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[And he waits, and he waits, and he waits]

1

TalkBack / The Actual Problem With The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's Combat

« on: November 12, 2021, 08:22:43 AM »

And he waits, and he waits, and he waits

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/editorial/58914/the-actual-problem-with-the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-swords-combat

With the release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, a whole new generation of people are experiencing one of the more experimental entries in the Zelda series, which is also one of the most divisive. Originally released on November 18th, 2011 for the Nintendo Wii, Skyward Sword dared to use the system’s motion controls to input commands. Swinging the wiimote left has Link swing his sword left, and a non-zero amount of people hate it. The HD version still has the motion input option, but also includes the option to use the left joystick to input sword strikes. Playing through Skyward Sword HD with stick inputs still left me feeling a little cold on the combat. However, I don’t think it’s the control options that’s the problem; it’s the enemy encounter designs.

When I say enemy encounter designs, I mean the strategy behind defeating specific enemies. The simplest enemies, like Keese, only require swinging the sword in their general direction to defeat them. Most enemies demand a little more strategy. These strategies are either unclear and confusing, or boring. Skyward Sword is the Zelda game that makes the player stand around waiting more than any other one, and it’s about as fun as that sounds.

From the earliest humanoid enemy, Bokoblins, Link has to eschew any combat strategy to swing his sword around wildly. Bokoblins are very good at blocking Link’s strikes. A Bokoblin will move their sword around to block different directions that Link could attack from. One of them holding their sword to the right means that I should be able to swing my sword to the right to attack their unguarded side. Except they have a near instant reaction time. Many times when trying to use this strategy the Bokoblin would immediately block the side they weren’t guarding. Attacking up when they were blocking any other direction would have them block up immediately. My strategy for dealing with them was mindlessly swinging at them until they died.

Lizalfos have a clear way to attack them as well as having a sense of character.

Skyward Sword has great enemies that focus on blocking angles of attacks. Lizalfos will block all Link’s strikes until they only block one angle and taunt Link, which gives him a path to attack that doesn’t close. Stalfos block all but one angle of attack and change the one open direction on regular intervals. This gives them a rhythm game feeling to fighting them. Messing up the timing or attack direction gives the enemy an opening to attack which can be dodged or parried if you’re brave. Messing up an attack direction on a Bokoblin means that Link just has to swing his sword around more.

This lack of strategy gets compounded by the addition of electricity. Skyward Sword will imbue enemies with elemental traits. This can be fire, which causes a damage over time effect and burns wooden shields, or electricity, which will stun Link when he hits an electrified enemy with his sword. The counterplay to an enemy being electrified is to wait. Most common enemies can be electrified from Keese to Bokoblins. The worst electrified enemy is the Chuchu. This enemy is defeated by cutting it in half into smaller versions of itself until the smallest version is defeated. After cutting the larger form in half, the smaller blob will pulse with electricity. Link must wait until the pulse dissipates then cut the creature in half again, which will then, again, pulse with electricity before being attacked. The pattern to attacking electric Chuchu is strike then wait then strike then wait for a total amount seven turns. Link has to stand around waiting for an enemy to be open to attack seven times - maybe five if you're fast - to defeat one Chuchu.

The encounter design of making Link wait around isn’t exclusive to electric enemy types either. Moblins will also force the player to do nothing until they’re open to attack. The first Moblin the player comes across has a spear and a wooden shield. The shield has to be attacked in multiple directions to destroy it. Once the Moblin’s shield is gone, Link can freely attack them. Making an enemy’s defensive tool useless is an interesting encounter design even if they have way too much health. Later types will upgrade to a metal shield. The only way to open the metal Moblins for attack is to parry a strike from their spear. Until they attack with their spear there is nothing for Link to do but wait. Most of my time spent fighting metal Moblins was to stand in front of them hoping they would try to attack me. The "wait to parry" strategy is unfortunately employed by other enemies. Sentrobes will force the player to stand around until the specific attack that can be parried is used. It isn’t an engaging combat design.

Boss fights aren’t safe from Skyward Sword’s weird encounter designs either. Scaldera has a phase in the boss fight where their weak point, their eye, bounces around to different points on their body, but it’s not clear how to hit it. The eye would move up and to the right from Link, so I would use the right diagonal upwards strike, but that would miss. Eventually I just had to swing the sword around constantly in front of Scaldera to do damage. Tentalus has a similar phase where it sends snake versions of its tentacles after Link. The way these snake tentacles are animated made it difficult for me to tell what direction they are coming from. This part of the Tentalus fight almost necessitates me taking damage.

This didn't hit and I don't know why.

All of these weird instances in the combat could have been avoided. There are numerous clever uses of the sword controls to defeat enemies. Every fight against a Deku Baba is genuinely fun. Requiring the player to hit Skulltulas in a way that turns them around to expose their stomach weak point is clever. The first phase of the Tentalus fight features Link cutting down tentacles with the Skyward Strike, which I think is cool. There’s just too many instances of enemy encounters that are unclear or designed around wasting time. It’s a shame because I like the implementation of the motion or joystick controls in concept. Swinging the sword right by swinging the Joy-Con right is neat. On top of that Skyward Sword features the best overall suite of dungeons of any Legend of Zelda that I’ve played. The unfortunate encounter design brings down the experience in a way that could have been additive instead.

[Watership Crown]

2

TalkBack / Tails of Iron (Switch) Review

« on: September 17, 2021, 04:00:00 AM »

Watership Crown

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/58352/tails-of-iron-switch-review

Odd Bug Studios’ Tails of Iron looks like a game that’s very common these days. It is a hand-drawn 2D action adventure game with RPG mechanics, punishing combat and optional exploration. With those descriptions it was possible for Tails of Iron to feel derivative. However, after playing it, I really think that Tails of Iron is something people should take a second look at.

The story of your adventure is a single moment in ages of warfare. You play as a young prince rat named Redgi. His father, the rat king, led his kingdom to a temporary victory over their nemesis through generations, a kingdom of frogs. The beginning of the game sees an elderly rat king pass his crown to Redgi right before the latest siege of the frog kingdom which demolishes their kingdom, Crimson Keep.

Tails of Iron rebuilds a kingdom through action. Moving through the story and completing side quests has a tangible effect on the overworld. The player starts out ruling over a ruined land, but they will slowly and steadily build it back from the brink. The ravaged courtyard of Crimson Keep will become home to working rats and music after a few quests instead of being home to rubble and corpses. Long Tail Village’s merchants and citizens return after helping their local leader. Even the areas outside of the main cities see the same type of rebuilding. Farms and Mines will begin production again. Routes out to distant areas will have bridges built and enemies cleared to make them less tricky to navigate and treacherous. Time invested in Tails of Iron gives a satisfying sense of actually affecting the world.

Quests come in a few different flavors. Mostly it’s combat, but there are a number of retrieving item missions plus some rescue missions. Rarely, one of the tasks for Redgi is to escape an area he’s become trapped in. Two early quests involve rescuing two castle workers, a chef and a blacksmith, from frog encampments. Later the blacksmith will ask you to fetch a book of blueprints in order to better outfit Redgi for his trials. The smallest quests are as easy as existing in the world; it’s possible to buy items such as paint and wood from vendors then trade those items to a farmer to start a commercial beehive.

The majority of quests involve going to an area and clearing out any present enemies. Frogs were seen by scouts in the sewers, so Redgi will have to venture into them and slay all the frogs. A local farmer has a bug infestation in his cellar. All the dead frogs in the sewers are attracting dangerous wildlife. Even if the design of these quests are similar, the mechanics of each type of enemy make the fights unique, and Odd Bug Studios made an effort into thinking of ways to incorporate these quests into the story of the world. I never felt like I was going down into a dungeon to kill something just because. The inventiveness behind the mainline quests starts to run out of steam a bit around the last hour or so of the game, but for 90% of my playthrough the quest stories were engaging. The rewards for these quests are all useful. They can be a new weapon or armor, items to feed back into the RPG systems like blueprints or food, or currency to spend how you would like.

The mechanics of defeating enemies is a melee combat system focused on recognizing attack patterns and punishing openings left by enemies. Reacting to attacks is either shielding or dodging. This is another instance of being something very familiar. Despite the tried-and-true nature of the combat mechanics, none of the fights are boring. Each enemy unit has unique moves that need to be learned, as well as some units having a defensive stance that needs to be broken first.

The RPG mechanics add to the variety with armor and weapon loadouts. There are three types of weapons: swords, axes, and spears. Spears are the fastest with the longest reach yet do the least damage. Swords are a middle tier of each attribute. Axes attack the slowest but hit the hardest. Armors are more varied by having different defense ratings, unique resistances, and come in light, medium, and heavy weight classes. The resistances aren’t to things like fire or poison, but against enemy types instead. There are four enemy types that some armors can protect Redgi against more than just their defense rating. This adds a small preparing stage to big fights. The weight system complicates this preparing stage by affecting how quickly the player can run, attack, and dodge. The lighter your equipment, the faster all three of those actions are.

The most visible twist to the combat is a rock, paper, scissor mechanic. Occasionally enemies will flash one of three symbols above their heads. This signals a special type of attack that they are about to execute. Each special attack has a specific defensive action to avoid damage. Depending on the indicator, the player must either run away from the enemy, dodge, or parry. The inclusion of this system makes combat more dynamic. The player has to stay on their toes and focused, plus the enemy gains a unique and terrifying attack. In case anyone was worried this was going to make enemies too readable, later ones will have multiple versions of these special attacks. Noticing which animation leads into which attack is still required.

I still haven’t really decided if the addition of the telegraphed attacks make Tails of Iron more accessible when it comes to difficulty. Being able to see what an enemy is immediately going to do is helpful. However, it takes away the effective-in-most-scenarios tactic of just hold the shield button present in other games with similar combat systems. Every enemy, even the earliest of weaklings, will be able to bypass Redgi’s defenses. Every enemy will force you to time and dodge their attacks which usually come out very fast. There also aren't any difficulty options present. If you’re looking for a more accessible game in Tails of Iron, I don’t think it’s that. It is possible to make the combat a little easier by exploring and interacting with the RPG mechanics. However, despite dealing more damage, having higher defenses, or having a bigger health bar, players will still need to spend time learning the fights.

With how taken I am with Tails of Iron’s worldbuilding, it’s really disappointing that my one big complaint is related to it. The game is narrated by Doug Cockle, Geralt of Rivia’s voice actor. He does a great job. His narration gives the story a fairytale quality that I really enjoy. However, his inclusion, or how much he is included, comes at the cost of character development. Since no characters in the game speak or have any written dialogue at all - everyone talks in pictograms - each character has the same personality. Everyone you meet can be described as “helpful citizen.” All the NPCs are still able to emote thanks to great animation work. Something as subtle as feeling ashamed was still readable, but talking to a new NPC was too similar to talking to any other NPC too often. The first and only character to have a different personality wasn’t until I found a city of mole communists underground.

Fortunately, the environments have enough personality to keep the game from feeling stale. Crimson Keep and the wooded forests surrounding it feel different to Long Tail Village and its adjacent farmlands as well as Mole City’s grimey modern metropolis or Frog Village’s poison swamp. All of these areas are beautifully drawn with a ridiculous amount of details. Even the loading screens and menus are delightful with an art style reminiscent of medieval art. The sound design is also additive here. It does something very clever in that there isn’t music unless Redgi is near a source of music like ones found in towns or near a traveling bard. Dungeons and outskirts will have a backdrop of ominous tones mixed with ambient noise like rocks tumbling or farmers working. Sources of music will sound soft and muffled at a distance, but coming closer to them will increase how loud and clear they are. This trick adds a greater sense of place for me.

I’m impressed by how much thought was put into Tails of Iron and how that shines through while playing the game. Nearly every new screen I entered contained another small inclusion to admire. In my final attack on Frog Village, I found farmer frogs tending to their fields in between fights with enemy frog soldiers. Odd Bug Studios including them shows that even the big enemy isn’t only evil; this is a civilization that unfortunately happens to hate Redgi’s. The care and attention to world building would have been enough to keep me playing Tails of Iron, but the tight combat made it a joy to play the whole time.

[Digging it?]

3

TalkBack / Spelunky (Switch) Review

« on: August 25, 2021, 04:00:00 AM »

Digging it?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/58172/spelunky-switch-review

It is nigh impossible in this day and age to not know anything about Spelunky from Mossmouth before diving into it. Even if someone has never played the influential roguelike before, it’s very likely they’ve heard of the game at a minimum. I’ve consumed an enormous amount of media about a game I haven’t even played until reviewing it because Spelunky is such a prolific game. There are thousands of hours of content and analysis for this one little indie game. Speedruns, funny compilation videos, podcasts, and design analysis are all available for those curious because this game has meant so much to so many people.

If your interest in this review is exclusively wanting to know whether or not Spelunky runs well on Switch before making a purchase, I’ll get that out the way first: it runs great. I’ve never once encountered any technical problems like lag or dropped frames. The game performs like a 2D indie game from 2012 should perform on a modern console. The controls are responsive and intuitive. All my deaths are based entirely on my unfamiliarity with something about the game, such as misjudging my landing trajectory or not being sure how an enemy can kill me. If your only concern was if Spelunky played well on the go, feel free to buy it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Spelunky is a roguelike platformer. An explorer on a quest for buried riches arrives at a mystical set of caverns that trap explorers in a randomized dungeon until they can grab the hidden treasure and escape. The cave system is filled with a large number of enemies and traps that are all deadly in different ways. Some enemies will charge at the player head-on while others will jump towards the player. One enemy’s projectile can travel through terrain but another’s projectile can’t. There are spike pits and dart traps around every corner; every environmental interaction is a chance to learn how the maze can kill you.

Spelunky is a game about paying attention. Observing the path ahead and noting the traps and monsters in front of you is the safest way to advance through the game. Not noticing a dart trap will, at best, take away some health or, at worst, start a chain reaction that ends your run. A slow and methodical approach is best, but Mossmouth designed several ways to encourage the player to move quickly. Avoiding one hazard often means jumping into a new one. The most fun of these encouragements is if the player takes too long to clear a level, a ghost will appear and chase them until they exit.

As for how I feel about playing Spelunky, it’s complicated. I really enjoy some aspects. How good it feels to control the player character is almost unmatched. Moving through each level is a delight; even the most complicated of maneuvers feel natural to pull off. I want a straight 2D platformer with these movement controls or for Nintendo to give Mario the ability to mantle.

