Card to Kill: Final Dusk

I end up with a lot of card spewing games from Groupees that I would never normally play. As I write this, Steam enhanced reports of remaining card drops my account has $47 CDN sitting there. While some of that is bugged and some of that will be taken by Valve, you can get an idea of just how many Card games I end up with.

Mechanically Final Dusk is a puzzle game where the vampire girl runs along a set path, and then there are a variety of objects to interact with. The vampire girl has brain problems, likely from listening to the music on loop, and has to be guided, prodded and protected with all your bat energy otherwise she turns to stone and a pointless sad game over screen appears. I feel like this is a pretty normal puzzle game, sort of akin to a more interactive physics puzzle, but somehow it doesn't quite have the pleasing feeling a puzzle game does.

From the second level on, the game presents you the option of using your ... Bat-ness? ... to cover objects. This is about 3 minutes into the game, and I already hit a snag. The controls indicate you press 'Q' to use your bat powers to cover a light source, but the game doesn't explain how this actually vis-a-vis works.

It is always a good sign when the wordy, irritating blob of tutorial text doesn't actually cover how to properly use a skill. Also I noticed running it in windowed mode it had that moronic "windowed but locked" set up, where your cursor can't escape the window. That is optional, mind you, but I'm not really sure why it should ever be turned on. As far as I can tell after a good twenty minutes of limping through levels, you press 'Q' and then slide your mouse over the object you want to cover... Once I figured that out, I could get the mechanic to work most of the time, but not always. It never felt quite consistent.

If there's one thing you don't want out of a puzzle game, it is even the slightly margin of error introduced in the control scheme. Certainly it is ultimately user error, but I'm not even sure why it is possible to make such an error.

Art asset wise, Final Dusk has the weird smell of clip-art ... But other than that is actually quite crisp, clean looking and maybe a little weird if you don't like ... I dunno what we're supposed to call the princess here. They clearly portray her as a bratty teenager, so we'll say she's 16 and pretend? Ok? Anyway her sprites are good, the bat sprites are good, and cutscene art is pretty nice looking. I guess I can forgive it, since she's sexualized in sort of the "for teenage girls" ways, and I sort of imagine this game is aimed at teenage girls so maybe there you go?

Or you know, waifu hunters.

The music is awful. Like really, really awful. There was one track that just bored a hole in my skull until I turned it off, maybe there were other tracks later on but I didn't hear them because I feared permanent brain damage. I then put on the tracks for Sol Survivor, which are really good and make for excellent ambiance while doing puzzle games that don't otherwise have good sound tracks. Like this one.

nope.jpg

I got to a level early on where I realized you're supposed to, in the planning stages, winch furniture up an elevator. Like you move the dresser over to the elevator and then you - yes, I'm serious - crank it up "by hand" to the next floor. During the planning phase. I don't know what happened, I blacked out for a moment and when I came to the game was uninstalled from my computer. It is a mystery!

Anyway I like the basic ideas behind Final Dusk's gameplay, and the art is actually nice, but the control issue is just so freaking irritating that it makes the game frankly impossible to enjoy on any level. Between fighting with the controls and the tedium of slowly setting up the levels to run the track, and the game deriding you for "setting a checkpoint" when all it does is redo all the nauseating busywork because the controls flaked out on me, I just kinda fell asleep in my chair. I really don't want to repeat the two minutes dragging furniture around. If I wanted that type of gameplay, I'd stop putting off cleaning my basement.

I do feel like maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe this game is for twelve year old girls, not me, and that's fine, but I still kinda actively hated my time with it.

I completely forgot to post this one back when I finished the game. I always feel bad posting negative reviews. Then I tried playing it again. God, the music, urgh.

Roguelike fatigue: Dungeon of the Endless

The Endless line of products is sort of amusing to me in that it was the Steam Holiday Auctions that really shifted my focus onto them. I wanted to do one completed auction, just to get the achievement, but on the most part most games seemed like people were bidding on them with a day or two to "the sale" with an amount of gems worth more than their sale price.

I mean, just as an aside, but if you ever wanted to see that psychological issue f2p games exploit where the conversion of currency causes individuals to lose track of the value of a dollar, wow. Watching people spend $12 in gems on a game that is going to go on sale for $5 in less than 24 hours is impressive for seeing that particular mechanism in action. It wasn't like you couldn't just immediately sell the gems for $12, the market was the same number of mouse clicks away!

Anyway so the one game that did seem to be a reasonable price ... Wasn't this game. It was Endless Space: Emperor Edition, or Gold, or whatever which displayed the wrong item and with the DLC price included was a pretty reasonable amount. So I looked it up and realized they'd apparently made three games, sort of, in the shared universe. That's really cool, but apparently Dungeon and Space are the weaker titles to Legend...

