Chamomile Has A Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gunk is a 3D platformer game in which you are broke scavengers who land on an uncharted planet, discover an alien civilization in decline, and massacre approximately 90% of their population by destroying their food supply. I’m extrapolating the number based on thematic parallels, but it is explicit to the text that nobody has any idea how all these people will feed themselves once you’ve destroyed their food supply. None of them seem to mind, though, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

The titular Gunk is an evil space amoeba generated as a waste product in the strip mining of the planet’s blue magic life energy, which is used to sustain the alien population in the Garden. You spend the better part of the entire game figuring this out, starting by landing and investigating the Gunk, discovering that the planet’s ecosystem recovers when you clear it out, and then that there are ancient alien ruins here, before finally encountering a survivor who can explain what details xenoarchaeology could not. Then you enter the Garden and confront the Gardener. Twice. The first time it’s a dark night of the soul thing, the second time it’s for real. Which is when he has the dialogue asking how the protagonist plans to feed his people if she shuts down the Garden. She doesn’t really have an answer.

The parallel here is, as far as I can tell, a garbled combination of the impacts of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on Earth and humanity. It’s been posited by a number of economists, political activists, and psychotic murderers that agriculture was a net loss on humanity for most of the history of civilization, that generally speaking you were better off as a hunter gatherer than as a farmer. People became farmers not because they wanted to, but because they got forced into it somehow, and once farming is the only food supply you know how to do consistently, you’re stuck with it. That’s now how you get food, and if you try to wander into the wilderness to become a hunter gatherer, you will probably die before figuring it out even if whatever force compelled your parents to become farmers has since withdrawn or collapsed.

That sounds plausible when comparing a medieval French peasant to a Celtic hunter-gatherer in pre-Roman Gaul (if you’re pre-Roman enough, at least – by the time Caesar was conquering them, they seemed pretty agricultural), but a modern French citizen is in much better shape than either of them. The Gunk (to the extent that it’s making this comparison at all – seems plausible, but it’s not explicit) seems to be aware of this, in that it says the Garden was adopted because it was a more stable and comfortable life. But also the industrial revolution caused global warming which is starting to catch up to us in a big way, and the titular Gunk is probably meant to represent this environmental collapse caused by industrialism and post-industrialism.

But then the Gunk posits no solution to the problem. You defeat the Gardener, shut down the Garden, and all the aliens seem happy about it in the credits scenes, but, like, it’s explicit in the text that there is now an unanswered question of how everyone is going to feed themselves and if we’re going anarcho-primitivist, the answer is that about 90% (if not 99%) of them are going to die. None of the real solutions to this problem have anything to do with abandoning agriculture, but rather doubling down on it with vertical farms and new power sources (well, “new” power sources – our most effective tool in fighting climate change will always be nuclear power, which is ~75 years old at this point). After all, if that doesn’t work, and huge numbers of people die from resource collapse, well, then we can go be hunter-gatherers again. Our primary environmental crisis is that in about 30-40 years we are going to have drastically reduced arable land, so a solution that involves setting all our farms on fire is a lot like incinerating a cancer patient and declaring victory because you have prevented the victim from dying specifically from cancer.

It’s pretty clear the Gunk doesn’t actually want to deal with these issues in depth. It just wants a vague pro-environmental vibe. But its main villain is not an industrialist but the Gardener and its ending thesis statement is “what’s so bad about wilderness anyway?” What’s so bad about wilderness is that the overwhelming majority of the population is going to die in it.

