much time into designing a house or character or spaceship before I get bored and want to use it to actually do something, and if Hokko Life’s gameplay outside of the interior decorating is just Animal Crossing but again, then I’d rather just play Stardew Valley (or maybe Haunted Chocolatier, the Stardew Valley guy’s next project which looks spooky-cozy and I can’t wait).

The Serpent Rogue is the villain of its eponymous game, some kind of dragon-y thing, I guess? It isn’t directly depicted in any of the marketing I could find, but its evil aura is corrupting a fantasy world and you play as an alchemist in a plague doctor mask. It sells itself as a botanical RPG in which doing alchemy is a primary means of engaging with the world and I am very excited for that premise. Of course, a cool premise is no guarantee they’ll pull it off (for example, Moonlighter totally failed to do the “running a magic shop” premise in an engaging way – I’ve heard Reccetear is better), but I’m definitely going to play it and see for myself.

Three pick-ups from January, which is pretty standard. I’m still screaming back up well over 170 because 1) it also comes with Christmas, and a lot of people know to just give me games from my Steam wishlist for Christmas these days (the only other thing I really want are art assets for commercial projects, which isn’t exactly easy to shop for), and 2) I played very few video games in January as I nearly all of my free time was consumed by a sudden mad rush to pivot away from 5e (which ultimately turned out to be unnecessary, but I didn’t know that until January 26th). And we haven’t even got to February’s Humble Choice yet. I try not to get too wrapped up in the number, but as always, I do have one eye on it just because if it isn’t going down over time, that necessarily means there are games I want to play but never will.

Cook Serve Delicious is a Kongregate game from 2010 that fell through a time portal and emerged bleary eyed into 2020. Well, strictly speaking, Cook Serve Delicious itself, the original, was released in 2013, at exactly the moment when you’d expect devs to be making the jump from decaying Flash to proper indie game development, but the second two entries in the series still have that Flash game style, making them come across as time-displaced.

Specifically, Cook Serve Delicious is a game where you are the chef of a restaurant and must prepare orders. It’s almost exactly like those Papa’s Whateveria games except that instead of making lots of variations on a specific type of food, you are making all of the foods. There are a total of 37 different foods you can prepare from concessions stand pretzels up to steak and lobster, and you can have up to six of them on your active menu each day. Customers come in, ask for a random selection of the six, and you have to prepare it using gamepad or keyboard inputs before they get impatient and leave. Different orders can be slightly different from each other. For example, one of the types of food is a hamburger. A specific hamburger order might ask for any number between zero and three patties, might ask for bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, etc. etc., and each ingredient corresponds to a button on the gamepad or a key on the keyboard. In order to keep a line from piling up, you need to slap the ingredients on quickly and without making mistakes.

The game has a neat self-correcting difficulty curve where getting perfect orders causes more “buzz” for your restaurant, which brings in more customers in the next game day. Each game day still lasts the same amount of real time (somewhere around 10-15 minutes), so higher buzz means more customers in the same span of time means greater frequency of customers means you have to make orders faster to keep the line moving. If people get impatient and leave, the order counts as botched and you get a buzz penalty for the next day, bringing things back down to where they’re easier to manage.

The original Cook Serve Delicious has just under 50 different types of food and about 300 total recipes, though they’re not evenly distributed. There are very few recipes for fish, for example: You either fillet, season, and cook, or fillet, season, add lemon, and cook. On the other hand, there’s something like thirty different ways to make a plate of nachos.

Cook Serve Delicious 2 and 3 have a much, much larger menu of food items, and having only just started on 2 (I tried 3 for a few hours back before I was making an effort to finish games), I’m not sure I like how quickly the menu expands, especially since the control scheme is different between 1 and 2/3, so none of the old recipes I’ve memorized carry over. Worse, CSD 2 has all recipes for a specific type of food unlocked from the beginning. In CSD 1, your starting hambuger came with the buns, the patties, cheese, bacon, lettuce, and tomato (but no onions, pickles, chicken patties, etc. etc.), and you had to pay to upgrade it, which increased the price but added several new recipes incorporating the new ingredients. This let you slowly build up familiarity with a food’s recipes over time. But in CSD 2, every recipe is unlocked as soon as you start in on a new food. This means that memorizing recipes is no longer practical without taking time aside to study this video game. In CSD 1, memorizing recipes was a matter of using level 1 of a food until you mastered it, without getting overly-ambitious and upgrading to level 2 early. In CSD 2, memorizing recipes is a matter of going into practice mode and beating your head against the complete arsenal of recipes for that food type until you’ve completely mastered them. CSD 2 is also more generous with time limits, so it seems like less memorization and more quickly processing the recipe is the intended method of play.

I still like CSD 2, but I liked CSD 1 better. A brief glance at the three games suggested they probably steadily improved over time, so I took them in order in hopes of avoiding exactly this kind of disappointment. C’est la vie.