But I ended up with this game, because it has some sort of weird arse coop set up and I think a friend bought it for me to play with them (I think?) while I got Space from the auction. I haven't even unpacked space yet, since its been wall to wall games this year, but I'll get around to it probably after I finish off Dungeon or more likely get sick of Dungeon.

Dungeon is especially interesting, though, because when you peel away the pixel graphics and the excellent audio you're left with the guts of several games connected to a roguelike skeleton. It is actually really weird, the game hybrids elements from tower defense to the point it almost feels like a Heroes of Might and Magic game, or a city builder, and there's some weird ideas I feel like came out of horror even.

If I was going to give it a genre, I'd peg it into "Roguelike flavored quasi-reverse tower defense" and then just keep talking because that tells you nothing...

Card to Kill: Legend of Dungeon

Legend of Dungeon is a game I believe I acquired through a bundle and played entirely for the cards. In fact, while I'm not 100% certain, I'm pretty sure I straight up own two copies of this game and got cards from both. Must have been a pretty good deal. This is going to be a short review, which will be pretty obvious, pretty quick!

What surprised me about LoD is that I installed it and fired it up thinking it had art assets in line with the artwork on its cards, which is how you say "not the good". Actually it might be conveyed as 'ugly' and I'm not really sure why... Instead, I was surprised to see a super retro looking game that reminds me of long lost days of fiddling with my cousin's commodore something like two and a half decades ago. The game is not quite 2d, but it is close, with a brought forward pixelated 3d style that I really dig on. The game looks fantastic, and the screenshots don't do it justice, since it looks really slick in motion.

The game itself is essentially a very stripped down dungeon crawler. I'm not absolutely certain as to the story, or frankly, even the goal as I didn't bother to play the game enough to finish it. You enter the dungeon, which divides into levels. There is no real unified style (as best I can tell) within given levels, but it does mark your descent and it seems to grow in difficulty the further down you go. You basically look for apples or loot, and battle various infinitely respawning monsters lovingly rendered in the weird retro 3d world.

You hit monsters. They, as far as I can tell, seem to operate mostly around the generic retro 'body touch hurts' system, though they do seem to have attack animations as well. Once you hit monsters, you collect XP globules and eventually level up which ... Does something? I can tell you gain +10 health, but beyond that, I can't really figure out which number means what in the damage system. Chalk it up to not paying enough attention or the game not explaining itself well, your choice. I lean more toward the latter, but hey, what is text when you can put in bare minimum effort?

You can also acquire loot, which has basically the saddest inventory system I've ever seen. You can't pick between items, you just desperately flip through them, with one item becoming equipped and it isn't your weapon. You can pick up all sorts of wacky stuff, including spellbooks that summon monsters or allies, and piles of kittens which you can toss down to ... Like, it's a kitten.

I guess it is supposed to be retro or whatever, but the inventory system is a tragedy and I can't be arsed to figure out what the different stat numbers are supposed to mean. Numbers change when you put different loot on, but other than moving slower or faster it takes too much empirical testing to nail it down and snore. Bored now, throwing my character in lava.

The lava looks really good. What is it with retro style pixels displaying lava best?

The game's music and audio in general is excellent. If you want to pay a dollar for an amazing chillout session, this game will give you some great chillout tunes to just relax to. I mean the dopey, who cares gameplay doesn't get in the way of just hitting zombies with an old rusty sword while listening to some nice ambient tunes. Ahhh. It's not bad for a bit.

On my first runthrough of LoD, I hit the 'use' button and was killed or something by one of the patrons of the bar at the top of the dungeon, then when I went to the dungeon, I got one shot by a snake. Neat?

On my second runthrough, I got down to like level 6 or 7, and then was killed by a giant swarm of warlocks. And by that I mean, I encountered like 12 of them, turned around to see one of them and thought 'I can take one of them if 12 of them spawn at a time'. I could not.

On my third runthrough, I got down to level 3, which apparently had no exit after ten minutes of flipping through the doors. I wondered if maybe the game had like, dead ends or something. I eventually ended up all the way back up to the tavern, which wasn't where I wanted to end up. Then it wouldn't let me leave the tavern anymore, so after a minute or two of fiddling with it, I just reset the game. Most of my playthroughs worked essentially like these two. You wander around for a while, and then something vastly more difficult than the general door to door enemies kills you.

Frankly, Legend of Dungeon is a lazy game. The music and art assets are soothing, but the completely lack of inventory management, explanation of the statistics or what things do, or basically anything beyond trial and erroring you way through the game is irritating. Potions, for example, have specific color/names combinations but you don't really know what they did. Usually they make you barf, which is great, but the non-barf ones don't explain themselves, and neither group is re-labeled by the game into what it does.