Another strength is the sheer amount of variety in the game. Not just in the enemy mechanics as mentioned above, but in the environments and items, too. Instead of focusing on ways to make your character more deadly, Mossmouth focused on ways to make your character better at platforming. The simple act of falling has several items that make it safer or more controlled: you can pick up a cape that slows your entire fall or a parachute that deploys at the last second. Early runs might have players only thinking that there are the four levels, but eventually branching out will lead the player to discover cities of gold or a worm’s intestines. The different themed areas change the enemies’ themes along with it. One minute you’re fighting people-sized scorpions or zombies, aliens, and abominable snowmen, to an Egyptian god the next. The amount of new stuff to see—big and small—in Spelunky is staggering.

Despite all the variety in other parts of Spelunky, I can’t help but feel like the player’s options are too minimalistic. Each level is filled with diverse problems that all have the same solution. The most common being “carry a rock.” Is there an enemy in the way? Hit ‘em with a rock! Got a trap that needs to be set off? Throw a rock at it! Some enemies can only be defeated by throwing a bomb at them, but those are few in number. Mechanically speaking, that’s also not much different than throwing a rock. The efficacy of common items additionally reduces the value of special ones. Why risk going for the cape or the parachute when careful platforming is enough? Why try to rob the shopkeeper of their shotgun when you have this perfectly good rock? I rarely visited a shop unless they had a compass, more bombs, or rope because those are the only items that made a difference to me succeeding in a run or not. The simplicity in design is likely intentional, but it isn’t exciting. Unless I was opting in to see the different items effects or different areas due to craving variety, each run was basically the same.

Take Size Five Games’ The Swindle as a counterexample. It’s a very similar game in that it’s also a roguelike platformer about paying attention. However, the necessary verb list in The Swindle is enormous in comparison and forces players to find unique solutions to different problems while still leaving room for player expression. Security guards can be bludgeoned, but traps and mines can’t. Hacking traps and mines will neutralize them or you could invest in an EMP charge. The mechanics required to enact each solution—hacking is a little rhythm game while setting off an EMP is one button press—plus what happens to the object  (i.e., if the trap is now the player’s or if it’s dismantled entirely) add layers to the gameplay that Spelunky can’t match.

The item and player action mechanics aren’t the only time when Spelunky’s systems fight each other. Playing through I kept wondering what the point of each of the hidden levels was. Some areas like The Black Market are necessary to reach the secret, super difficult optional ending, but other areas like The Mothership or The Worm seem actively detrimental to explore. They don’t change the ending or make defeating the final boss easier. There are powerful items in these areas, but I think most items are less useful than bombs, so I wouldn’t enter these areas just for that. Apparently, these areas contained unlockable characters. In a potentially weird quirk of the Switch version, a lot of these characters are unlocked from the beginning. The Robot Spelunker would be found in The Mothership, but I started the game with them available. What would have been a fun reason to try and keep tackling The Mothership was removed in a disappointing way. Even characters that didn’t require a whole optional level, but rather a specific seed in an area were already unlocked like The Round Boy. Taking these moments away from the player removes what could have been added a sense of discovery from Spelunky that I think it desperately needs.

Death in Spelunky isn’t punishing, but it is frustrating and uninspired. Each roguelike is a Rube Goldberg machine waiting to spring a whirlwind of misfortune for the player character. No other genre has the capacity to make dying part of the fun like a roguelike. That could be better here. A lot of things can kill your character, but most of them involve being stunlocked until you die or touching one of the arguably too many things that kill you in one hit. Hitting a bat stunned my character long enough for them to fall on instant death spikes. The boomerang enemy can stunlock your character until they are done killing your character with the boomerang. Unless you're trying to complete a run from beginning to end or playing the daily challenge, lost progress can be kept to a minimum by completing the Tunnel Man quests to unlock shortcuts, but these are really boring ways to die. Especially for a genre that has some of the most interesting deaths in gaming.

When it comes down to it, Spelunky feels dated. Since its initial release, roguelikes and lites have evolved a great deal. That evolution, of course, is due in part to Spelunky. A daily challenge seed with a leaderboard is something I first heard about in Spelunky. When comparing it to the modern members of the genre, what you get is lacking. This is still a perfectly playable game, which is a strong compliment for a remake of a freeware 2009 release. The concept of Spelunky is timeless, even if the game itself is not. I just think that recently developed roguelikes will give players more.

[Solving a murder with cards]

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TalkBack / The Magister is Releasing September 2nd

« on: August 12, 2021, 08:49:06 AM »

Solving a murder with cards

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/58067/the-magister-is-releasing-september-2nd

The murder-mystery deck-building roguelike, The Magister, is coming to Switch on September 2nd. The news was shared by the game's publisher, Digerati, on Twitter.

The player will take control of the titular magister who is summoned to Silverhurst to solve a murder. You'll need to discover clues, complete quests, build a powerful deck, and upgrade your magister with traits and perks to find the killer. The central mystery will be randomly generated to have a different killer each run allowing subsequent playthroughs to continue to be engaging.

Calling all private eyes! We've got a release date for The Magister!

🔎 September 2nd - Steam & Nintendo Switch
🔎 September 3rd - Xbox

Wishlist on Steam to get notified on launch! 👇https://t.co/ClSGsOg7iT#indiedev #murdermystery @nerdook pic.twitter.com/WxnsUub64v

— Digerati (@DigeratiDM) August 12, 2021

The game is being developed by Malaysian game developer Nerdook. They started their career making popular flash games on the browser-based hosting site Kongregate like Vertical Drop Heroes and Monster Slayers. Nerdook moved to releasing more ambitious games for PC and consoles with the HD remake of Vertical Drop Heroes in 2014.

[Spending a week in Button City]

5

TalkBack / Button City (Switch) Review

« on: August 09, 2021, 07:05:20 AM »

Spending a week in Button City

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/58025/button-city-switch-review

Button City by Subliminal is immediately intriguing for people who enjoy cute games or low-poly art styles since this game contains both. The player takes control of an adorable anthropomorphic fox named Fennel in an charming pastel world of other low-poly anthropomorphic animals. The biggest question I have when it comes to games that put a strong artistic foot forward is how good the game is behind the art. In Button City’s case, it’s pretty good.

It’s hard for Animal Crossing not to spring to mind when playing Button City. A lot of the game’s visuals and character animations are remarkably similar to what you’ll find in Animal Crossing. If Fennel was dropped straight into Pocket Camp, I don’t think they would look out of place among the other chibi cartoon animals. The expressions of the cast and their reactions are essentially the same as Animal Crossing’s Reactions. When a character is surprised in either game they both stand up straighter with wide eyes. Both games make use of floating lines above characters heads to show anger or sadness. Some cutscenes feel like they could be recreated in New Horizons without losing a lot of their context.

The soundtrack is another similarity to Animal Crossing. The town theme in Button City reminds me of the 10PM theme from New Horizons. Both songs are mellow pop that sound like they’re played from a MIDI file. The town theme is my favorite song from the soundtrack, which is lucky since it’s the most played track. The OST does change depending on the context of the game. Scenes that require being sneaky see the soundtrack change to better fit that scene. More raucous scenes are backed by more rock-inspired songs. It’s a fun game to try and think of the K.K. Slider song that these sound most like since the whole soundtrack has a similar vibe to K.K.'s music.

Animal Crossing and Button City do have big differences when it comes to gameplay and structure, however. Button City is a narrative adventure game, so you’ll be traveling around the town, talking to the other citizens, and maybe doing them a favor or two to advance an actual story. Progressing through the story moves time forward and opens up more of the town that the game takes place in. There is a lot of going to one place, talking to a person, then going to another place, so be warned if you aren’t a fan of that type of gameplay loop. I don’t hate games designed this way if the writing is good, and fortunately it is in Button City.

The main story focuses on a group of friends making a competitive video game team, defeating their rivals, and then trying to dismantle a hostile takeover of their favorite arcade. It’s an already endearing premise that sticks the landing. Every member of the main and supporting cast is likeable or, at a minimum, interesting; the same can be said about the storylines that come with them. Sorrel has a penchant for doing what she calls metal yoga, doing yoga to death metal. Lavender loves cosplaying her favorite characters from Gobabots, a game at the arcade, but feels embarrassed by it. Fennel’s mom is a struggling single mother who works a second shift job, so it’s hard for her to be around for Fennel. The range of stories from funny to heartwarming to simply sad while not feeling forced is impressive.

Because Button City has excellent writing is why it’s so disappointing when the developers include wholesale memes in the script. The “Let me in!” meme from Eric Andre is fully in the game. I think a well used meme is funny, but I wanted more from this team. It makes me sad that they chose the easiest joke to make when their own ideas would have been better. The number of memes as dialog ends up being a trivial portion of the script, but it’s a bummer that they wanted to use any at all when they’re clearly a talented group.

Traversing across the town is done in a unique way. It’s referred to as “Zoomie” in-game. Essentially, it’s a teleportation system where the player can teleport Fennel to a new area of the town by pressing the B button. This pulls up a list of all the unlocked locations on a square patch of land. These can be rotated to see who or what is happening on that square. Looking at the locations this way gives them a diorama feeling that I can’t recall feeling before in a game. Subliminal uses these aspects of the Zoomie system in a gameplay capacity later in the game as well as using them in what is my favorite gag in the game. I don’t want to spoil it, but I could not stop laughing when I realized what was happening.

All the walking and talking is broken up by recurring minigames. There are three main games you can play at the arcade: Gobabots, a 4 vs 4 arena combat game, rEVolution Racer, a racing game based on an in-universe anime, and Prisma Beats, a rhythm game. Gobabots has the most story importance, but my favorite is rEVolution Racer; it’s the most fun mechanically. The slightly wacky drifting style combined with the boost system really dug its hooks in me. It’s also the central game in my favorite questline where Fennel helps Chive, a big fan of the anime who is wheelchair bound, mod the game to have hand controls so they can play. I like Gobabots, and Prisma Beats is a serviceable rhythm game, but I wouldn’t always agree to play them if a character wanted to like I would with rEVolution Racer.

The minigames also tie into the reward for quests and exploration. Completing a quest for someone will generally give you a collectible item, like a piece of clothing, a toy, or food. It’s possible to use or display these items in the overworld, but the neatest use they have is to modify the arcade games. Collecting the rain hat clothing item will unlock a mode in rEVolution Racer where it's raining and affects the handling of the car. The Strategy Book will unlock a mode in Prisma Beats that increases the tempo based on how high a combo the player accumulates. A few of the collectible items are even used to solve quests that appear later. Button City has a rewarding positive feedback loop for exploring what the game has to offer.

For a game that I had a lot of fun with there are too many weird technical hiccups not to mention. Animations occasionally don’t play in cutscenes: I’ve watched Fennel t-pose across a room. Interacting with doors is generally a coin flip as to whether it works or not. Talking to some people again after finishing their quest has them recite their end quest dialog even if it includes a dialog option. There were two quests that I couldn’t get to trigger despite a lot of effort to get them to. Attempting to go back to one room in particular will softlock the game. A few arcade game characters don’t have functional hit boxes. A few minor bugs I could look past, but when it is literally impossible to complete 100% of a game due to bugs, that’s a problem.

Button City provides an enjoyable time but it comes with a lot of caveats that unfortunately sully a full recommendation. There are a number of “, but…” statements after saying “I like it.” You have to be the type of person who likes this gameplay loop, and there are a couple of forced memes in the writing. You also have to look past the large number of bugs. If those notes don’t sound like a dealbreaker for you, Button City is a very good game.

[Evil Dead rises later than anticipated.]

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TalkBack / Evil Dead: The Game Delayed to 2022

« on: August 05, 2021, 07:07:11 AM »

Evil Dead rises later than anticipated.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/57987/evil-dead-the-game-delayed-to-2022

Evil Dead: The Game has a new release window of February 2022. Bruce Campbell, actor and producer for the Evil Dead series, unofficially announced the delay back on July 9th at a Q&A session for the 40th anniversary of The Evil Dead. The news is now official after being shared over on the game's twitter account. Before the announcement, Evil Dead: The Game was targeting a 2021 release. The launch was moved "to give the team some extra time for polish and to ensure this is the ultimate Evil Dead experience you’re all waiting for!"

Evil Dead: The Game will be releasing in February 2022
Hey groovy gamers, we're targeting a new release date to give the team some extra time for polish and to ensure this is the ultimate Evil Dead experience you’re all waiting for! pic.twitter.com/c5I4OSQshA

— EvilDeadTheGame (@EvilDeadTheGame) August 5, 2021

Evil Dead: The Game is an asynchronous multiplayer game in the vein of Dead By Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game. A team playing famous protagonists from the series face off against a lone player taking control of the Kandarian Demon. The goal for the team of players is to gather enough artifacts from the series to perform a spell and banish the Kandarian Demon while the solo player uses Deadites, environmental hazards, or other minor demons to stop them. A gameplay trailer was first shown at Summer Game Fest on July 10, 2021.

[Another deck-builder roguelike but this one stars a slime]

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TalkBack / Rise of the Slime (Switch) Review

« on: June 28, 2021, 11:55:09 AM »

Another deck-builder roguelike but this one stars a slime

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/57705/rise-of-the-slime-switch-review

Roguelike deck builders are having a bit of time in the sun. From the success of Slay the Spire came more entries into the genre like Steamworld Quest, Griftlands, and Monster Train. Now Rise of the Slime by Bunkovsky Games is throwing its hat into the ring.

Rise of the Slime’s first impression is that it’s pretty freaking cute. The main character is what appears to be a King Slime, but is mostly a perfectly round boy. They’re wearing a little hat and bounce all over the place with a squishy little face. They are very endearing, and the overall art style is equally so. A large portion of the characters are depicted as paper cut-outs attached to sticks. The whole vibe has a feeling of a stage play since the sticks are definitely attached to an analog of stage hands. Whenever a character uses a shield item, two arms with shields around them spring up from the area the stick rises out from, adding a touch of humor.

The story behind the gameplay is kind of an afterthought, which isn’t uncommon for the genre. Story details are basically nonexistent, but from what is shared the plot follows the titular slime embarking on a quest to conquer the slime kingdom. What is an afterthought in Rise of the Slime that I didn’t really expect is the soundtrack. I honestly kept forgetting there is one. The volume it plays at is really low to the point where I had to turn my headphones way up to even hear it at all. Even when you do notice the music, it isn’t anything to write home about.

The gameplay in Rise of the Slime is pretty standard for a deck-building Roguelike. At the start of a turn, random cards will be placed into a hand. These cards have different effects like shielding, melee physical attacks, ranged attacks, summoning pets, or casting magic spells. The magic effects can either damage enemies or alter terrain, and usually the magic cards will also include one of two status effects: burn or poison. These status effects will deal damage over time and can stack for larger amounts of damage over longer periods of time. There is a mana system which means that you can only play so many cards in a single turn; each card has a mana cost in the upper left. The costs range from zero to five. The stronger the card, the higher the mana cost.