The game also states (admittedly, through the mouth of a character who doesn’t necessarily know, but the Gardener doesn’t deny it) that all life on the planet is going to be wiped out if the Garden persists, and in fairness to the game, this pretty much reverses the moral calculus from the real world situation. In the real world, we may as well try to make agriculture work and save everyone because if we fail, we’re going to experience the kind of drastic population reduction necessary to return to hunter-gathering anyway, and in the Gunk, they may as well shut the Garden down and try to live off the land, because whatever percentage of their population they’re going to lose it will still be less than 100%. So if I take the game as a work of fiction, then none of what I’ve just written actually matters. But the game pretty clearly wants to be a defense of actual anarcho-primitivism. It draws a decent amount of attention to its thesis statement of “what’s so bad about wilderness?” and nobody, not even the practical-minded voice with an internet connection character, brings up the massive death toll. And it is a fairly common misconception that global warming is going to be a human extinction event (it’s not – killing the first few billion humans in the least habitable areas of the planet will reverse climate change long before the last few million humans in the most habitable areas have died).

The game itself is pretty fun and I didn’t hate it, but you can tell by its ubiquity in this post that its messaging really dominated my experience of it in the end.

Two Point Campus is a university management game in the general Sims style of bearing surface resemblence to the modern world, but then also there’s some robots and vampires dropped in anywhere it would make things more interesting. You set up lecture halls, libraries, major-specific rooms like science labs, kitchens, and jousting grounds, and things to keep student needs satisfied like dorms, bathrooms, cafeterias and vending machines, and student lounges that host rock concerts.

When I picked it up I said that I was disappointed that it wasn’t a magic school manager rather than a regular one, but Two Point Campus is almost a magic school manager. You can teach wizard classes and there’s no strong incentive to expand into a wide variety of different classes rather than doubling down on just one or two, so you can, if you like, have every student at your school be a wizardry major and there’s even a campaign mission that encourages this. There’s even two separate wizard-related courses, regular Wizardry and the Dark Arts. It’s still pretty barebones compard to what I would hope for from a full-fledged wizard academy game, but much more than what I expected from a university game.

Two Point Campus also has majors like Funny Business, Archaeology, and Spy School, so in addition to a regular university and Hogwarts, you can also run a clown college, Indiana Jones’ school, and…was there ever a secret agent high school themed YA book series or TV show or something? I feel like that happened at some point, but the closest thing I can think of is Alex Rider, who is a teenage James Bond-style operative but I don’t think he ever went to a special spy school. Anyway, you unlock different majors with points you get from leveling up your campus, which you do by buying things and hiring people and generally playing the game successfully. The amount of points for unlocking majors goes up linearly, but the amount of effort required to get them goes up exponentially, so there’s no hard cap (that I’ve reached, at least) for how many different courses you can offer, but the more you have, the harder it is to get more still. Instead of getting new majors, you can instead upgrade the ones you have, increasing the number of students who attend for that major and maybe also improving their grades or something, I’m really not sure. The cost on improving majors goes up with each level of the major, so you’re encouraged to diversify at least a bit, but only in marathon mega-schools will you ever reach a point where it feels like the game is trying to drag you into a major you don’t want to support.

This is almost exactly the kind of thing I was talking about with Spacebase Startopia, although only almost because there’s still only one kind of university to run mechanically. Some of the majors do have slightly more complex room requirements than others, the simplest ones requiring only a lecture hall while the most complex require multiple different laboratories and are high enough difficulty to tax your mastery of things like libraries and private tutoring rooms, which increase a student’s grade, something which is less necessary on easier courses and more necessary on harder ones. There aren’t really different builds for different kinds of university, though, some of them are just harder than others. Still, you can at least have the appearance of different universities, and the difference in difficulty isn’t nothing.

The game also has a sense of humor that is, in stark contrast to Spacebase Startopia, present. It’s not hilarious or anything, but it’s actually doing the sardonic British wit thing that Kalypso so desperately wishes it could do. Honestly, the broad theme of Two Point Studios so far is that they’re like if Kalypso were actually good at all the things they attempt. They should make Two Point Dungeon just to really rub it in.