So I guess I'm supposed to write down the stats of the items I'm re-equipping, because it doesn't compare or doesn't display it in a visually easy to determine way (I think it does? But I'm not sure) and it doesn't tell you what anything does.

If you want to just start a new game, then go punch some bats and listen to the excellent ambient score, it is an excellent game. But beyond that it is a slow paced, lazily built game that expresses all of the low-points of modern "roguelike" design without ever really stretching into anything else. There is little depth to the gameplay, and it comes off as clumsy, imprecise and just rather sleepy. I feel like this is all rather intentional, which means if it sounds like something you're into - great - but otherwise, I'd give this one a pass.

Perhaps some of these elements are 'features' keyed to being 'retro styled'. But like I said in the Shovel Knight review, retro does not make your design unassailable. If your features suck, they suck, the end. Ultimately, this game is very close in most elements to Hero Siege, but doing almost everything shared worse. I wish Hero Siege was done in this engine, and not much else.

Great art and great music though, and the engine is pretty great for the retro feeling. Its a shame Legend of Dungeon is, to be honest, roguelike. If it was an actual down to the bottom properly crafted game with some fixes to the ridiculous inventory, I think it would have been great. As is, like I said, if you can get it cheap the first few playthroughs are some wonderful chillout.

Neo Retro Future Imperfect: Shovel Knight

I was introduced to Shovel Knight way way back when Two Best Friends (who are now like, Super Best Friends or something since it has turned from a pair into a posse) played through it in a demo ages ago. The game looked pretty neat, but I never realized it was actually some sort of "major indie" release, akin to say Starbound (which mind you is still in early access 14 months later or something ridiculous) and Transistor. The hype train slowly built I guess while I wasn't paying attention.

There was a bit of a dust up about the game during the Winter sale due to it not going on sale, then going on sale. I actually thought their reason for not going on sale was reasonable - Shovel Knight is not exactly a time oriented release, and they claimed they wanted to finish the DLC they promised in their kickstarter or something to that effect before running up the sale train. I actually admire that attitude, as the current progression of kickstarter into early access into steam cards and sale train with release somewhere over yonder (hello Starbound) disturbs me. But I'm gonna do a write up of my thoughts on the current steam cycle sometime this month.

It was good to see some work ethic for once, you know? But the game did go on sale, and a friend of mine ended up buying it for me, basically in return for me buying him Trails In the Sky. Which I bought entirely because 'Dude I got you TITS' was worth the price alone. There was some further complaining about how it went on sale and I don't know, my eyes just roll around randomly in my head.

Shovel Knight is, as implied by the title above, a sort of Neo Retro about a shoveling. It is a retro styled platformer, but like Terraria, it does things far beyond what you could do in the 8-bit world. Shovel Knight, however, is far more dug into its position as a retro game. Many if not most of its ideas are built or brought forward from 20-30 year old games. This is something of a mixed blessed, and I wonder how much of the game would be improved or more creative for having this shackling torn off.

But then, the game is as it is, and that is just what we have now. There is DLC coming, but I feel like I won't necessarily remember to play through DLC whenever it happens... (promised for Q2!

)

Eight long weeks of playing roles: Fallout New Vegas

Was this game seriously made in 2010? Blimey, I feel sometimes like I'm stepping between eras whenever I pick another steam game to pick up. FF8 is 1999 or something, this is ten years after that and SR:R was 4 years from that?

Anyway! Fallout New Vegas is, according to most reviews I've read, the best of the "two" Fallout games produced roughly around the same time. I had something of a mixed opinion of Fallout 3, which was good but not great, and I've always been a little scared to fire up FO:NV. You see of all the bad mental habits I have, I think I'm a bit suggestible in a weird way. If someone tells me something is hot doody, I tend to gird myself and then be pleasantly surprised. If someone tells me something is amazing, I tend to pick out its flaws and not give it much room to breath.

Tell me Fallout: New Vegas is the hottest RPG title in the last five years for storytelling and worldbuilding, watch me sputter like a vagrant in a hot dog explosion as I try to get over how bad the mouse acceleration is. More on this later, though...

FO:NV also has the weird issue with Bethesda steam DLC pricing. Basically, a friend of mine bought me this game for a fiver a couple years ago, and I left it in my inventory. I used to do that, leave games lying there out of my library. Anyway, eventually the game went on sale for the same price, but with all the DLC packed in, and it was more to buy the DLC later. I don't know what Bethesda's deal is here, but I ended up buying the game again with all the DLC and leaving that copy sitting there. Which I still have.

I don't know how to feel about that, either. I do want to make the point that the played statistic above is an astounding thirteen hours off my in-game played time. That's a lot of time alt-tabbed looking at solutions, crashing to desktop, fixing mod orders and other general nonsense. Still, sixty plus hours is a lot of game, either way, and I guess playing with mods counts as gaming sort of anyway?