What deck you start out with is somewhat random. The player is given a choice at the beginning of a run to pick a flavor of deck. There is the standard deck featuring normal attack and defense cards, a fire focused deck, a poison focused deck, and then a deck made of entirely random cards. Earning new cards is done in a few ways. They can either be bought in the shop or are earned after winning battles. For each enemy defeated in battle, the player also earns one new card chosen from a random group of three.

Rise of the Slime has additional random elements via its mutation system, which is how it makes each run unique. Picking up a mutation will grant the slime a new intrinsic effect such as earning coins faster or granting a bonus for being on fire. These are similar to the Boon system in Hades. Mutations are very powerful and will make some runs much easier. However, they don’t dramatically change how the game plays.

The mutation system not changing the gameplay enough underpins my biggest complaint with Rise of the Slime. It just doesn’t have a large enough variety in the amount of verbs. It’s really easy to fall into the same strategies because the number of options is low. I will admit that there are strategies revolving around stacking poison and burn effects on yourself, but to really pull those off, you have to take on a negative first. I’ve never been a fan of trade-off power ups where to get to a good aspect, you have to deal with a bad one. So, for me, the options in building a deck weren’t very enticing: focus on strength building, or upgrade the summonable pets. Creativity in the deck-building aspect isn’t exactly where I want it.

That isn’t to say there aren’t unique aspects to playing Rise of the Slime. The combat section has an aspect of tactics games to it since you can position the player character. Each arena is a long corridor that has tiles where the slime or enemies can be. Kiting enemies or igniting specific tiles are legitimate strategies thanks to the movement system, which is  also used in a really clever manner in certain rooms that are all movement puzzles. One room had blocks falling from the ceiling and the entire point of that room was to make it to the other side without being hit by the falling blocks. I really like this use of the mechanics a lot. It broke up the monotony of trudging through endless combat rooms or character improvement areas.

Rise of the Slime isn’t a bad game or a great one. It’s fine. Ultimately, nothing here feels special. Switching gameplay modes from deck-building combat to the pseudo-platforming sections really feels close to being groundbreaking, and I would love to see that explored more in a future game from Bunkovsky Games. Taken for what it is, Rise of the Slime is just okay.

[The Future of Dodgebrawl]

8

TalkBack / Knockout City Roadmap Revealed

« on: June 28, 2021, 09:31:00 AM »

The Future of Dodgebrawl

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/57704/knockout-city-roadmap-revealed

In their latest weekly update column Velan Studios shared an image of their roadmap for the future of Knockout City.

Specific details are a little slight, but there is still useful stuff to know. The last event of Season 1 will include a 2X experience boost. The second season will start on July 27th and run for nine weeks. Season 2 will come with a new season theme, new contracts, and gameplay updates like a new ball and playlist types. Not mentioned in the image, but is mentioned in the text of the column is the introduction of a daily log-in bonus. A random reward will be given to the player the first time they log in to Knockout City each day.

You can read more about the roadmap and the rest of the Knockout City Chronicle here. You can also read our review of the Knockout City here.

[Spending a week in Knockout City]

9

TalkBack / Knockout City (Switch) Review

« on: May 29, 2021, 01:41:43 PM »

Spending a week in Knockout City

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/57324/knockout-city-switch-review

It’s really hard to compare what it’s like to play Knockout City by Velan Studios to other games. It’s possible, for sure: Knockout City is really just a three vs. three arena combat game, but that description is too simple for how many layers there are to the game. Most people will think of Halo or Call of Duty when you say the words “arena combat.” However, Knockout City isn’t only a point-and-shoot like those games. This is dodgeball.

What a typical game looks like in Knockout City is three people loading into a map to play against another team of three. The first team to get ten knockouts wins the round; winning two rounds wins you the game. You don’t spawn in with a dodgeball, of course. Those are found in various spots around the map, or anyone on the team can become a more powerful ball by pressing R. Once you have a ball or a teammate in ball form, the real fun begins.

The opening paragraph is a little unfair to the more traditional shooters out there, but it’s true. Successfully beating an opponent in Knockout City involves bluffs, fakes, and tricking your opponent in ways that make it feel deeper than comparable games. The most basic way to describe how this plays out is that it’s a third-person shooter incorporating the fighting game neutral. It feels incredible to master. The core of this is the lock on system; preparing to throw a ball will lock onto the nearest target. Locking on to a target means that a thrown ball doesn’t miss. I would normally hate this in an arena shooter with guns, but it’s integral here. Without the lock-on, Knockout City would be another game focused on who can aim better. There is a place for that kind of skill expression, but the real joy of Knockout City is the miniature mind games between opponents. Those would be lost without the ability to lock on to your opponents.

There is a lot of counterplay to being targeted by an opponent. Thrown balls can be caught or dodged or blocked by terrain, which are all fairly easy moves to execute without much effort. Players are alerted to being targeted by an opponent by a red outline on the screen appearing. That’s when you have to quickly decide whether to try catching the ball or dodging out of the way. Catching and dodging have a decent amount of end lag, so the attacking player will try to bait out those moves first.

The player throwing the ball has several tools to force their target into a mistake. Charging a throw will change the speed at which a ball travels, but a charged throw can be canceled at any time before throwing it. Passing between teammates or catching an opponent’s ball will overcharge the ball, making it travel even faster. Clicking in the right stick will make your character fake a throw. Using one of the double jumps while throwing will lob the ball while the other double jump will curve it. Lobs and curved throws have a different timing than normal throws.

It’s the combination of all these different ways to attack an opponent or save yourself that have me hooked. Being caught without a ball is still engaging. Trying to guess when an opponent will stop bluffing so you can catch their throw is thrilling. It’s equally satisfying to cause opponents to flinch by swapping between fake throws and passing to a teammate. Fully charging a throw then canceling it to throw a slow ball at an enemy has scored me several KOs due to the timing mix up. Even just playing with space can trip up an opponent. On several occasions, I’ve made an opposing player backup and fall off the level simply by walking at them with a ball. That’s how deep this system goes. Sometimes your most powerful move is pressing forward. There isn’t a similar option in another PvP game that I’ve played, shooter or otherwise.

And that’s only the combat portion. Each of the arenas these matches take place in is very fun, and has its own unique twist. Knockout Roundabout has cars circling the outer part of the arena that will stun players if they get hit by one. Rooftop Rumble is a fight on the top of two skyscrapers with one bridge between them. Players can either brave the bridge or hang glide across on the sides. My favorite stage is Back Alley Brawl, which has these pneumatic tubes that will whisk players to the other side of the map. These are great for quick escapes or punishing flanks.

All of the nuances in the gameplay wouldn’t matter if the game suffered performance issues, but I’ve only ever had it run flawlessly. I never noticed a dropped frame or moments of lag across all the different modes. From the normal modes and ranked, to even the more hectic special modes like Diamond Dash, where KOs cause collectible diamonds to fall out of the target, or Ball-Up Brawl, a four vs. four mode where the only balls available are teammates in ball form, everything played like a dream. The game does default to 30 frames-per-second, but Velan Studios included an option to drop the resolution and increase the framerate to 60 frames-per-second.

Diamond Dash and Ball-Up Brawl won’t be the only special modes available. Knockout City is intended to be a live-service game, and that comes with all the normal trappings. New modes and ways to play are going to be added over time. Ranked play is based around seasons. Dipping your toe into the ranked mode is encouraged through the use of unique items only available by reaching certain ranks. Playing either the three vs. three mode or a one vs. one faceoff mode will either earn points toward a new rank or lose them depending on if you win or lose. Reaching a higher tier will earn players rarer rewards, and honestly, it’s nice to play a few matches that people are taking a little more seriously. Right now, it is possible for a team of single players to be matched up against a premade team of three friends, which doesn’t exactly make for fair matches. It isn’t every match, but that is something I hope the developers change in the future.

I think the artistic choices are really nice. Everything from the announcer to the soundtrack to the visuals have a retro-futuristic style. The soundtrack is phenomenal. It reminds me a lot of Empire of Sin’s jazz fusion soundtrack. The music was a highlight in Empire of Sin and it’s a highlight in Knockout City. The sound design is another strength. Velan Studios somehow got the unique sound that a dodgeball makes when it hits a surface just right.

The visuals are mildly more contentious at first. I think all the stages and the assets in them are bright and readable and look great. The problem I have is that the character customization options that the player starts out with aren’t very appealing. None of the faces are ones that I would pick in other games. The two body types available look slightly off. Every initial hair style doesn’t fit with what I want my character to look like. Making a character that I liked on the first day was basically impossible.

But these gripes were quickly rendered moot as I almost immediately unlocked cosmetics that suited me more. I have a hairstyle that, while not exactly what I would choose, looks nice. My equipped outfit is now something that I would wear in real life. Other types of unlockable cosmetic options that I normally wouldn’t care about in other games, I enjoy here. The match introduction animation I have is ridiculously fun. It’s called The Human Helicopter. My character spins down from the top of the screen and lands in a superhero pose. I start every match with a big goofy grin on my face. I will never, ever equip a Bauble in League of Legends: Wild Rift, but I look forward to unlocking new cosmetics in Knockout City.

I’m floored by how much I enjoy Knockout City. Despite the first trailer for the game being a bad way to sell the concept of the game, I always thought it looked good. I never would have guessed that Knockout City would be excellent. I haven’t had this much fun with my Switch or any other game console this year. Velan Studios has made an outstanding experience in Knockout City.

[Idle hands]

10

TalkBack / The Longing (Switch) Review

« on: April 29, 2021, 08:39:06 AM »

Idle hands

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/57021/the-longing-switch-review

Studio Seufz sold the concept of The Longing as a game that takes 400 real-life days to finish. This isn’t really true, though. You could wait 400 days, but that’s not how it’s designed to be played. The Longing is really a game about comfort and perseverance. You play a character called The Shade, who looks like a combination of a black cat and a gremlin. Unless you do want to wait 400 actual days to finish the game, all your time will be spent trying to make them happier and more comfortable.

When you first open the game, a cutscene plays where a giant stone statue of a king in a large underground cavern unfurls his hand revealing The Shade. The statue tells them that he needs to gather his strength to end all longing in 400 days. How the player spends that time is at their discretion. The Longing is a mix of metroidvania, puzzler, and home designer. Immediately after the opening cutscene, The Shade wakes up in their home. It’s modest to start but will be expanded and improved over time. Transforming this dwelling into a home makes time go by faster here. Hanging art, collecting crystals, finding supplies for The Shade’s hobbies, or building a bathroom will increase how quickly the timer ticks down. This makes The Longing a home design game that I want to engage with. Eventually, other similar games lose their appeal due to the designing being an intrinsic reward exclusively. Coupling improving The Shade’s home with a gameplay purpose gave me a reason to stick with it.

All of the creature comforts or required tools can be found exploring the underground. The game world encompasses a vast cave system with even more of it locked behind sealed pathways. The lock is either tool gated—many pathways require finding a pickaxe—or simply locked behind time. Earthbound for the SNES has an area in it locked behind a similar password; the password is to stand still for three real-time minutes. The concept of that password is a lot of what it is to play The Longing. A bed of moss needs time to grow big enough to be able to safely jump down onto it or a stalactite needs time to fall to the ground. After that set amount of time, you’ll be able to simply travel in that direction normally. Other areas are locked behind spending time doing a task there. For example, I was able to gain access to an abandoned mine by pacing back-and-forth over a weak support beam that collapsed part of the floor.

Moments like weakening the support beam are the real joy of The Longing. Video games don’t explore repeated actions and their effect on the world like this one does. The Grand Canyon was carved by the Colorado River working slowly over millions of years. The Shade is the player’s chance to become the Colorado River, and I find that really fulfilling. Forest trails are formed by being repeatedly walked on for long periods of time. A construction crew with a piece of machinery could make a path in much less time, but that isn’t nearly as special. A naturally made dirt trail is a living map of a journey. The cave system in The Longing at the end of those 400 days is a history of The Shade’s journey.

And it is a beautiful journey. For a video game that takes place underground, there are a number of distinct areas. The first section of the cave you’ll explore is full of red rocks and striking pink crystals. The next part is a dark grey area, but venturing past that leads to an endless hallway of brilliant white structures. Exploring further will lead The Shade to a green moss-covered area, purple-hued mushroom farms, or a waterfall surrounded by radiant white crystals. Each of these areas is hand-drawn and looks wonderful. It is hard to imagine a more appealing video game that is 90% rocks.

For me, another great aspect of The Longing is how much I liked spending time with The Shade. There aren’t really other characters in The Longing beside The King - who is asleep - and The Shade, but I never thought the experience was lonely. All of that is due to The Shade. They’ll frequently remark on new areas they’re in, any new items they find, or simply enjoying the act of exploring. It is very cute to walk through a puddle the first time and have The Shade mimic the noises the water makes or, when coming to a dead end, The Shade mentions how cozy that area of the kingdom is. They will also generally comment on their mental state throughout the game. It is incredibly heartwarming to watch them go from “The water is not deep enough to drown myself in” to commenting on how comfortable their home is and how they really would like to read more.

My biggest conflict about The Longing is how it fits or doesn’t fit into my life. There are times where I have 30 minutes available to play the game, but I think it’s more efficient to actually not. Taking The Shade out of their home means giving up on the dramatic increase in time that being home provides. There’s a question that I have to ask myself before loading up The Longing about whether this is enough time to go out and meaningfully interact with the world then get The Shade back home for the increase in time progression. Of course, you could always leave them out in the world, but that’s not efficient. Would I find something out there that would make not shortening the amount of time for that spider to weave me a ladder worth it? Sometimes, not playing The Longing will allow a player to progress faster than playing The Longing. It’s weird.

Another odd quirk is that I was also usually playing something else. The Shade takes a long time to do things and the game doesn’t allow you to set him on a task and then close the game. The Switch going to sleep or closing The Longing will cause The Shade to stop whatever they’re doing. Accomplishing a slow task means staying with The Shade accomplishing the slow task. On one hand, this is good because anything that you need them to do is actually achievable in a reasonable amount of time; It will never take them two hours to mine for resources. On the other hand, this means a lot of time is spent with my Nintendo Switch in my lap making sure it doesn’t fall asleep while playing on my phone. Mining for resources might only take five minutes, but I don’t actually want to watch The Shade swing a pickaxe for five minutes.

The Longing is a very special game that alters how someone plays a game, what a puzzle can be, or even what a game can be. This is a fun game full of moments that are exciting, which is honestly surprising for what might be the slowest game ever made. Finding a new tool or a decoration to make The Shade’s home more comfortable is truly joyous, and I love that the puzzles are clever and unique. No other game is going to lock progression behind waiting two hours for a door to open. No other game is going to make moving a rock across a room take three minutes and dozens of button presses. I just don’t know if I think that wanting to play a different video game while waiting for another video game to play itself is good. Should an entertainment product be constantly engaging? I don’t really know. However, I do know that I wouldn’t change a single thing about The Longing.