The Red Lantern is an indie game about a failed doctor going out into the Alaskan wilderness to try her hand at becoming a musher and starving to death within three days. I’m being flippant, but I’m not joking. You pick out four dogs from a team of eight, you start out with one medkit, one kindling, two meat, and three bullets, and you quickly discover this is not nearly enough tools and supplies to survive the trip. Awakening from what turns out to be a nightmare, you decide to add about $30 worth of additional stuff to your sled before trying again. There’s no actual money in the game, I’m just roughly estimating the cost of two extra hunks of meat, an axe, some extra kindling, and exactly one additional bullet. In fairness, the meat hunks look pretty bulky, so I might be underestimating there. Still, the most valuable resource in the game is bullets, which look like they’re probably 30-06 Springfield ammo, which you can buy in boxes of 20 for $25. In fairness, the San Francisco med school dropout I’m playing as probably would not be able to deadeye snipe caribou with the reliability that I can win the little shooting minigame.

Once you start mushing, the dogs know the way, but you do choose to go left or right at various junctures and you get various encounters based on some combination of time of day, which choices you make, and random chance. I never kept careful track of my route, so I have no idea if you get the exact same encounters if you follow the exact same route (including camping at the same times so it’s the same time of day for each encounter). I tmight be completely deterministic or it might be completely random with your left-or-right decisions having no immediate impact whatsoever. Certainly, some parts of the map are labeled as having different animals from others. There’s moose country and there’s bear country, for example.

For the most part, you are making barely-informed decisions to go left or right and to either investigate or ignore different encounters (sometimes, but not always, it’s obvious what kind of encounter you’d be investigating, and sometimes the encounter investigates you) and hoping the game delivers enough resources to you to survive until you reach the cabin with the red lantern left out front, which your friend Margot has left for you. You do have a bit of control over what happens, by choosing whether to spend a precious point of hunger on pursuing an encounter with minimal information or ignoring it, holding out hope that you’ll get one that’s obviously a rabbit or bird or shockingly vulnerable moose that you can hunt so you won’t have to gamble on an encounter whose hook is something like “what was that noise?” and could end up being anything.

Given the game is a stealth Roguelike (but a short one, so I’ll forgive it) where you’re expected to fail multiple runs before succeeding, the main takeaway here seems to be “if you go to Alaska, you will die.” Not only is that the most likely result of your first run (and in fairness, that by itself is more “if you go to Alaska and refuse to spend an extra $50 on life-saving supplies, you will die”), a lot of the encounters are abandoned resources. Sometimes it’s a not-quite-empty box of bullets that might be litter, but sometimes it’s an abandoned axe or jacket, something where you wouldn’t expect the previous owner just lost track of it.

A run is held together with vignettes with one of your good boys. For example, in my first run, one of my dogs was Barkley. Barkley is a dog with a tendency to pick fights with wild animals no matter the odds, which I instantly felt a kinship with and decided this dog must be part of my sled team. While getting to grips with the game’s time and resource management, I wound up sledding through the dead of night, and I was attacked by a wolf. Barkley jumped in and fought the wolf long enough for me to grab my rifle and take advantage of my mysterious San Francisco med school dropout sniper powers. Later there’s another vignette where Barkley jumps in to intercept a squirrel aimed at my face, and decide to take the option to teach Barkley to bark at things before attacking them. This comes around when the sled is attacked by a tank on hooves while I have no bullets left, but Barkley manages to scare the elk off.

And then I died anyway. No bullets, no food, and still only about three-quarters of the way to the cabin. The game frames this as a nightmare that prompts the protagonist to buy the aforementioned $25 in additional supplies, but after the whole run with Barkley, it didn’t feel like a dream sequence. It felt like I died and reloaded. And then I died several more times. The threat of death does give the mechanics some teeth, but you have to build up a decent mastery of the game mechanics to make a successful run, figuring out which encounters are good or bad and which options in which encounters yield precious food and bullets and which waste a hunger point for nothing, slowly assembling an arsenal of survival tools and a decent starting amount of supplies. It does a pretty good job of making me feel like someone who’s getting to grips with surviving in the Alaskan wilderness, except that diegetically I am doing this through psychic nightmare visions.