Eight weeks of playing roles: Shadowrun Returns

 

Roleplaying winter couple of months continues with some sort of successful kickstarter game. Hurray. It's cold out! Let's play the role of someone who can open their not frozen shut windows. Because I can't open my window. It is covered in ice. Is this ok?

I don't have any strong memories of Shadowrun as a teen; I'm not sure if I was too old or too young. I have the weird luck of having read Neuromancer in my formative years - like, to the point I was young enough that William Gibson marched me right past a sex scene and I didn't even know what they were doing - which I think shaped a lot of my ideas about how the future is going to go. Everyone should read Neuromancer, even if it isn't Gibson's best work. Shadowrun is, to my loose grasp of cyberpunk as a conceptual predecessor to the eventual genre it "became" Neuromancer by way of magic and other wackiness, likely making it more akin to the early Warhammer 40k lore which was also something of a melting pot of concepts.

Did you know Warhammer 40k actually originally had a sense of humor?

As for kickstarters, I was really excited when kickstarter first came into being as it represented gamers being allowed to choose what would be developed and influence the market in a more hands on, or wallets on, manner.  The end result however has been something of a mixed blessing. The whole cycle of Kickstarter into Early Access into Steam Cards into Steam Sale has really highlighted a lot of points where the game industry has problems that we all gleefully blamed on like, Electronic Arts and Bobby Kotick for the last decade and as it turns out those perceptions might not have been on the money.

See the joke there is kickstarter has wasted a lot of people's time and money, though I think it is less egregious than the whole green light early access "give me money for an unfinished product I don't plan on finishing chortle" set up.

But SR:R is a kickstarter "success"; the game was made on time, I think, came out and people reacted to it in a pretty reasonable fashion. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but it's a roleplaying game and I had more interest in playing it than finally trying to get through Fallout: New Vegas (which is just so hyped I'm scared) and trying to figure out what the first Dragon Age actually "is". Is it Origins? No I mean yes it is on Origin and I have the full version, but which one actually is it? I don't want to think about it. What happened to putting numbers or clear titles after games?

Right I'm getting distracted. SR:R is a top down, isometric RPG with guns, magic and trolls. It is a mix of cyberpunk and magic, though it ends up feeling like the cyberpunk side is pretty subdued compared to the magic, so that might disappoint a little. As I hinted by mentioned Neuromancer, it takes from an oddly bog standard view of the future, in which nations no longer quite exist and huge megacorps do things for money. Very close to Syndicate, I believe, which this game feels like the more honest RPG cousin of.

I'm referring to the shooter that people wanted to be an isometric RPG there, in case you didn't care. You don't. Let's move on.

Eight weeks of playing roles: Final Fantasy Eight

You know before we talk about anything else I really want to say I was surprised at how long FF8 is, in both positive and negative ways. There is a fairly good amount of content in the game but it is gated behind wandering in circles and just the worst pathing elements good lord. Admittedly it isn't that much longer than FF7, but it really feels longer, but again, in bad and good ways... My in-game played time is rather different from my out of game played time, and I only saw the game over screen five times...

People talk about Final Fantasy games - Frankly, they talk about roleplaying games - Way above the level of enjoyment I think anyone actually gets out of them. You get this moment, when you ask someone what their favorite RPG is and their words just stop making any real sense. From Final Fantasy to the Witcher, to Baldur's Gate and back again, it all just comes off as 'good lord I need to justify this skinner box so hard'. I'm not saying these are bad games, not at all, but it sure does end up feeling like it when you sit down and play them again. Except the original Final Fantasy. God that game is just a bleak void of a skinner box. Argh.

Anyway, I mention this because Final Fantasy Eight is or was probably my favorite in the series, insofar as actual FF games and not like FFT or weird spinoffs or whatever. FF8 is the one I went into expecting was super bad, then found I actually just like every element of it. People bemoaned every element of it, often to the point of absurdity - Squall is extremely Cloudlike, and yet he was derided for elements he shared with the FF7 protagonist - and in the end uh, to be honest, the game didn't seem that bad. Seriously Cloud and Squall both do the '...' thing. Cloud, I guess, gets a bit of a pass since he actually has brain damage and then gets more brain damage over the course of the game, but still...

On the other hand coming back to this game, well... It's a little bit of a strange one, isn't it? The feeling, not the game. The game is pretty Final Fantasy ## you know? Like FF7 I was expecting to come back to disliking it but just playing it anyway because memory is a fickle thing. Here I came back to something I have actual nostalgia for and just being like man, this is just the damn oddest thing.

I mean yeah, the skinner box, the loot thing? FF8 drops much of that element, and I started to wonder by the end if the loss of big lewtz was a big part of why a lot of people really didn't "get" it?