When I was writing up my review of Siege Survival, I was a bit nervous because of how long it had been since I played This War Of Mine, and that I couldn’t remember playing it all the way through (turns out I actually did, though – when I reinstalled the game, one of the scenarios was marked complete). My review of Siege Survival was pretty unfavorable, which is unusual coming from a guy who’s pretty sympathetic to creators and much more likely to at least give a game the faint praise that it might be second or third or twelfth in line in a ranking of best games of its genre, but if you really like that genre you will eventually get down to it.

Most of that unfavorability stemmed from Siege Survival being medieval This War Of Mine and just not as good. It frames your peasant civilians huddling in the courtyard of a besieged castle as unambiguously helping the defenders to repel the invaders who, though I’m given to understand they’re about as sympathetic in the greater Gloria Victis setting, may as well be white walkers in Siege Survival itself. This takes the game’s narrative about nearly-helpless civilians struggling to survive a war zone and turns it into a narrative about civilians-turned-partisans playing a key role in keeping the siege defenders supplied by making nightly scavenging excursions. That’s neat, but the gameplay is largely unchanged (some tweaks are made to adapt the game to siege warfare rather than continuous modern battles, so the tech tree is drastically overhauled and the exact nature of the threats you face while scavenging are different, but the basic loop and the narrative it supports is unchanged), and TWoM’s gameplay is only gripping because of the narrative attached.

What I worried about while writing up Siege Survival is that maybe TWoM was worse than I remembered it. Maybe, once the novelty of the game had worn off, I just didn’t like that kind of gameplay. Having now replayed TWoM, I can confidently say that no, TWoM is just better. Having a bunch of soldiers sitting around in a castle manning the walls while you go on nightly excursions to keep them supplied is just not nearly as compelling as being on your own in a wartorn city. The soldiers of Siege Survival come across as equal parts selfish and stupid for not ditching the chainmail to go scavenging for themselves, the inability to fight the invaders under any circumstances fails to communicate the deadly danger posed by heavily armed opposition the way that TWoM does, where you can defeat soldiers, but it is very unlikely. They’re small details that affect the raw mechanics very little, but they make a world of difference to the narrative. You’re a small band of civilian survivors. The military patrols and criminal gangs are ordinary humans who die when they are shot with bullets just like you, but bullets are a precious commodity, you’re not a very accurate shot, and they travel in packs while you scavenge alone.

Continue reading “This War Of Mine” →

Moonlighter is a video game where you go into a dungeon to beat up some monsters, collect some loot, then put that loot out for sale in your item shop the next day. So, instead of selling loot to a shop, you run the shop, selling loot to other people. You still use your funds to buy upgrades to weapons and armor in order to defeat the bosses of four different dungeons and collect four keys with which to unlock the grand poobah finale dungeon and reveal the secret behind the dungeons.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t live up to its premise.

The dungeon crawling half of the game is adequate. You’ve got a couple of different weapons with different movesets, enemies with different attack patterns, a dodge roll, and you can have up to five health potions equipped at a time, giving you a finite supply of healing in any specific battle while also having health potions as a long-term attrition resource that competes for limited inventory space with valuable loot. There’s also some inventory innovation with curses on items that do things like destroy an item in a specific direction (above, to the left, diagonally to the bottom right, etc.) when you return to town and which you’ll therefore want to put on an edge or corner where the curse falls harmlessly off the edge of the inventory, or requiring the item to be kept on the top or bottom row. Unfortunately, the inventory management this leads to is ultimately not much more consequential than regular. You’ll almost never have so many cursed items that you can’t find a place to put them without actually sacrificing inventory space. If they wanted to emphasize inventory Tetris, they would’ve been better off using actual Tetris shapes instead of everything being a single cell.

But the shop half of the game is perfunctory. It’s got exactly two significant differences from just dumping your inventory into a merchant like in any other RPG. First, there’s a lot of upgrades you can buy to get customers to pay more money for items. Second, you have to do a certain amount of guess-and-check to figure out the ideal price for an item based on customer reactions, being overjoyed to find something way underpriced or scowling and walking away if they find something way overpriced.

There’s nothing wrong with either of these mechanics, but they don’t sustain proper shop gameplay. There are technically different customer types, but they make almost no difference to gameplay. Adventurers aren’t interested in regular drops, only in finished weapons, armor, and potions. Rich customers are more flexible on price, their threshold for getting scowly and refusing to buy is much higher. The problem is, these customers don’t have a separate reputation pool from standard customers, and even put together they’re very rare, so you don’t really have to care about them at all. If an adventurer comes into your shop and can’t find anything for sale, well, no big deal, because eighteen regular customers did that day. If a rich person walks into your shop, they might buy something at a markup that you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to sell, but only by about 25%, which is basically never worth the hassle of keeping some high value items overpriced until a rich customer walks in, especially since every regular customer who considers buying it will cost you reputation if they scowl at it and leave. There’s a tradeoff here, in that losing customers gets you less foot traffic, but getting more customers than you have items to sell is super easy, so you can afford to sacrifice some reputation to marking up some high value items for rich customers…but the markup is small enough that it’s hard to care. An extra 25% on one or two items when your backpack has enough room for 15-20 (depending on how many potions you’re hauling around) means that your daily profits will probably increase by less than 10% if you master this, the only real shop management mechanic that the game has.