I definitely think this would’ve been better as a sleddy-aroundy trading game (although not a complex one – the mechanics just don’t support more than 10-ish trips, tops, so the tertiary gameplay loop shouldn’t require more than that), though admittedly the problem there is that this is a pretty grounded story about a protagonist who feels like they’ve failed in life and are venturing into the snowswept wilderness to find themselves, and it would be weird to add into that story “just pretend that oil is shipped from the point of extraction to Anchorage in dog sleds.” But regardless, the game relies on a meta-structure of making multiple runs and slowly getting more familiar with the Alaskan wilderness as you do, and that’s good, but it does this by giving you a goal and so few starting supplies that you are basically guaranteed to die and have to restart multiple times before you succeed, and that’s bad.

The game is saved by its brevity, though. Each of the eight dogs has a different story you can play through (like Barkley’s) if you want, and that might take 4 or 5 hours, but just getting to the cabin alive only takes about 3, and that was long enough that the sense of wonder at the Alaskan wilderness the game was trying to convey hadn’t quite worn off by the time I got to the end.

In Cook Serve Delicious 3, the tower where your Cook Serve Delicious restaurant operated out of in CSD2 gets hit with a missile, something that seemed wacky and comically paradoxical in January of 2020, so you hit the road with a food truck and two robot assistants, Whisk and Cleaver. Whisk is your driver and generally nice and supportive while Cleaver rides shotgun in the original sense of the term and is more critical. This is a fun character dynamic and the line-by-line writing is good.

What I dislike is that the game is bad at seeing how well you’re doing and having Whisk and Cleaver react appropriately. Their comments seem to be based exclusively on what medal you got for the level: None if you failed completely, a bronze if you scraped by, silver for a good but imperfect run, and gold for totally flawless. Cleaver sometimes comments about how she’s really surprised if you get a gold medal, but this is informed neither by the percentage of completed levels which already have gold medals (variables that should not be hard to keep track of unless the game has severe problems with spaghetti code) nor by how many attempts this level in particular took to get a gold on (ditto, though less so). Like, the fuck do you mean you’re really surprised, Cleaver? I played CSD2, most of these recipes are carryovers, I am butchering these early levels, gold after gold on the first try. A character whose respect is difficult to earn is only compelling if they actually pay attention to and notice when you’re doing really well. It would even make sense for Cleaver to have a “don’t get cocky, this is the easy part” kind of attitude, but instead she acts like getting a perfect run is remotely surprising even though I just did fifteen of them in a row.

Whisk doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, either. Her gold medal comments make sense, she focuses a lot on how impressed she is by the achievement, but her comments on the silver medals often feel like they were supposed to be for bronze and got coded wrong or something. The Cook Serve Delicious series sets out to be the Dark Souls of food preparation games (one of the series taglines is “prepare to dine”), and I think that attitude may have leaked too much into Whisk, who is supposed to be the kind and supportive one of the duo. Particularly I’m thinking of a line she has in a silver medal that goes something like “I know you’re trying, chef, but maybe next time try a little harder?” And Cleaver adds “or a lot harder.” This dialogue makes sense for a bronze medal, but for a silver you’d expect Whisk’s answer to be more along the lines of “wow, nearly perfect, you’re almost there!”

I’m not sure what the dialogue is like on bronze medals or failed levels, because I’ve got none of either so far (the game is divided up between eleven “territories” across the post-apocalyptic United States and I’m partway through the third, so getting all golds and silvers so far isn’t a huge accomplishment), but I’m honestly not sure how Whisk could get much more critical without breaking character as the kind and supportive one completely, considering that a bronze is still a success.

I wonder if this is driven by the fact that you can get bronze and silver medals on Zen Mode, which disables the timers (you can still mess up an order by pressing the wrong button, but you have as much time as you need to prepare the recipe), but not the gold medal? The developer has discussed in a news update that Zen Mode was added to CSD2 in a bit of a panic and they were never really happy with it, so I suspect they may still think of it as a “fake” game mode that served as a band-aid solution to a problem that deserved more time than was available, and that came through in the writing. That’s a guess, but it reflects my experience of playing the game.