[And heads will roll]

11

TalkBack / Impressions from the Ambition: A Minuet in Power Beta

« on: April 21, 2021, 07:05:58 AM »

And heads will roll

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/56965/impressions-from-the-ambition-a-minuet-in-power-beta

The French Revolution dating-sim, roguelike Ambition: A Minuet in Power was recently announced for a summer release on the Nintendo Switch. It is very uncommon for a video game to combine those genres, so imagining how Ambition will play isn’t an easy task. Fortunately, the team over at Joy Manufacturing Co. shared a playable beta with me.

The game begins with the player character, Yvette, journeying to Paris from her small hometown via carriage to meet her fiance at a bar. When she arrives there, her fiance is nowhere to be seen. This is where the game introduces its conversation mechanic. The player will pick between various patrons of the bar to ask if they’ve seen her fiance. There are only two chances to talk to people, so you’ll have to pick carefully who to interrogate as you won’t be able to talk to everyone. Based on the chosen responses each conversation has the chance to provide information or one of two resources: Peril and Credibility. The full scope of Peril and Credibility hasn’t been revealed, but information is more immediately useful.

After exhausting all the conversation chances, Yvette heads to Armand’s house hoping that he’s home. Unfortunately, he isn’t there either. Who is home, however, is Camille, Armand’s housekeeper. Camille is delightful. In a colorful cast of characters, she’s quickly become my favorite. She’s capable and knowledgeable but jovial and not-so-serious in a way that other characters haven’t been yet. She gives you the news day-to-day, advice on what to do as well as bringing you any party invitations that show up for Yvette. One of which has already arrived on her first day from a “Viscountess de Foix.”

Parties are a big deal in Ambition: A Minuet in Power. This is where most of the connections will be forged and the lion’s share of useful information will be found. Preparing for a party is just as important. The nobility of Paris are apparently very particular on the types of outfits a person wears. Each ensemble will have different attributes valued by different Parisian factions as well as a depleting resource called Novelty. When the player wears an outfit too much it will become detrimental to their attempts at warming up to the movers and shakers of the world.

New outfits can be acquired from the dress shop recommended by Camille. Visiting the dress shop also opens up the calendar system as well as the ability to explore the city. Each task that Yvette can do takes up one day of the calendar. Visiting the dress shop, going to parties, visiting places of interest, etc. all are an investment at the cost of doing something else for that day. Each one is necessary which means you’ll have to choose wisely. Yvette can’t show up to her first party in Paris wearing the outfit she traveled in, so the dress shop is the only action she can take that day.

When she finally attends the party, Yvettte meets Viscountess de Foix who is an early game antagonist. She only invited Armand and Yvette to embarrass them in front of other Parisian elites. Since Armand is still missing she settles on embarrassing only Yvette. This is the player’s first chance to gain and lose favor with the main factions of Ambition, The Crown and The Revolution. Naturally for a game taking place in the French Revolution, you will be able to sway the winds of change toward the elites or the proletariat. Choosing to curse your host’s rudeness will gain Yvette favor with The Revolution. There are also three minor factions that can be manipulated: The Church, The Bourgeoisie, and The Military. Their effect on Yvette’s fate hasn’t been revealed yet.

Before being thrown out of the Viscountess’ party, Yvette will learn a small bit of gossip about The Crown. Waking up the next day Camille will mention that Yvette could sell that piece of gossip to a local paper since she needs money to earn her way in Paris and pay the house’s mortgage along with Camille’s wages. Selling gossip will be primarily used to earn money, but can also be used to sway public favor toward or away from a faction.

With that, the game opens up. Random events and places of interest will be available to visit. Randomized parties can be attended. The player can continue the search for their missing fiance or team up with other nobles to get revenge on Viscountess de Foix. My forays into what happens after this has been a little slow due to the beta having a penchant to crash before I can save my gained progress. This is a non-public beta, so I’m not terribly concerned about technical hic-cups like these. There should be time to iron anything out before the game’s official launch. This did give me a chance to see how quickly it would be to start over if anyone wanted to replay the game. All the tutorials are skippable and the required story scenes are fairly fast to click through if you aren’t reading.

So far, I’m excited for what Ambition: A Minuet in Power is shaping up to be. The gameplay feels like a grander version of the system the Reigns series uses. Balancing how much important groups like or detest you, but with an actual end goal and characters. You should also know that aesthetically Ambition is truly great. The soundtrack is dynamic and catchy. The context of scenes will take dramatic turns quickly and the music will follow along with it. Every one of those scenes are beautifully drawn from the detailed backgrounds to the actual characters. It really is a stunning game to look at.

The PC release in spring is coming up quickly. PC players seemingly have a treat on their hands. Fortunately, Switch players won’t have long to wait when Ambition: A Minuet in Power is ported over in the summer.

[Hot Guillotine Summer]

12

TalkBack / Ambition: A Minuet in Power Announced for Summer Switch Release

« on: March 31, 2021, 06:59:16 AM »

Hot Guillotine Summer

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/56723/ambition-a-minuet-in-power-announced-for-summer-switch-release

Joy Manufacturing Co. released a new trailer for Ambition: A Minuet in Power on Tuesday to announce the spring PC release window. At the end of the trailer, they included a surprise Switch release window. Ambition: A Minuet in Power is coming to the handheld console this summer.

Ambition: A Minuet in Power can be described in a lot of different ways. Kickstarter success, roguelike, dating sim, otome, period piece, and more are all valid ways to explain what Ambition is as a game. The game centers around a young woman attempting to navigate the ever changing social landscape of a pre-French Revolution Paris. Using mechanics commonly found in dating sims, the player will gain or lose favor with various political factions and Parisian nobles. Each play through of the game will be different from the last, but the goal is always the same, survive.

[A mobile game that has grown past being mobile]

13

TalkBack / There is Too Much to do in Dragalia Lost

« on: March 30, 2021, 09:11:05 AM »

A mobile game that has grown past being mobile

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/56720/there-is-too-much-to-do-in-dragalia-lost

I adore Dragalia Lost, Nintendo’s mobile RPG made in conjunction with Cygames. There has rarely been a day where I didn’t log in to do my dailies since I started playing the game in October of 2018. The story, characters, and game mechanics are all great. Lately, however, I’ve been feeling really down on the game. Maybe this is just burnout, but I think it’s actually some other thing entirely. What I downloaded Dragalia Lost for was to have a game I liked that was always available to hop into for a little bit. Recent updates and the latest Dragalia Digest have cemented that the game just isn’t that anymore. It might sound like a good thing, but there is just way too much to do now.

When I started playing Dragalia Lost, there were only daily quests to do, and a manageable number of them at five. They would also occasionally be running an event that gave players another thing to work on when they finished their dailies; it was all pretty breezy. These days, there are events running at all times, making me miss weeks when there aren’t any events. It was nice to have off weeks of just logging in for twenty minutes to finish the daily list and be done unless you wanted to work on weeklies. There are no more relaxing weeks. Occasionally, there will even be two events running concurrently, which adds to the litany of tasks to accomplish each day.

Honestly, if it was still only dailies, the two events at one time might be tolerable. Over the course of the game, Cygames has added weeklies into rotation. Initially, this was very welcome: the addition of the first weekly, Advanced Dragon Trials, was a great way to give more hardcore players an end-game task that granted access to the strongest weapons in the game. Even when Cygames added the next weekly, The Agito Uprising, those were satisfying, too. Hardcore players out-leveled the Advanced Dragon Trials and needed a new challenge.

Recently Cygames has added a lot of new weeklies into the game. This past year, they’ve nearly tripled the number of weeklies. Most of the Agito fights have had a Legendary Difficulty added that counts as its own weekly. A new harder version of the Morsayati fight has been added that counts as its own weekly. A new type of boss fight has been added with Lilith’s Encroaching Shadow that is, once again, its own weekly. It’s a lot of new content for someone who wants to spend time with other games.

Maybe these would feel better to me if my teams could easily solo these fights. Part of the struggle with the time it takes to clear these fights for me is the reliance on the co-op modes in Dragalia Lost. Co-op works and works well. This feature isn’t an indictment on it being hard to find a match. That said, finding a match still takes time and effort along with actually successfully finishing a fight. Success isn’t a guarantee in any end-game fight, and spending all that time to fail a trial and earn nothing for the effort really hurts now. Back when it was only Advanced Dragon Trials, failure was kind of expected. They were hard fights, but you only had to clear five of them to unlock all the weekly chests. I have fifteen difficult fights to clear in a week now, so any wasted effort just makes the whole process longer. I think learning a new fight is fun, but once I’ve learned the motions to perfecting a fight, I don’t want to waste my time redoing a fight I know.

The sticking point of how much of a grind there is in Dragalia Lost is that all of it is important. Each daily is still necessary to complete. There is a mechanic where you build up facilities in your home base that require materials from the daily events to level them. The end-game requirements for leveling these buildings is incredibly high. There isn’t any room to not do the dailies and continue to power up these buildings. The same goes for weapon crafting and adventure leveling. Crafting every weapon of a specific type (lance, sword, axe, etc.) in the game gives additional benefits to that weapon type. Powering up every adventurer will soon add additional benefits to adventurers of the same element. It isn’t possible for a player to simply skip the easiest content to save some grind without losing out of some sort of benefit.

I don’t know if the basis for Dragalia Lost’s rate of adding content is due to the “keep moving or die” nature of mobile games. Ultimately, I’m ready to admit that it’s all too much for me. There are challenges that aren’t a weekly or a daily, but are still important to progression like Void Battles or Astral Raids. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Dragalia Lost. Even if I don’t play for the end-game content anymore, I’ll likely keep the game downloaded on my phone. The character stories will always be interesting to me, and I’m invested in seeing where The Prince’s journey ends. It’s just becoming harder and harder for me to see myself playing the end-game content. Succeeding in the end game now requires hours and hours a week to progress. If a person only wants to play this one game, too much content is probably not a problem for them. What I wanted it to be is a quick dip in and out experience. Dragalia has evolved past that though, and I don’t think I have the stamina to keep up with it.

[Sentence about the Switch Pro.]

14

TalkBack / Apex Legends (Switch) Review

« on: March 12, 2021, 01:47:00 PM »

Sentence about the Switch Pro.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/56533/apex-legends-switch-review

Apex Legends by Respawn Entertainment is a known quantity at this point. Even Switch owners who haven’t had the chance to play the game before now have likely heard of it. It released a little over two years ago to critical acclaim and massive player numbers. The game has only gotten bigger since and recently broke the previous record for highest player counts this year.

All the praise and popularity is worth it. Apex Legends is a unique take on the battle royale formula while also innovating it in ways that are being adopted in games outside of the genre. Built off the back of Respawn’s other phenomenal game, Titanfall 2, the movement and guns are as fun to use as they were there. Battle royales are traditionally solo affairs of one person trying to scrounge for supplies and live longer than everyone else who dropped onto an island. Apex Legends is a team-based version of that. To facilitate players working together, Respawn included a way to revive fallen teammates by placing respawn beacons around the map and developed a ping system to allow players to communicate when voice chat isn’t an option. It’s the ping system that is the most revolutionary implementation. A player can get across essentially everything there is to communicate with a teammate by pinging. Enemy locations, where to move next, unopened item crates, opened item crates, equipment that your teammates need and more can all be announced with one contextual button press. Apex Legends is a great game on PC, Xbox and Playstation.

Then there is the Switch version. I was so excited when Apex Legends was announced for Switch. This being a handheld console, I knew that it wouldn’t be as pretty as other versions or run at the same frame rate as other versions. I’m not a big graphics or frame rate person, so I wasn’t too bothered by the announced resolutions and frame rate before launch. My expectations were already that the game would be 30 frames-per-second, and while 540p in handheld mode isn’t ideal, it’s workable. The fact that all my skins and characters were locked on PC is annoying but not a deal breaker. Nearly all the skins in the game look bad anyway. If I could just unlock Rampart quickly, I was fine. I like playing her the most and the starting roster has enough characters that I think are fun. My problems with the Switch port aren’t due to my expectations being too high. I had already accepted all the caveats that should have come with a handheld Apex Legends port.

Unfortunately, the performance of the game is even worse than my adjusted expectations. I still think that 30fps would be fine, but the time Apex Legends spends at 30fps is minimal. Too many characters appearing on screen will cause frame drops. Shooting a gun will cause more frame drops. These two occurrences happen quite often. The resolution also isn’t the only problem with visuals on Switch. Frequently textures won’t load into the game. Seeing a textureless Pathfinder perform a finishing move once is kind of funny, but texture loss happens all the time. Opening menus will see sections of those menus disappear. I’ve opened the healing item wheel to switch to a Med Kit, but the wedge of the wheel that shows Med Kits didn’t appear. Apex also includes in-game voice chat to communicate with friends and other players, but it doesn’t work. Whenever my friend tried to use their voice system it came through with a lot of cutting out between syllables.

The worst part of the Switch version of Apex is the draw distance. How far away you can see enemies is much lower in the Switch version. Where in the PC version it’s possible to see enemies across the river canyon near Caves, this is impossible on Switch. Such problems are wildly exacerbated playing portably. I was constantly moving the console closer and closer to my face to try and see who was shooting at me. It’s this difference that makes me think crossplay being on by default is a mistake. I never would have guessed that tweaking the effective visible distance would make it feel like an entirely different game, but I do now. Playing against other players with a functional ability to track at distance feels like playing an unfair version of two different games that happen to have crossplay. Strategies that are possible on PC and other consoles simply aren’t on Switch.

Not everything about the port of Apex is doom and gloom. Gyro aiming is in the game; I even think it works well. It’s not perfect since it doesn’t include the option to recenter the cursor by pressing a button like Splatoon, but it works. The entire control scheme took a second to figure out how I wanted it configured since there are a large number of settings options. After getting that settled, aiming feels good. Gyro aiming allows me to control the recoil patterns that I would have with the standard control options on other consoles. Tilting the controller down to account for recoil is a much more natural reaction for me than pulling the analog stick down.

The Nintendo Switch version of Apex Legends is the most disappointed I’ve ever been in a port. I was so excited to play it. Playing a lower resolution, lower frame rate version of the game was something I would have been fine with. It isn’t just a lower resolution and frame rate version, though. Apex Legends on Switch drops frames at the first sight of game play, and it’s an uphill battle, to say the least, when trying to play against other versions that have definite advantages. Even if this was the only version of Apex to exist, it would still be a bad game from a performance perspective. If you do only have a Switch, download it to see what all the hype is about. The game is free, and maybe the performance issues aren’t a big deal to other people. Whatever you do, make sure to turn cross play off.