The shop half of the game desperately needs more. For example, instead of reputation being invisible, have three different obvious reputation meters (visible on the HUD whenever your shop is open to customers) for warriors, rogues, and mages, each of whom buy different materials for heavy, medium, and light armor, respectively (there are materials in the game that are only used for different weapons, that are only used for potions, and that aren’t used for any crafting at all, but I’m staying focused on armor materials to keep the example simple). The higher your reputation with a customer type, the bigger a tip they leave, and having a high reputation with a specific customer type also draws in more of that customer type. You lose reputation for overpriced items, but also if a customer can’t find anything to buy.

Additionally, rather than always making just one purchase, customers have a certain amount of money they’re looking to spend and will purchase multiple items until they’re above that threshold. This means you can’t split up bundles of items into multiple small parcels to trick customers into being satisfied with a tiny purchase, you have to actually stock items that the specific customer type values.

A more realistic but more complex approach would be that they have a spending limit and a certain total value of items they’re looking to buy, and they will spend as little money as possible to hit their value target, but will give up and not buy anything if they can’t hit their value target without going over their spending limit. I don’t know if there’s a good way to make all that legible to the player, though, and if the system is opaque it won’t be fun to interact with.

However you model specific customer spending habits, you have to give an easy way to check which drops appeal to which customer type while in the dungeon so players can make quick and convenient decisions about which items to drop in favor of others. A little dot, for example: Grey if no customer has ever reacted favorably to this item (which might mean that it is unknown or might mean that nobody likes it, usually the former), blue if a mage has reacted favorably, green for a rogue, and red for a warrior. The dot can also be multi-color if multiple customer types have reacted favorably to it (for example, probably everyone loves potion ingredients and certain rare and high-value treasure items). A three-color dot is probably pushing it on how easy it is to make out the colors, but since there are three colors total (plus grey, but grey is mutually exclusive to a multi-color dot) it should be easy to interpret that if the dot has so many colors that it’s starting to become a mess, that means everyone likes this item and you don’t have to squint and double-check what specific colors are there.

And then you make the armor-types favored by those customers cheaper the higher their reputation becomes, as your store attracts more of that type of adventurer to town and bulk production of relevant equipment brings the price down. So if you’re a light-armor type yourself, you want lots of mages in town, but you don’t want to neglect warrior and rogue types so much that you can’t sell your warrior/rogue materials at all.

And you’d also want to have to prioritize what you’re doing when the shop is open. As it is, it’s usually very easy to attend to every customer who’s on the fence about an item (this pushes them into purchasing it), check out all the items for your customers, and tackle any thieves who swipe something. Occasionally a thief will swipe something while you’re on the other side of the shop and you just won’t be fast enough to catch up, but there’s never any need to choose whether to attend to one customer or another because there’s always plenty of time to do both. It feels less like gameplay and more like an idle game giving you mostly-pointless tasks to keep you engaged while your gold ticks upward for the day. In a better version of the game, though, attending customers would play more into reputation and would also convince them to give a tip or at least to increase their spending limit and thus buy more items. Instead of being something that comes up now and again, customers would require attendance almost constantly and there’s no way you’d be able to get them all, so you need to decide who’s most important.

I’d want an actual prototype in front of me to play around with before I commited to this next part, but you might also want expenses. The shop half of the game is probably best served by drawing on tycoon games, and in a tycoon game the looming threat is that expenses will outstrip income. Shop employees need income and also should exist at all earlier in the game and be more important, decorations should likewise feature more prominently and require maintenance as should the shop itself. It’s possible you want to cut the shop expenses because in this game you’re saving up for weapon/armor upgrades instead, but I don’t know if the shop management end can work without that.

These are unplaytested idea off the top of my head, but the point here is that you can definitely give the shop half of gameplay a lot more meat, and that it definitely needs more meat, because it’s the game’s main selling point.

I struggle to find anything to say about Hades that hasn’t already been said, but I want it on record that it is a good game that you should play. If you have any interest in Roguelikes or in Greek mythology, you should give it a go, because it does a very good job with both of them. I feel like I should probably go into more detail, it’s not like I’ve ever been averse to spending 1500 words just to rephrase what other people have said because I came to similar conclusions, but for some reason it feels like this time that wouldn’t be any fun to write. I guess probably because I was aware of the conversation around Hades before I played it, so there was never an article growing inside me during gameplay that I wanted to get out of my system even if a post-game scan of reviews and analyses revealed that everything I had to say had been said already. This time around, I’d read/listened to the reviews before I played, which, I guess, switched off the part of me that tries to turn opinions into blog posts.