Dan Plays Games 5

 Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

Tactical Breach Wizards

I wanted fantasy XCOM, I got fantasy XCOM in the best way possible: an extremely fun puzzle game disguised as XCOM. It's gold stars across the board. Easily one of the funniest games I have played in a long time. Love the aesthetics. Setting is "modern day in a world not our own, with a light touch of the supernatural and we need more of that thank you. Plays similar to Into the Breach, where it gives you perfect information up front and you have to decide the best way to proceed. You're able to roll back your moves on a given turn an unlimited number of times, which is a godsend and I think it should be added to basically all tactics games as a difficulty option. The cost of experimentation and failure is low, and you know how much I love games that do that.

The Pathless

A minimalist masterpiece. It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful (Austin Wintory alert!), and it plays beautifully. Basically all of the game is movement (save the puzzles you stumble across in the world and a total of 5 boss fights), and this is a good thing because it feels absolutely fucking fantastic to move. It is a game that is designed to do one thing very well, and all the other cruft has been cut away. It’s not a complicated or difficult game - I don’t actually think it’s possible to hit a fail state - but that’s irrelevant in the face of its top tier status as a singular artistic experience.

Potioncraft: Alchemist Simulator

Didn’t land for me. You brew potions by navigating a marker around a map, with each ingredient moving the cursor in a different direction. If you hit the right spot, you get X potion effect. Sounds novel on paper, but quickly wore out its welcome in a single play session. There’s not much else to the game, and while you can save recipes to auto-create that’s only a minor convenience that didn’t really help me out.

Halo CE (MCC)

Replaying this for the umpteenth time, I’m beginning to think that the doom for the Halo franchise was written into this game: they got it down too good on the first try. The combat sandbox was so well-designed from the beginning that any changes in following iterations were destined to be either minor improvements, one-offs that don’t meet the cut, or mistakes. A trap of diminishing returns, unable to escape its own gravity well. You’d need an entire change of genre to move forward, and that’s a move that 343 is not willing to entertain.

Anyway, game still good. The opening of Silent Cartographer still manages to do a whole hell of a lot with not very much. Anniversary Edition graphics are mostly good but the character models look worse than the OG and there are some weird choices like adding plants all over the first part of Truth and Reconciliation.

Halo 4 (MCC, Spartan Ops only)

The sauce ain’t here, Chief. It doesn’t feel //right//, you know? It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t sound right. It feels right when you’re fighting the Covenant, because that formula is down to a science. The Prometheans, on the other hand, are fucking //miserable// to fight. They’re visually bland, their weapons are crap, and they seem designed primarily to be annoying. Even just playing two episodes of Spartan Ops I am already tired of them (and the devs are as well, considering that two episodes in we are already seeing map re-use). Swarms of Crawlers rush your ass and gun you down with their maxims (thankfully they go down with a single pistol pop to the head on lower difficulties), Watchers are both hard to hit and weirdly tanky, and the Knights’ teleporting doesn’t do anything beyond making the fight longer. With all the cool shit already in the expanded universe, and all the new and novel directions it could be taken, this is a profoundly mediocre disappointment. Either leave the Forerunners to the books where you can explore what makes them interesting, or actually include that shit in the game.

Terra Nil

I got to the part of the tutorial where they introduce the animal happiness mechanic and had a minor panic attack. Maybe I was just on edge that day.

Vampire Survivors (Replay)

I must once again state how immaculate the pacing of the gameplay loop is: you play, you unlock new things. You do something different, you unlock more things. And you’re always unlocking something, because they give you a big checklist and you can go wham bam thank you ma’am and knock out a chunk at a time with some strategic task consolidation. Makes dopamine receptors go brrrrrrr. 100%ed this sucker and then uninstalled.

Vampire Survivors (Ode to Castlevania)

This and the Dead Cells DLC are the best Castlevania games to come out in who knows how long, so take that as both a condemnation of Konami and praise for the “hey here have a DLC that’s just a new game”.

 

Potionomics

I am torn on this one. The vibes are charming, the art and animation are great, the gameplay loop is engaging…in theory.

In practice, even on the easier difficulty they recently added, I find the gameplay loop a stressful nightmare scenario where you never have enough money and never enough ingredients and never enough time to do the actual challenge you are supposed to be accomplishing, because you are too busy barely keeping yourself afloat in the hopes that you might be able to accomplish one of the prerequisites of the challenge you’ve been handed.  

Instead of being a tense challenge that rewards you for strategic play (as I presume was intended), you end up hitting a point (mine was week two) where you are stuck flailing around blindly as you drown, and given the way the game is structured, unless you have been diligently making a new save file for each individual day, that time is wasted. There’s no strategy to be had, because I not only don’t have the time or the resources to make a plan, several of the options for where to put those resources are outright traps!

The devs made an extremely good simulation of the experience of poverty, which as it turns out isn’t fun. I might give it a clean sweep and a new save and keep a wiki open, but if it doesn’t click by Week 2 then it’s a hopeless cause.

Update: The game, thankfully, has a very generous autosave system - it autosaves every morning back to the beginning of the game, so I was able to go back to the start of Week 2 and didn’t have to restart the entire game. It is a lot smoother this time around, though that is wholly because I ended up looking up information outside of the game.

Things the Game Does Not Tell You That Are Vital To Actually Having Fun

• Give everyone a gift every day; only hang out if you have time to spare and / or need to relieve stress.
• Send Mint and the other adventurers out as often as you can, even if you can’t do a full expedition; this is your main way of getting new materials.
• Negative traits don’t have any effect on adventurers; you can give them whatever disgusting bullshit you please.
• Custom orders are a trap and you shouldn’t engage with them at all past the tutorial.
• Baptiste’s expeditions are mostly a trap, and really only useful if you have money burning a hole in your pocket and one of the items on offer is new to you.
• Buy and use fuel whenever possible, even if it’s just straw.
• Be friends with Muktuk; you get Pump Up and Enthusiasm very early on and this is a bread-and-butter combo.
• Most cards you unlock aren’t going to be game-changers.
• The difficulty curve is entirely busted; the first week and a half is extremely hard, but if you can survive to Day 14, then you get the Vending Machine and can easily make a couple hundred extra gold per store opening just by selling garbage potions. Then you can start snowballing by buying shop upgrades from Saffron which will give you more potion slots to sell per opening, plus more cauldron slots. If anything this has actually made the game go from impossible to extremely easy on a dime.

I am now actually having fun with the game, but ye gods is the balance entirely busted.