[A genre blending adventure that devotes itself too much to a theme]

15

TalkBack / Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Switch) Review

« on: March 01, 2021, 11:13:03 AM »

A genre blending adventure that devotes itself too much to a theme

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/56455/anodyne-2-return-to-dust-switch-review

The first thing to know about Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is that if you haven’t played the original, you’re safe to play the sequel. The first screen in the game is a note from the developer, Analgesic Productions, stating that each game is a separate story. The original Anodyne is a pixel-art, top-down, action adventure game in the vein of the 2D Zelda series. It’s very easy to imagine what the game plays like by that description if you missed the original. The sequel is harder to describe. Anodyne 2 blends genres and art styles in a way that prevents it from being just one thing. It still contains the top-down action adventure style of the first game, but also includes low-poly, low-resolution 3D open world exploration elements and throws in a little bit of a rhythm game.

The gist of what you’re doing in Anodyne 2 is your assigned job, being a Nano Cleaner. A Nano Cleaner is a person who can shrink down to a microscopic size and enter other people’s bodies to remove a corrupting force known as “Dust.” The 3D exploration part of the game features driving around these basically empty 3D environments until you find a Dust corrupted individual. Once one of these individuals is found, the player character will play a short rhythm game section to get close enough to the person to shrink down and find where the Dust is to remove it, like a Magic School Bus and Osmosis Jones crossover episode. Finding the Dust involves exploring a themed 16-bit 2D dungeon; later in the game there will be another layer added that includes 8-bit 2D dungeons. A narrative item given to you in the beginning of the game will turn that Dust into a card, which is used to upgrade a Dust containment device to hold more Dust.

It’s the act of playing Anodyne 2 that brings down my enjoyment with the game. So much tedium is baked into actually playing it. The problems are all symbolized by the in-game elevator, which takes you to three floors that you’ll visit throughout your adventure. The bottom floor is where you will upgrade the Dust containment device and the middle and top floors are where you’ll find cards. To go from the top floor to the bottom floor involves visiting the middle floor every time. There is no way to go straight from the top floor to the bottom floor. The entire process is: walking to the elevator, pressing the down button, going through a screen transition, arriving at the middle floor, pressing the down button, going through a screen transition, and finally arriving at the bottom floor. Extrapolate this experience to almost every mechanic in the game. That’s what it’s like to play Anodyne 2. It’s needlessly slow normally, and frustrating at the worst of times.

Everything else about the game helped me tolerate those design choices. From the very first notes of the soundtrack, I knew this was going to be a musical masterpiece. The OST is strongly influenced by the 8-bit JRPGs of the 90s, but twisted a little bit. It’s as if someone took those old school soundtracks and distorted them in a way that made them more ethereal and fleeting. There’s a hard-to-pin-down aspect to each of these songs that makes them feel like something new despite the obvious inspirations. I love this soundtrack; I love the happier upbeat melodies, and I love the pieces made of brooding tones. There wasn’t a time I was ever close to being disappointed with the music.

Accompanying those first few notes is a conversation between two recurring characters, Palisade and C. Psalmist. They walk the player character through who they are and what they were created to do. I like these characters a lot. Palisade exudes a motherly warmth and caring that feels genuine. C. Psalmist is a dork about protocols, but never seems like anything other than a good person. I can’t fully express here how well every character is written. Each person you help along your journey generally comes with a short monologue about their place in the universe. These monologues easily could have been self-aggrandizing, yet they somehow straddle the line between being small enough to not forget the person speaking them and using big ideas that should still be understandable to most people.

The story continues the excellence in writing. What starts out as straight-forward becomes so much harder to fully grasp at the end. Being a Nano Cleaner is sold to the player character as vital to the survival of the game world. After a few twists and turns, it’s not really clear if that’s true. I do have one big problem with the story writing in that at the end of the game, the player is given a choice between two outcomes. The entire time before picking an outcome each option is painted as a grey choice with pros and cons. After seeing both of these outcomes, one is definitely painted as the bad choice. I believe there’s a way to write what is the bad ending as something less unarguably bad. It feels like a missed opportunity since most of the game is spent thinking that either decision will have negative aspects to it only to find out that, no, one choice is 100% the bad one. I would have preferred if things weren’t so black and white at the end.

My first few hours with Anodyne 2: Return to Dust had me ready to write it off as middling. I could see the hook, and, overall, I thought it was fine. The writing and music were great. Each story-important character came with a vignette that taught me things about them that I was excited to learn. However, the act of exploring was really tedious. The 3D spaces are all empty. The 2D dungeons were hit-and-miss; some dungeons were incredible, but others were boring. Around the three-hour mark, the game had a dramatic shift in what you were doing. I thought here was where the game would leave all the tedious moments behind. This was where the game was going to only be great. Unfortunately, it didn’t. You just go back to the game as it was before. I had to struggle through more of the mildly painful game design: Back to the rhythm game that I don’t think adds very much. Back to the funky boat mechanics. Even though I know that including pressure points was likely intentional by the developers since they actually go along with Anodyne 2’s overall theme decently, that doesn’t excuse them. Anodyne 2 is a game that the farther away I’m from playing it, the more I’ll think about it fondly. In a year I’ll only remember the amazing atmosphere and setup that led to the scary chase sequence and forget how difficult to control that section of the game was. Right now, I’m living with all the great things and the frustrations simultaneously.

[Nintendo finally released another general Direct, but were the other ways of communicating better?]

16

TalkBack / The Argument Against General Directs

« on: February 18, 2021, 09:21:30 AM »

Nintendo finally released another general Direct, but were the other ways of communicating better?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/editorial/56312/the-argument-against-general-directs

I was walking to my car, fresh from watching the latest Nintendo Direct, going over all the great announcements featured in it. Except I really wasn’t. What I was actually thinking about was Splatoon 3 and Skyward Sword, and not really even that. The list of things that I was actually thinking about would be:

• Splatoon 3 looks great and I’m very excited for proper Splatfests again, but I kind of wish it was a spin-off game instead.
• As of right now, poor Metroid.
• Where’s Silksong?
• Did Skyward Sword have a release date?

It’s that last point that really struck me. After watching 50 minutes of exciting commercials for products that I would love to play, I couldn’t even remember a detail about the penultimate announcement. Then I started to realize I didn’t really remember all that much about any of the announcements. I made the list of things that I was actively thinking about; it’s not very long. If I had to make a list of things that were featured immediately after watching the General Direct, it wouldn’t even come close to covering a quarter of the things announced.

We’ve spent a year and a half without a general Nintendo Direct. In that time Nintendo came up with new ways to give fans information about their upcoming products. From where I’m sitting now, I feel like the new ways Nintendo shared information are more effective. Is seeing a tweet for a Partner Direct Mini as exciting as seeing as an announcement for a 50-minute-long Direct tomorrow? No. However, I could far more easily tell you what games were featured in the few Partner Mini Directs than February’s Direct.

The very first Partner Mini that everyone hated had Cadence of Hyrule DLC, that wrestling game that I wasn’t interested in, and the Shin Megami Tensei III Remake, along with reshowing Shin Megami Tensei V. The next one had Fuser, a Kingdom Hearts rhythm game, a rhythm game RPG duology, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. The one after that had Empire of Sin and Monster Hunter Rise. Out of the two of these games I listed, I only own two of them, but I remember the ones that I don’t months later (all the listed games were recalled from memory). I got to spend time with these announcements because I wasn’t distracted by the next big thing being announced literal seconds later. These announcements were more of a focus. The same goes for Twitter dropping a trailer video. I’ve never really wanted to play a Pikmin game, but I for sure watched the Pikmin 3 trailers. It was the big news that day, and I had five minutes to watch a Pikmin trailer.

It’s a similar situation to Disney+ dropping one episode of a show a week versus Netflix dropping a whole season at a time. The focus in the Disney strategy is placed on that one episode so people are talking about it for the day. The episode gets analyzed longer by a wider group of people. The meaning of the episode and the references get noticed in a greater capacity than when Netflix places a whole season in front of viewers. The focus in the Netflix strategy is placed on the big moments and the smaller ones get left behind.

Another unfortunate byproduct of full Directs is that part of the focus will be on what isn’t there. I know this isn’t fair to the games that actually do show up and get announced, but it’s hard not to wonder if Metroid will show up beforehand or think that Star Fox really is dead after it doesn’t show up. There is an expectation of big announcements in a full-blown Nintendo Direct. So much that after the Direct people start to think about the big announcements that didn’t show up over what games actually did.

This is a screenshot from Neon White, one of yesterday's announced games.

I know that being featured in a general Nintendo Direct is a big deal for developers and publishers. Selling video games to primarily Nintendo gamers is a lot easier to do if they land a spot in a Direct. Part of that has to be the amount of eyes on a full-length Direct compared to a Partner Mini. The last general Nintendo Direct before this February’s Direct was in September 2019; that video has 2.6 million views alone. Only one of the Partner Mini Directs has a higher view count. The 2019 E3 Direct has almost 4 million views, which none of the Partner Mini Directs beat. If a publisher wants more people to see their game, being featured in a sizable Direct is better. However, from my own experience, how much mindshare do those games actually have? How much mindshare did Neon White - a game that I think looks very interesting - hold with me? Not enough to last an hour after learning it exists. If it was announced in a Partner Mini, I probably would have been thinking about it for the next day.

I’m happy that full fat general Nintendo Directs are back. Part of it really does feel like the world getting back to normal. I’m just stricken by the fact that Twitter drops and smaller showcases informed me better on what was releasing soon or what was in development. Maybe this was too long of a Direct? At 50 minutes, this was close to (if not the longest) Direct Nintendo has ever released. Going back to the very first Direct Mini I can still name two games announced there: Mario Tennis Aces and Dark Souls Remastered. I don’t want general Nintendo Directs to go away again, but I think it would be better for the games included in them to be a more focused experience.

[Peeling back the fabric of reality is now on Switch.]

17

TalkBack / Cultist Simulator: Initiate Edition (Switch) Review

« on: February 01, 2021, 11:00:00 PM »

Peeling back the fabric of reality is now on Switch.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/56121/cultist-simulator-initiate-edition-switch-review

Weather Factory’s cult-hit Cultist Simulator has finally brought lovecraftian horror mixed with business management to the Nintendo Switch with the Initiate Edition. The roguelike, deck-building game tasks players with falling down the rabbit hole of occult mysteries, gathering a flock of followers, and bringing glory—or ruin—to their new cult. On the way to enlightenment, there will be investigators to handle, rival cults to stamp out, and many treasures to find.

Playing Cultist Simulator centers around moving cards. It first released on PC with a very intuitive way to move cards around (keyboard and mouse), but the Switch doesn’t really have that. Weather Factory developed three ways to move your deck around: a button layout, a joystick controlled cursor, and touch controls. Generally, these all work okay. The easiest way I found was by mixing the button layout with seldom use of the cursor. There were times when I wouldn’t know how to move the focus to certain cards with the buttons, so I would use the cursor to select them manually.

You move the cards in your deck to action slots. These consist of various verbs like Dream, Work, Explore, or Talk. The first verb for every character is Work. This sets up the day job for the chosen character, which is the primary way to earn Funds. Their day job also sets up how their interest in the unknown is piqued. A doctor will randomly remember a patient who was talking about worlds beyond view, or an inheritance will include strange journals or diaries. As that character's story opens up, so will the amount of verbs a card can be used with. Eventually, six verbs will open up in total.

The various uses a card can have with those six verbs is quite impressive. Meeting a character while exploring will add their character card to the deck. That character can be used with Talk for them to give you work contracts, Study for them to teach you a skill, or you can Explore a specific location with them to open up side objectives. That doesn’t only apply to character cards; Tools, Followers, and Lore Fragments all have numerous amounts of uses. There are cards that can only be used in one area, but each time I encountered that situation it made sense to me why that was the case.

The challenge of Cultist Simulator is that each action and most cards have a countdown associated with them. Playing a Follower with the Explore verb to wander the city means that Follower and Explore are both locked off for 60 seconds. If you suddenly need that Follower to destroy evidence or need Explore to create a specific card, you won’t be able to until that action is finished. Cultist Simulator is a balancing act of creating cards when you need them while also progressing toward an ending. Studying occult mysteries will take time away from protecting yourself from certain status afflictions like Trembling in the Air. The cards that protect the player from status afflictions also have a countdown before they disappear, so hoarding protection cards is impossible. All of this adds up to a frantic yet measured gameplay loop that is compelling to spend time with. I would sit down to play Cultist Simulator then find out that two hours had gone by before I knew it.

The type of balancing act that Cultist Simulator requires lends itself to unintentional hilarity. One of the stats cards in the game, Health, can be changed into An Affliction if you become unwell. If left untreated, that Health will be lost. Treating An Affliction can be done with the Dream action by combining it with a vitality and extra funds. Since I’m bad at juggling cards, I was woefully unprepared for changing An Affliction back into Health. One way around this is by using a card in an action as it will pause the countdown timer for that card. Around the same time I had recruited a new Follower, Leo. Bright-eyed and eager to delve into the depths of the invisible world, Leo was unfortunate enough to be responsible for how I paused the timer on that particular Affliction. Leo’s first three turns as a believer were spent not participating in ancient rituals but instead talking to his boss about how his tummy hurt.

There is plenty of time for these unintended moments because each run is incredibly long. It’s easy to play Cultist Simulator for several hours and not make much progress. Part of that is caused by the low amount of instruction available in game. Not everything is a mystery here, but experimenting with card combinations was an intended focus from the developers. This does mean you’ll frequently have the feeling of spinning your tires while trying to figure out what to do or have to struggle through a few preventable deaths that feel unfair. My first few runs ended with my character dying to status effects that I didn’t know how to cure, the second of which saw my character lost due to accumulating three Fascinations. Cultist Simulator does say that spawning Dread or Fleeting Thought cards will stop this occurrence, but I didn’t know how to—and kind of still don’t—spawn them. Eventually, things become less mysterious as you put hours into the game, but getting there can be frustrating.

Another aspect of the long runtime is due to progress toward some victories being very slow. A normal victory would be by ascending various Way cards then performing certain rituals. This involves crafting higher and higher value Lore Fragments, which is done by combining two of the same or similar Lore Fragments and by acquiring victory specific cards. What cards the game gives the player is random, however. Eventually the ability to progress in one of the first ways possible will slow to a crawl that involves watching countdown timers tick down. There is a save and resume later option available, but Cultist Simulator has the potential for the longest individual run time of the roguelikes I’ve played. The length of a run can be doubly devastating since it’s possible to spend the good part of a week working on a victory then lose in the last moments.

The artistic trappings of Cultist Simulator are a mix of highs and lows. Quickly touching on the music, it’s basically background noise. The OST doesn’t really stand out and it faded to silence once I got into the groove of actually playing the game. Visually, though, the game is beautiful. Each card has a lovely piece of minimalist art with pops of color acting as a highlight and as a little hint to each card’s function. Collecting books about different bits of occult knowledge is a big part of the game, and knowing which subject a certain book will be about is explained by their color. The Knock principle is represented by purple and Forge is represented by a muted scarlet. Outside the cards, the game has a lot of unused space. The background is often empty, and Weather Factory rarely takes advantage of the real estate. Occasionally, a bigger drawing will pop up to signal an important event happening, but most of the time it’s left empty. It feels like such a waste since the other pieces of art in Cultist Simulator are fantastic.

Cultist Simulator: Initiate Edition is a neat little package. Weather Factory made an effort to be sure it would control well enough on the Switch. All three of the game’s previously-released DLCs are included, too: The Dancer, The Priest, and The Ghoul. The new characters and mechanics of the DLCs are available upon starting the game. Overall, the game also runs like a dream. The kind of care to give Switch players an experience as good as other versions is really nice to see. I do have problems with the gameplay, like it being obtuse at first or the overall length of a run being way too long, but in the end, I enjoyed my time with Cultist Simulator.

[Do you like spreadsheets?]

18

TalkBack / Empire of Sin (Switch) Review

« on: January 22, 2021, 07:18:40 AM »

Do you like spreadsheets?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/56037/empire-of-sin-switch-review

Empire of Sin, the strategy and management game from Romero Games, had a fairly rocky launch on the Nintendo Switch. Performance issues were cited frequently when people mentioned the game. It’s unfortunate since the top-down tactical RPG combat and the business and real estate management sim aspects of the game are rare to find in a higher profile release like this. Over a month after release and a few patches in, does the game still have issues?

This is how the game should look.

Well, yes, it’s still a very rough game from a technical standpoint. The visuals are blurry; textures that should have some dimension to them, like clothing or cobblestone, are flat. Lag spikes are frequent. Animations will occasionally not play or sound cues will be missed. Commands for your characters take a few tries to execute. The performance-related aspects are actually a noticeable bit better when playing docked; animations are much less likely to be skipped, for example. Lite owners and mostly-handheld players like me will have to live with the hiccups, however.

This is how the game does look.

Empire of Sin sees the player take control of a fledgling gang in 1920s Chicago and tasks them with taking that gang from the dregs of society to mob royalty. But first, you need to pick a gang. The variety of options here are a little staggering at first with fourteen gangs that all have different benefits to choose from. I picked the Hip Sing Tong due to their gang leader, Sai Wing Mock, having the ability to throw poison bombs around the battlefield, which sounded cool. There are other benefits to bosses that are less visceral. Any brothel owned by the Hip Sing Tong gets an extra guard automatically as well as the cost to upgrade casino games being 20% less.

The intrinsic perks of your gang affect the management sim part of the game. Conquering Chicago is done by obtaining and growing businesses. There are a few types of businesses, called rackets in game, that you can run: breweries, speakeasies, brothels, casinos, and hotels. The player can invest money into each business to grow them by improving the ambience or the word of mouth. Owning successful rackets brings in a higher weekly payout. You need money to make money here, so making each business as nice as possible is key. You’ll start the game with a brewery and a few other rackets, but expanding is up to the player.

Acquiring businesses has a few different methods. Some buildings can be bought outright, but others have occupants that need to be kicked out first. The safest buildings to take over are thug occupied buildings or those owned by minor gangs. These will have the least amount of blow-back from displacing the tenants. Expansion becomes tricky when you take buildings from other premier gangs. Going after these buildings means snatching something from people who don’t take too kindly to having their stuff taken. Rival gangs will try to take their property back if your favorability rating with them gets too low. Protecting a building means investing in Security to increase the number of guards that building has. The police are also a faction in Empire of Sin. Each business is illegally run, so slowing down suspicion by investing in Deflect is another way to protect a business.

Dealing with other rival gangs can also be done diplomatically. As mentioned earlier, other gangs can lose favorability toward your gang, but sometimes they can like you. For my playthrough, everyone hated me. I think it’s because I kept accepting business deals with other gangs despite certain factions hating the people I did business with. Inter-gang relationships can be checked in the Diplomacy tab to see who has relationships with whom. The diplomacy tab is also where you can offer trades with gangs, form alliances, or just plain give people money to like you. Another reason everyone probably hated me was that I was always bribing the cops so they would like me. I didn’t want them to raid my businesses. I understand why that would make all the other gangs hate me; when you’re surrounded by people living outside the law, they probably aren’t going to like the person who is snuggling up to the police.

How combat plays out in Empire of Sin is tactics style on an isometric grid. Every member of each gang gets a turn to perform actions like moving, attacking or using special abilities. The turn order is based on each member’s initiative stat. Each unit will have two action points (AP) to use during combat. Generally, they’ll be used to move behind cover and then attack, but more powerful weapons like sniper rifles take both action points to use.

Special abilities are unique skills that each unit has like reducing an enemies defense or applying status effects like bleed or slow. Which special abilities a unit has access to is determined by their class, an overall distinction on how they play, or what that unit can do for you. Enforcers are about getting into the fray or protecting your crew. Demolitionists have access to explosive skills. There is also an element of customization with each unit. As a member spends time on your crew they’ll have the chance to learn new abilities, and you pick which abilities they learn. Does your crew need someone to flush enemies from cover or do they need an attack that hits multiple people?

Combat is risky, though. It has the ability to leave lasting effects on your crew. Taking enough damage will actually harm a hired member psychologically. My first gang member, Hugh Miller, acquired the trait Hair Trigger due to taking too much damage. If anyone in the gang takes too much damage he starts to act on his own and fires wildly at any nearby enemies. Fortunately, there are also good traits to acquire over time. If a crew’s morale is high for long enough, units will gain the Happy trait. This means they’ll perform better in combat, because they like working with you.

On top of being a tactical RPG and a management sim Empire of Sin is partially an open-world exploration game. There are real-time-generated neighborhoods of Chicago to run around in. Ducking down an alley could lead to finding thugs guarding gear or side missions to improve non-combat stats, such as persuasion, of the controlled character. It’s surprising how much these little neighborhoods feel like an actual place. Random passers-by are found wandering the streets; corner stores have period-style signs; look-outs for other gangs patrol areas. A lot of the feeling of the neighborhoods derives from the sound design. I tried playing Empire of Sin once on mute, but I missed how vibrant the world sounded. Without the beep of cars rolling down the streets or the chatter of the locals, the game loses a lot of its luster.

Despite how enjoyable walking around 1920s Chicago is most of your time will be either spent in the combat sections or going over spreadsheets for the various elements of the game. Each neighborhood has a number of spreadsheets of information with each individual racket in that neighborhood having more. In addition to those spreadsheets, each rival gang has numerous spreadsheets to hold information and every potential gang member has spreadsheets of information. I don’t mean this as a negative; I enjoy getting a peek at granular details in games especially with how easy it is to find information due to the number of sorting options. It helps that all of the information contained in these spreadsheets is useful. I needed to know which gang liked me and which didn’t, who my hired gangsters hated/liked/were in love with, the overall preferred alcohol for a neighborhood, or which of my rackets weren’t full of customers. These pages are where that information is found.

There are a lot of good things in Empire of Sin. The combat has a lot of room for variable play styles. The diplomacy systems make every play through unique. I love the neighborhoods they crafted. This is a game built around the idea that emergent gameplay is fun, and it is. That’s why the technical problems are such a bummer. Empire of Sin is a good game, but the Nintendo Switch is the worst place to play it.

[Unto another unfair death.]

19

TalkBack / Unto The End (Switch) Review

« on: January 09, 2021, 12:18:20 PM »

Unto another unfair death.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55914/unto-the-end-switch-review

Unto The End by 2 Ton Studios is likely going to be a love it or hate it type of game. It isn’t the story that causes this, which is benign in a bland way. You play as a lost father trying to find his way home. What would cause Unto The End to be divisive is the gameplay. It’s a 2D weapon combat game. Enemies either attack high or low while you need to block those incoming attacks and respond with a high attack or low attack of your own. The tuning of the combat such as enemy damage numbers or how quickly the player can react to attacks along with a complete lack of any explanation of mechanics is what really makes the game difficult.

I didn't enjoy Unto The End, but before getting into the reasons why, there are a few highlights worth mentioning. Unto The End is a beautiful game. It is a 2D flat art style depicting frozen tundras and Nordic imagery. The developers even did something very clever with the lighting settings: increasing the brightness in the settings menu only brightens the areas that are supposed to be lit. The contrast between the bright areas and the deep shadows is preserved, and I’m honestly surprised other games don’t use the same system.

The daunting part of reviewing Unto The End is that it’s designed to be hard. It’s made to push back against the player. So when I say that I haven’t had a lot of fun with Unto The End, I don’t want people to think that it was too hard; I actually enjoy a challenge in games. I beat The Radiance in Hollow Knight, and I beat Demon’s Souls without summoning help. What I don’t like in Unto The End is that it doesn’t play fair. The player has a strict set of rules for combat that enemies don’t, so they aren’t constricted like the player is. Actions taken by the main character are slow with long ending lag, so making the correct button presses in combat is key. Recovering from enemy weapon strikes also takes a long time. It’s not the same for enemies. Opponents can be hit square in the face with a sword then immediately hit back. You’re not allowed to do anything close to the same thing.

The heaviness of your character’s movements is almost a strength of Unto The End. There might not be a weightier sword strike in a video game than this one. For a small amount of time it’s exhilarating. After that brief window, the inconsistencies start to come forward. Putting up your guard to block incoming blows is slow, but dropping your guard is immediate. It’s hard to wrap my head around the difference in speed of certain actions. I either needed my character to be slow constantly or fast constantly, but they switch between the two. It’s hard to get a feel for how combat should work because of this.

There is an optional combat tutorial where the game will tell you how the game is supposed to work.

The inconsistency in character speed is exacerbated by the way damage affects the main character. Combat is traumatizing, with battle taking a physical toll that affects you long after that fight. Scraping through by the skin of your teeth will exhaust then eventually kill the player character via bleeding out if they don’t have a healing tonic or find a bonfire quickly. An exhausted adventurer will stumble around, act slower, or fall to the ground. My character has fallen off a ladder from exhaustion once after a particularly close fight. It’s honestly a system that I would love if it didn’t mean that not healing before another fight meant almost certain death. Even successfully clearing a fight while blocking all the attacks affects your character. I’m pretty sure there is a type of stamina system, but I can’t be sure since the game doesn’t give the player any information about it. The chances to heal are incredibly rare. From the beginning of the game to the end I found about five bonfires with some of those being hidden. The last stretch of the game has four fights in a row without a chance to heal or craft more healing tonics.

The rules of combat that govern how the player fights are flexible in a bad way. Everything works until it doesn’t. For instance, the game says that blocking an attack would prevent damage, and while this is true for the most part, sometimes blocking low when an enemy attacked low would still damage my character. There is one enemy that has an unblockable attack—it’s the final boss and is some nonsense that comes out of nowhere—but this wasn’t that enemy. The game says that some enemies will string together attacks that if all of them are blocked, the player would get a chance to do damage. This is true until it isn’t. I’ve had encounters where I’ve blocked a string of attacks that usually let me attack in that manner, but the enemy would block my strike anyway. I know these encounters are acting weird because I’ve done them dozens of times; Unto The End is a highly repetitive game. The player character often dies in one hit and enemies have large health pools, so I’ve had plenty of time to master certain fights.

My biggest problem is that 2 Ton Studios painted themselves into a corner. What is equivalent to a starting tutorial area features platforming deaths that can only be prevented by having died there once. The only saving grace of those is that they have lessons tied to them. One death was about jumping at the last possible second and another was to reinforce not panic rolling. Fight difficulty escalates very quickly in this area, too. The second combat encounter of the game is a fight against two enemies. When the earliest area in the game features gank fights and trial-and-error deaths, where does a development team go to make their game harder?

2 Ton Studios decided on more surprising trial-and-error deaths to make the platforming sections more difficult. Unto The End is a gorgeous game that wastes that style on massive amounts of blank space on the screen and foreground clutter. So many things are hidden by foreground objects, including traversal critical ones. Dungeons devolve into walking around small corridors while the Switch screen is 80% unused space.

Believe it or not, there is a ladder behind all this blank space in this actual screenshot from the game.

To make the fights more difficult, 2 Ton Studios started obfuscating whether an enemy would attack high or low. Several enemies have attacks that look the exact same whether they will hit high or low, especially in handheld mode. The fight that I spent the longest on is a sequence of two fights between a one-armed lantern carrier and then an older fighter with a long staff. I could beat the lantern carrier fairly consistently, but it was impossible to tell whether the older fighter would attack high or low. Instead of the fight centering around the “read-react combat” the developers intended for the game, it was a fight about guessing where the enemy would hit you. The only way I was able to pass that fight was by rolling around like mad, a strategy the game expressly tried to teach me not to do earlier.

I understand why someone would enjoy Unto The End. I’m sure that some players out there like being kicked in the teeth with their hands tied behind their back. That, personally, sounds like a bad time, much like Unto The End wasn’t a good time. If I wanted to play a game that didn’t function as described, I would at least play a game that kind of wanted me to like it.

[The elements of stealth.]

20

TalkBack / Wildfire (Switch) Review

« on: December 23, 2020, 05:04:00 AM »

The elements of stealth.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55846/wildfire-switch-review

Stealth games are a bit of a rarity on the Nintendo Switch. The highest profile ones are all ports of years old games like The Swindle, Mark of the Ninja, and Invisible, Inc. Fans of the genre are probably a little starved. Recently, Sneaky Bastards released a new addition to the stealth crop in Wildfire. The successful Kickstarter campaign paid for the development of the PC version, but it has now made the jump to Nintendo Switch.

Wildfire contains a lot of familiar features if you’ve played other stealth games. Enemies have set patrol routes that you must navigate while avoiding their line of sight. The player character’s actions generate noise that enemies can hear. Sounds are visualized by a ring emitted from the player character; enemies outside the ring won’t be alerted to your location. Objects in the environment can be used as hiding places to conceal the playable character. It’s standard play for the type of game this is.

How Wildfire twists gameplay is via the element system. You get to control and use fire, water, and earth to evade or defeat foes. Starting a brush fire will cause nearby guards to panic allowing you to run through unnoticed. You can grow vines on the side of a cliff face to climb to a path that wasn’t reachable before. Turning a water ball into ice will allow you to freeze enemies or other bodies of water. While the uses for each element are interesting on their own, I wish there were ways to use them together. All of the abilities are mostly isolated from each other. Holding a fireball will melt nearby ice you’ve made, but that’s about the depth of the interactions.

The visual effects of these abilities are a mixed bag. Fires have a very cool simulated pixel smoke effect that gives them a kind of liveliness. This wouldn’t have been possible if the smoke effects were done in a different way. How neat that particular visual flair is leaves the other elements wanting; nothing reaches the same heights for grass and water. They’re static and in the same style of the rest of Wildfire’s assets. Wildfire is a good looking game, so the art assets for earth and water still look good, but they do feel flat in comparison.

Each level is a playground to use these abilities in different ways. There are multiple routes to completing the objectives of each level, so it’s up to the player to find success in their own way. Wildfire pushes you toward experimentation through its challenge system. Completing a level without being noticed or without killing a guard will pass a challenge. The level City 2: Crematorium is easy to finish by going through the middle route if you’re okay with dropping a few guards into the cremator. However, If you want to clear the challenge of not killing any guards, then you’ll have to figure out a way to move along the top or lower routes in the level.

Clearing a challenge rewards you with spirit points, which are used as part of the RPG elements of Wildfire. Spirit points allow you to upgrade the abilities of your character, like increasing their throw range or how many hit points they have. The elemental abilities can also be upgraded, but this requires a different method. To improve element abilities, you need to find a shrine each level and then throw the element you want to upgrade into it. The element points will unlock new abilities or improve already unlocked ones like staying alive while on fire longer or increasing the length of spawned vines.

In addition to challenges, the game has a large number of difficulty settings for people wanting to spice up their replays. The difficulty options get down to a surprisingly granular level. Increasing how much area enemies patrol or whether outlines of your character show while they’re hidden are two examples. The fine detail in the settings also includes accessibility options. The standard colorblind mode is here, but Sneaky Bastards also included a mode that automatically rearranges the control scheme to make Wildfire playable with one hand and an option to have your character automatically jump while sprinting.

Unfortunately, Wildfire has a lot of slow down. In larger levels, which become more common later, setting a fire or alerting a few guards will cause frustrating amounts of lag. This is a slower paced game, so more time to consider maneuvers isn’t game breaking, but the slow down also affects the ability to execute those maneuvers. Occasionally during times of intense lag, Fire Jump, basically a fire-propelled double jump, wouldn’t trigger. I had to keep jumping in place until it would activate.

I'm pretty sure you're suppose to be able to read that text bubble.

Any attempts to alleviate the lag didn’t work. In the settings, there is an option to disable extra particle effects that didn’t help. Whether I was playing in docked or in handheld didn’t change whether levels had lag or not either. I did notice another weird impact of playing in handheld mode, though. Wildfire zooms in on the player character in handheld, which may be to keep a certain amount of detail visible. This has the consequence of cutting off some dialogue during story beats. The handheld zoom can be turned off in the settings, but it’s weird for the default settings to harm the gameplay experience.

The frequent slow down significantly hurts my ability to recommend Wildfire on Switch. The back half of the game features a near constant lag that had me hoping for the experience to end. There is fun to be had still; I liked going back through early levels trying to puzzle out how to make it through while completing the optional challenges. However, the amount of joy I gained from those experiences doesn’t negate the fact that Wildfire just runs poorly on Switch. If you’re interested, it’s probably better to play this on PC.

[How one change from the original improved almost everything about the sequel]

21

TalkBack / The Evolution of Energy from The Blind Forest to The Will of the Wisps

« on: December 11, 2020, 05:01:32 AM »

How one change from the original improved almost everything about the sequel

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/editorial/55736/the-evolution-of-energy-from-the-blind-forest-to-the-will-of-the-wisps

Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps are two titles that, naturally for a game and its sequel, have a lot in common. From the outside looking in, what it looks like to play these games is very similar. However, how each one feels to play and their overall design is totally different. The driving force of this phenomenon is the way a resource called energy functions in each. In The Will of the Wisps the resource is allowed to affect everything about the game. In The Blind Forest, it’s still valuable, but isn’t used in a particularly interesting manner and is fairly one-note. The original’s use of energy is let down by the mechanics it’s tied to and the failings of the ones surrounding it.

Technically, energy in The Blind Forest has a number of functions, but the vast majority of the time, energy will be used to create a soul link. These are basically checkpoints. Saving is integral to any game, and it’s no different here. Unfortunately, preserving progress being tied to a resource hamstrings that resource’s ability to effectively do anything else. While energy can also be used in combat and as a key to open new paths around the map, those uses are downplayed either immediately or later on in an effort to support the resource’s use as a save system.

The blue fire is a soul link and also the root of the game's problems.

One of Ori’s abilities that is powered by energy can be used both in combat and as a key, the Charge Flame. This is a move that creates a small explosion around Ori that damages many enemies at once or destroys certain terrain. Both of these uses are made less impactful by design. The combat uses of Charge Flame are almost never needed as combat is incredibly basic. Most encounters can be solved by walking away from the enemy and mashing the button for Spirit Fire. Later in the game, a new ability Stomp is learned that can destroy terrain at no energy cost.

There are actually two different locks that can be opened by spending energy. The specific terrain mentioned above and gates that open by spending four energy. The energy gates are more interesting due to holding back players without enough time spent in game to have extra energy or proper knowledge of where energy stones—a breakable object that restores energy—are nearby. Energy gates won’t be replaced by a new ability, but they do share a different failing of the Charge Flame locked terrain. In order to avoid using energy on anything superfluous, these locks are not required to be opened to finish the game. They’re all optional, except for maybe one instance. Locked paths with necessary routes behind them are exclusively opened with the no-cost Stomp. This robs The Blind Forest of an interesting scenario of needing to reach an area with at least one energy as well as some mystery of what certain paths hold.

The door to the left is an energy gate and the rocky section of ground to the right can be opened with Stomp.

How Will of the Wisps improves on the original is by freeing the resource from the checkpoint system. For the sequel, Moon Studios decided to use a traditional system where the game automatically saves at certain points on the map. This no longer requires the player to have an energy reserve on them at all times, so spending it to solve a current problem isn’t seen as a waste. This allows the number of uses that energy has to expand dramatically. Energy can be spent as a heal, a strong hammer swing, a bow and arrow, a light source, or various other moves.

This doesn’t remove energy’s other uses from The Blind Forest in its sequel. It can still act as a key. Just how to use that key is different. Shooting special switches with the bow can activate moving platforms. Unstable ground can be smashed open with the hammer. All of these locks can now be placed before story-required content. The balancing act of needing energy for puzzles while also requiring it to save isn’t an issue in Will of the Wisps. Tricky platforming challenges can be interwoven with shooting accuracy challenges.

The larger variety of possibilities also changes what energy stones mean to the player. Mouldwood Depths is an area designed around all encompassing darkness. Ori has to move quickly between sources of light since spending too long in darkness kills her. Halfway through the area, she gains the ability to illuminate her surroundings at the cost of energy over time. Traversing the area is now about quickly moving from energy stone to energy stone. Where areas of light were the safe spaces in the first half of Mouldwood Depths, energy stones take their place as safe spaces in the second half.

Energy’s new functions also have a notable effect on combat. Ori and the Will of the Wisps has a much better combat system with more interesting methods of fighting the enemies. Melee combat is now the standard with ranged combat or special effects being a bonus that requires energy. If there is an enemy up ahead that you don’t want to fight, then the lance ability can defeat them from afar. Some enemies have wooden shields that need to be burned away with Light Burst. Damage taken in an encounter can be healed back with the Regenerate ability. All of these have to be weighed against what that energy could be spent on in the immediate future.

The ways that changes to combat and world design combine are most elogantly demonstrated in the Kwolok boss fight. This is a boss that hovers over the arena floor and doesn’t touch the ground, so ranged combat is very useful. Moon Studios included an energy stone in the lower right corner of the arena so the player could always use their preferred ranged attack. This makes that section of the arena more valuable than the others as well as giving the player the goal of trying to stay or quickly return to the bottom right corner of the arena.

This also has the knock-on effect of letting the player continuously heal throughout the fight. Moon Studios likely didn’t want the ability to tank damage indefinitely in this fight to be a viable strategy since they designed around it. Half way through the fight, Kwolok floods the arena and takes away the player’s ability to stand on flat ground. Regenerate can only be used while Ori is standing on flat ground, so she can’t heal at all, even if she has an endless energy supply.

The change in the arena then shifts how Ori and Kwolok both fight. Ori can use her Swim Dash ability to fly into the air and reach Kwolok with melee strikes or cling to the side of the arena and shoot her bow from there. Kwolok has several new attacks, like shooting missiles that move fast in the air and slowly in the water or summoning water enemies. The summoned enemies can be sent flying into Kwolok to damage him using Ori’s Bash ability.

All of these changes and interactions in one fight come from the basis that saving the game shouldn’t be tied to a resource. How to fight enemies, how combat evolves over time, the way areas are designed, and a number of the other positive changes in The Will of the Wisps stem from that decision. Experimenting with different systems of saving is a worthwhile endeavor. Shovel Knight’s opting-out of checkpoints for rewards by destroying them is a similar idea but more successful, for example. Moving away from the experiment Moon Studios tried in The Blind Forest allowed Ori’s sophomore game to be much greater than its predecessor.

[More roguelikes for the roguelike console]

22

TalkBack / Shiren the Wanderer: Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Switch) Review

« on: November 30, 2020, 09:24:52 AM »

More roguelikes for the roguelike console

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55595/shiren-the-wanderer-tower-of-fortune-and-the-dice-of-fate-switch-review

The term roguelike when it comes to modern games generally means the level layouts change each run with randomized loot and perma-death, meaning the player has to start over from the beginning. These elements were present in the original Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, but a lot of other mechanics featured there aren’t typically carried over. Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate from Spike Chunsoft does use those mechanics, however, in what is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Rogue.

Shiren the Wanderer is a top-down, action roguelike with RPG elements. A couple of the often unused mechanics from Rogue appear here, such as how it’s turn-based: monsters can only act when you act, like moving one square or using an item. New items need to be identified. Equipment can have certain stats or effects bound to them that won’t be known until they’re equipped or identified by an NPC or another item. Some of these effects can be deleterious like items not being able to be unequipped or sealing some of the items effects like bonus damage.

The most notable way that Shiren the Wanderer diverges from more modern roguelikes is how character strength is handled. Other roguelikes make your character more powerful by finding perks that alter their abilities. For instance, you find a bow to use as a weapon and later you find a perk that causes the arrows to explode when they hit an enemy. This particular one makes the player avatar stronger by making them more versatile through finding tools. Obviously, doing more damage is still beneficial, but solving most sticky situations is accomplished by clever use of item effects.

The way this works in practice is that pots, staves, grasses and scrolls all have effects on either Shiren or the enemies of the dungeon. A Knockback Staff will push enemies away from you. Opening a Hilarious Pot will send surrounding enemies into laughing fits. Slumber Scrolls will put all enemies surrounding you to sleep. Opening the backpack is the most powerful option Shiren has in The Tower of Fortune.

The truly impressive thing about the items in Shiren the Wanderer is how many there are and each unique way to deploy them. The Hide Pot is an item that can be used to trap an enemy and take them off the field or Shiren could put themselves into it to dodge enemies for a few turns. I was blinded by one enemy, which makes the entire screen black except for Shiren, so I just hopped into my Hide Pot to wait until the effect wore off. Onigiri can be eaten to increase Shiren’s fullness on his hunger meter or it can be thrown at squid enemies to defeat them in one hit.

All of this information is before taking into account the actual narrative of The Tower of Fortune. The plot finds Shiren coming across a small village where one of the inhabitants, Oyu, has a terminal illness. Another villager, Jikorichi, is determined to climb the Tower of Fortune where a rumor says that collecting the three Dice of Fate allows a person to reroll their destiny. Shiren agrees to help him with his quest.

The game features a large number of supporting characters with side quests to complete. While helping Jikorichi and Oyu I met two fox-girls trying to solve a mystery. Some spoiled rich kid needs help exploring and not dying. A gambler still owes me 4,500 gitan. Some big cat with a gun is mad at me. All of these narratives evolve over the course of the adventure and could advance each run. No worries on repeating content because once progress is made on these quests failing a run won’t remove it. Even more stories and content—there are three version exclusive dungeons—opens up after finishing Jikorichi and Oyu’s quest. It’s impressive how much content and narrative is packed into a game that was originally released in 2010 for the Vita.

The emergent narratives that happen based on how these systems and side stories intertwine is my favorite part of this game. One run I found a small child walking around one of the dungeons. I wanted to make sure this kid was safe so I go talk to them. They mentioned they were separated from their sister and asked me to go find her. I went to the next floor and accidentally stepped on a spring plate, a trap which flings you to a random spot on the dungeon floor. I was separated from my allies, and the room I was flung to was a monster house; I was alone and surrounded by monsters on all sides. I had time to make one move before I was attacked by four different monsters at once which would have killed me. Also in this room was a cowering girl. This was the small child’s sister from before. I needed to defeat all the monsters in here to rescue her and complete their quest. I opened my backpack and found the Immunity Scroll I purchased at a shop earlier in the dungeon. Reading the scroll allowed me to defeat every monster in that room and save this person’s sister. She thanked me for aiding her and promised to repay me one day. Seeing this small story play out was heartwarming, and, at the same time, going from almost assured destruction to solving the puzzle in one move was satisfying. Not every solution will be as simple as turning yourself into an untouchable murder machine. Sometimes the answer is wolfing down Swift Grass and hoping the staircase is in the next room.

The Tower of Fortune has a lot to keep track of. All of this knowledge can get overwhelming, but Spike Chunsoft put a lot of effort into making sure that each mechanic can be researched in game. Somewhere in the main hub, an NPC will be more than happy to explain how a mechanic works. The bank teller will explain how and why anyone would store money there. If those NPCs are too hard to find, the manual that would have come with the physical edition of the original release is included digitally from the start menu. It includes a story overview and quick notes on how some of the grander systems work, like how to suspend your game, the different kinds of shops, and how the wanderer rescue system works. Wanderer rescue is a system where after dying in a dungeon an outside player can send you a revival herb to save your run. I didn’t get to spend too much time with this since the system wasn’t populated very much due to being in a pre-release period.

The first town houses the Beginner House that explains how nearly every item works by placing you in a mini dungeon designed around escaping with that item. I recommend going through every one of these. Success will come from knowing how items can fix a bad situation. Items have descriptions detailing how they can be used, but the tutorials go into more granular detail. How I knew to use the Hide Pot to negate being blinded was from doing the tutorial for that item. If you’ve ever been curious about playing a roguelike of this kind before, this might be the best jumping in point due to how much care Spike Chunsoft put into onboarding new players.

Speaking about the game artistically it’s very easy to gush with praise. The pixel art world is only ever a joy to look at. Each dungeon has its own distinct look and feel while also being breathtaking. Several times I had to stop and admire the beautiful scenery. It helps that each dungeon isn’t exclusively the inside of ornate buildings. There are a number of outdoor levels as well. The music is equally great, and I’m not even really a video game music person. Most of the time I don’t notice it, but here I found myself constantly bopping around to the background music.

Stretching for negatives to mention, I found that there is a lot of time spent in menus. With the importance of items, the acts of organizing and swapping around your inventory are essential yet tedious. Finding a more useful item on the ground means having to open several different menus. Making space for things by putting items into storage pots requires navigating a handful of menus. Another knock is that run length is pretty long. A full run has you going through three different dungeons with easily over 30 floors that takes a few hours. The suspend feature is very nice for picking up a run later, but there is some time devotion required to finish a run. Movement will also take some getting used to. Moving diagonally is decently important in the game. They gave you a dedicated “move diagonally” button to do it consistently; it isn’t exactly an elegant solution, though.

I know Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is a good game because I’m devoting small amounts of time to it. When I have 20 minutes to spare I’m calculating whether or not loading it up would be worth it. Success in game gives me the feeling that I did something clever. The side stories are interesting and I want to know how they turn out, and it’s a beautiful world to spend time in. I have a real feeling of regret knowing there is a lot of content here that I will never see. There are numerous aspects of Shiren the Wanderer that I couldn’t find a way to jam into this review like how allies function, the over 100 optional sokoban puzzles, the Minesweeper-like dungeon, creating new items at the Tanuki lottery house, fusing items together for new effects, and much more. For anyone wanting to dive into a game with real depth, this is a great one.

[More metroidvanias for the metroidvania console.]

23

TalkBack / Two Parsecs From Earth (Switch) Review

« on: November 14, 2020, 09:55:23 AM »

More metroidvanias for the metroidvania console.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55496/two-parsecs-from-earth-switch-review

Ratalaika Games publishes a lot on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Searching their name on the Nintendo website brings up 97 games they’ve released for Switch. Most of these are just okay. There are some bigger names among budget indie games like Daggerhood or One Night Stand, but their offering from ABX Game Studios Two Parsecs From Earth is more along the lines of just okay.

Two Parsecs From Earth is a 2D Platformer Metroidvania. Your character, Z3-L1, loses their ship’s cargo after crashing on an unknown planet. You’ll pilot them through various jumping puzzles trying to collect that lost cargo and a few batteries to power their ship. Along the way there will be new abilities to learn, which will allow them to reach new areas and new pieces of cargo. Finding an upgrade comes with a choice though. Picking one ability will lock you out from the other one. The game can be finished with either ability, but how you move and interact with the environment will change depending on which one you choose.

While the game overall isn’t anything special, there are still successful elements. Its visuals and artstyle are top notch. They might be a little on the simple side, but this means everything is clear and readable. A spike pit will look like a spike pit while also being aesthetically pleasing. The visuals are so nice that, in what will become a negative later on, the main character comments on how good they look.

I’m also a big fan of this map. There are two things that I highly value in a metroidvania: non-linearity and recontextualizing areas that you’ve already been. This map does both of those things. It’s possible to reach areas before you’re supposed to reach them. Cargo doesn’t have to be collected in a specific order. I’m pretty sure some lost pieces of cargo can be collected without unlocking the required ability if you try hard enough.

Changing how the player moves through revisited areas is core to a metroidvania’s experience and Two Parsecs From Earth does a great job with it. Heading back towards the ship with all the upgrades was a near continuous realization of all the pieces of cargo I could pick up now. Moving through old areas had a background chorus of “Oh! I can do this now.” The feeling of being capable of achieving what was impossible before is the strongest part of the game, and the only reason I played around in New Game+.

The bad aspects of Two Parsecs From Earth come in pretty quickly after the beginning of the game. First, the script isn’t very good, and I’m not talking about the concept. Crashing on an unknown planet is fine; I don’t need a big reason to go on an adventure. The main character is incredibly talkative, with Z3-L1 commenting on almost everything in an attempted quippy manner that doesn’t land. They once stopped in the middle of gameplay to cite how they hadn’t commented on anything in a while. Z3-L1 is Bubsy-esque in their verbosity.

The most egregious negative is that the movement controls don’t always work in a manner that one expects them to. For a precision platformer that is a big error. The player character dies immediately to any damage taken, so the likelihood you’ll be repeating sections is high. Needing to repeat sections because the player character did a jump differently than before is frustrating.

This occurs in several different ways. When jumping up a ledge, there will be times when they mantle over the ledge, but other times they jump over it. A number of obstacles require the use of short hopping, quickly pressing then releasing the jump button to achieve a smaller elevation, versus full hopping. This wasn’t always consistent. It would have been better if the two moves were assigned to different buttons. As well, Two Parsecs From Earth doesn’t include the mechanic known as “coyote time,” the ability for a character to still jump shortly after leaving the ledge. That’s more of a stylistic choice, but in the time where that mechanic would register nothing is allowed. Instead of using your double jump, they slide off the ledge and likely die.

With such a frail and difficult to control character, there's too much repeated content here. The only checkpoints are from screen transitions, so making any amount of progress is short lived. This led to me developing a strategy of collecting one cargo then backtracking to the screen transition to preserve any of the progress I had made. Some instances had incredibly long challenge runs that I abandoned due to not wanting to perform the same actions as many times as were required. Having a new checkpoint on each cargo collected in addition to one at screen transition would have helped immensely.

The sections that congeal all of the problems in Two Parsecs From Earth are the non-optional challenge rooms after picking up a battery. Z3-L1 is teleported to a place outside the map without explanation; it’s weird. As they are wont to do, Z3-L1 remarks on this being peculiar, which doesn’t actually make it better. The goal of these rooms is to escape a large flying enemy by traversing very precise jumping challenges. There is no room for error in these and the controls get in the way of success in all the ways described above. Landing in front of a ledge instead of on top of a ledge once means you’ll have to start over. The camera will also break in a way that makes it impossible to react to upcoming obstacles if you land in a specific spot from a jump. The field of view shifts too far right in a section where you’re running left, and the length of these sections is also too long for how not fun and difficult they are to complete. To top everything off, after completion Z3-L1 will comment on how unoriginal chase sections in a video game are. All three of these should have been cut from the final product.

The game is clearly designed around speedrunning. The developers want the interaction with Two Parsecs From Earth to be the player learning routes and completing them faster and faster. Times for Any% and 100% are tracked under the statistics tab. I can’t see this being something anyone would want to speedrun, however, simply due to it being so inconsistent. Pressing jump at the same time and in the same way will give you two different arcs of jump, and I can’t tell you why. The big goal for the developer isn’t successful. It’s unfortunate since there are some good things here, but unpolished movement controls among other negatives are holding it back.

[The perfect season for a spooky card game.]

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TalkBack / Ring of Pain (Switch) Review

« on: October 24, 2020, 09:45:45 AM »

The perfect season for a spooky card game.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55275/ring-of-pain-switch-review

Nothing signals the start of spooky season like the release of a new spooky game. Simon Boxer and Twice Different are joining the festivities with the release of Ring of Pain, a new roguelike, card-based, dungeon crawler.

Ring of Pain’s aesthetic elements are centered around one goal: to be disturbing. All of the art walks this line between beautiful but creepy so well. Even the use of color is focused on this goal. The way each character is composed of dark shades accented by neon streaks give them an otherworldly yet sinister feeling. Poison dart frogs use their neon colors to alert others that they’re dangerous and it feels like the highlighting in Ring of Pain is used for the same effect.

That’s before their actual form is mentioned. Most designs are off-putting in unique ways. The one I want to focus on is Owl, one of the narrative characters. There is a world in which I could think of Owl as cute. They have big doe eyes and bright yellow feathers. If they were small, they would be adorable. The upsetting part of Owl’s design is they have the proportions of a human adult. They have long, spindly arms and legs. Their hands are seemingly made up of only bone. It’s impressive the way what could have been cute is twisted. Owl’s design is overall unpleasant, and I think the development team would take that as a compliment.

The sound design of Ring of Pain is haunting. There isn’t really a soundtrack here; only noises which add to you feeling uncomfortable. The first loading screen you encounter is a perfect example of this. It’s really just a cute frog sitting on a lily pad. When the sound starts backing the cute frog is when panic starts to set in. There was this sense of foreboding that something bad was going to happen. All of this anticipation was achieved solely with background sounds. Nothing ever happens with the frog, but I felt a strong “I need this screen to be over” sensation due to the sound design looming over the scene.

Actually playing the game begins with the player avatar waking up in an unknown place and must piece together where they are along with the meaning of this place. During exploration there are two narrative characters, the previously mentioned Owl and a mysterious shadow creature. Each character preaches the virtues of either the light or the dark with the game culminating in a choice. The mystery of which character to believe is a decent motivation to continue with the game outside of the fun of playing.

While it’s easy to gush about the artistic elements, the gameplay isn’t as much of a triumph. Ring of Pain is still fun, but the systems here aren’t as impressive as the visuals or sound. The classic feeling of “just one more run before bed” is present. For the most part, how you’ll play a run is fairly standard though. The player avatar fights their way through gauntlets of enemies picking up items and spells with special abilities along the way. And there are a lot of items to pick up. The player has over ten different item slots, a spell slot, and a consumable item slot. Each run will have an entirely new way to play that character.

The interesting twist comes from the “ring” part of the title. All the cards of the dungeon are situated in a ring with the only intractable cards being the two in front of you. That means if an enemy card is on the current level, the only way to attack it or for it to attack you is for it to be one of the two front cards. Opening a chest requires moving around the ring until it is in front of you. Moving around the ring is easier said than done. Enemies will stop you freely moving in a direction until they are dispatched. It is possible to sneak past them, but getting caught will damage your character.

The ways to interact with each card can be altered by the items and spells you pick up. Sneak chance, crit chance, health, defense and all your other stats can be increased, but the real goal is acquiring effects. Attacks can be upgraded with freeze or knockback. A poisoned enemy will take damage with each rotation of the ring meaning they can be dispatched without actually fighting them.  Knocking back an enemy who is about to explode protects you from the blast. Some of these mechanics could use a little more explanation though. It took me a while to figure out curse resistance, for example. The strength of effects causes a successful run to be predicated on RNG more than some people might like. The progression system in place alleviates that requirement somewhat, but is slow to help.

It’s weird to say that all of these usually negative qualities are actually positives for Ring of Pain. Who ever really wants to be disturbed? I don’t. However, I can’t help but admire how efficiently Simon Boxer and Twice Different can disturb. This is a game designed with a vision which was successfully executed. Playing Ring of Pain to see that execution alone would be worth it. Fortunately, there also happens to be a decently compelling dungeon crawler in there despite some pain points.

[A short and ultimately underwhelming action-platformer]

25

TalkBack / Gleamlight (Switch) Review

« on: October 05, 2020, 03:45:00 PM »

A short and ultimately underwhelming action-platformer

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/55135/gleamlight-switch-review

Most of the hype for Gleamlight came after being featured in one of Nintendo’s Indie World showcases. The game was commonly compared to the 2018 sensation Hollow Knight. That comparison was driven by its hand-drawn art and the ominous tone of the trailer. Gleamlight isn’t a spiritual successor to Hollow Knight; it isn’t even a metroidvania. This is a double-edged sword since it should give the game space to be its own thing, but will probably lessen the amount of interest some people have in it.

Gleamlight is an action puzzle platformer. The environment is made up of rooms that either need to be traversed from end to end while defeating enemies along the way. In some rooms the player will need to find and destroy a red gem, which unlocks the room’s exit. Occasionally in between puzzles there is a boss to defeat.

This is also a short experience. My first playthrough was around two hours of total playtime. That itself isn’t a statement of quality. There have been a number of short games that are also easy recommendations like A Short Hike or Wide Ocean Big Jacket. Designing a shorter game is a trade-off though. There is usually an aspect of shorter games that would be worse off if they were a longer experience. Wide Ocean Big Jacket has a hyper focused narrative and A Short Hike has a densely packed world.

So what was gained out of designing a shorter experience? The answer is not much. There isn’t much story to speak of. You play as a lone swordsman traveling through a dark and dangerous world. You’re chasing a shadow version of yourself down into a cave system. Robots show up eventually. The game features no dialogue. Any narrative is up to the player to decide, but Dico, Gleamlight’s developer, didn’t leave many clues to what that is.

A tight combat system would have been a welcome, but the game doesn’t feature one. The main character’s moveset starts with simple sword swipes and essentially ends with that. New abilities are added while progressing, but they are mostly focused on traversal. Every enemy encounter is about weaving in and out their attack range until they’re defeated. The player character does have the ability to angle their swings up and down, which is neat. It allows the character to hit enemies one ledge higher or lower than them. However, that isn’t enough to make an intriguing combat system.

I can’t really say that Gleamlight feels good to play either. While playing my button inputs sometimes wouldn’t register. Upon encountering the first boss I kept getting stuck inside their sprite and the environment with no way to escape. I managed to beat them by spamming the attack button while trapped in the enemy’s geometry. Gleamlight’s strict no words policy extends to the controls. Each time an ability was added learning how to use it involved pressing each button randomly. Some of these unlocks are even deleterious; one of the jumping abilities started to damage my character after defeating a certain boss.

That isn’t to say that Gleamlight is joyless. The puzzle room variety is actually quite nice. Puzzle environments range from claustrophobic corridors to vast caverns. Some areas may have similar layouts, but I never felt like I was seeing the same room twice.

Along with puzzle room variety, there is also a good amount of enemy variety. New types of enemies with unique mechanics are introduced at a good clip. Back to negatives for a bit, this amount of variety doesn’t extend to boss designs. One of the boss enemies is repeated a total of three times. I didn’t enjoy many of the boss fights in Gleamlight, but this one I did. If there had to be repeat bosses, at least it was an enjoyable one.

The art style was the main selling point in the trailer, and is the highlight. The stained glass inspired visuals are delightful to look at. The area backgrounds are deep and detailed. Terrain is beautiful on its own, but post effects like adding shimmering to crystals really enhance their looks.

Gleamlight is a mixed bag. There are enjoyable aspects here. Unfortunately, there are larger and more numerous negatives. At the end of my playtime I was left wishing the positive aspects were in a better game. Taking everything into account, I would skip Gleamlight.