Dan Plays Games 7

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

I'm trying to get better at actually finishing games I own instead of just buying new ones. I am not very successful thus far.

 

Pyrene

My feelings are complicated on this one. On the whole, the game is fun; I like the aesthetics and its roots in Basque folklore, but something in the roguelite gameplay loop and the difficulty curve is a little borked.

Every area has a spread of cards - enemies, items, yourself - and you move yourself around defeating enemies until you clear the area, repeat across 3-5 biomes. New characters are unlocked as you progress through the story, new items and abilities are unlocked by upgrading buildings in the village or completing “do X thing Y times” objectives. So far so good. You can make some disgustingly overpowered builds, which is always a plus.

The issue I kept running into was that the story locks your progress behind character-specific runs - you unlock a new character, and then have to complete a run as them to progress. Using anyone else will only get you more upgrade materials for the village. This shakes out with you spending more time playing as characters you don’t like / are having trouble with rather than characters you do, though there are thankfully a lot of difficulty adjustments that you can toggle on and off as you see fit.

If you're playing it as a normal roguelite with the normal cycle of “do run, return home, upgrade, go back out”, you’ll run out of things to upgrade long before you reach the end of the story thanks to playing and losing as characters you don't like; the last village upgrades are locked behind beating said story (and are postgame challenge stuff anyway), so the back half / third of the game just doesn’t really have any meaningful metaprogression unless you’ve been moving through the story faster than you can unlock things.

But then again, I really liked the last character in the story mode so I can't even say that it ended on a bad note. It's got flaws, but I still hit credits on it and enjoyed my time with it. Not being a forever game with endless depth is okay.

Pokerogue

This is a dangerous game if you have an addictive personality. The gameplay loop is that tight.

It's a basic framework: you draft a team, and then try and survive 200 waves of increasing difficulty It's simple superficially, but in shifting Pokemon to a roguelite gameplay structure, all of the weird gribbly background stuff that only matters to competitive players suddenly becomes both important and fun. It’s downright miraculous, and it’s such a dead fucking simple change.

When you catch or hatch a pokemon for the first time, its lowest evolution is made available as a starter. For every duplicate you catch or hatch, any new natures, abilities, IVs or egg moves are added to the gestalt. Using / catching / hatching a ‘mon gets you candies that you can use to unlock passive abilities (in addition to the normal ability), reduce point costs (you have a budget of 10 points for your starting party) or buy eggs (which have better odds of getting you a shiny or a rare egg move)

And then you can pick and choose what you want to start with.

Bolded for emphasis. In a normal Pokemon game making a specific build is an exercise in psychopathic tedium and monster eugenics, and it doesn’t matter whatsoever unless you are playing competitively. This bypasses all of that and lets you unlock new options just by engaging with the basic premise; after so long, there is finally a game where catching them all is actually a fun part of the gameplay loop. Even the egg gacha mechanics are fun, because you will regularly be surprised with a helpful egg move, a new shiny, or a hidden ability that you can then start building around; You're always making progress on something. (Again, part of the addiction loop. But it is still very satisfying.)

My one major issue is that the first two areas are always the same, and tend to get pretty boring even when you have a solid fighting type to clean house. The secondary issue is that once you start getting a team settled down, the grind becomes a lot more apparent. But when you're on a good run, man does it feel good to put on a podcast and grind out a couple dozen waves.

 (I have a Houndour with some truly obscene type coverage via egg moves, I love my walking nuke hellhound son.)

Spiritfarer (Revisit; original review 2023)

I started up a fresh Spiritfarer save after our cat Peaches died back in March (three cats in three years, folks. It’s been bad) and have been chipping away at it since then. It was the game I needed. Probably needed it anyway just considering the state of the world. Death has been on my mind a lot, of late.

In a media landscape that is so obsessed with death and so gleeful in its depictions of doling it out, Spiritfarer stands out as an anomaly. There are lots of good depictions of mythic Death out there, but very few of the part that comes before. The dying part, the winding down, the knowing and the dreadful waiting. Pratchett’s witches get it, no surprise there, but it’s a pretty barren landscape elsewise.

And then Spiritfarer sails in, with its music and its animation and its color and its warmth and joy and brushes with the transcendent, and it gives you the job of preparing spirits for their final departure. It invokes what is probably one of the oldest and strongest fantasies in humanity: the good death. Of going out with dignity, without regret, with all affairs in order, in the company of loved ones.

Very, very few people get that luxury. Have ever gotten that luxury. Most of humanity has died in pain, in terror, alone, without warning. If you’re lucky, you get to say goodbye.

And then Spiritfarer sails in and says “Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that”, and the effect is something like a glimpse of the elves on their way to the Grey Havens.

The gameplay loop is smoother the second time through, when I know what I’m doing, though I am reaching the point where many of the issues that got me to stop cropped up. Let’s see if I can play smarter. The biggest issue so far is if you drop the loop: Say you forgot something (easy to do in this game). You missed a passenger for a while, or you kept one around longer than you needed to. It’s entirely possible to get yourself trapped in a resource bottleneck where your only way to progress is through this One Specific Thing, and you’re stuck essentially going in circles until you accomplish the One Specific Thing and the game opens back up a bit. I started feeling it this run through around the same point as I did the first time; things can really start to fizzle out around the 50% mark. I’m going to push through, because I do want to see this through to the end, but it is a pretty sizable flaw in an otherwise flawless experience. The defect in the Claw of the Conciliator.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for dropping the game in frustration after hitting one of those scenarios. But beyond that, I think Spiritfarer is one of those very rare works of art where the world is better - if only by a small amount -  for its existence. 

Path of Achra (Revisit)

Got back into this for a while. I’ve come to appreciate how, since the main gameplay loop is just “attempt to get to the end, and then do it again but slightly harder” nearly all of the achievements are based around getting to the end of the game with one of the 80-some prestige classes - it’s a small but welcome encouragement to vary up how you play the game. Makes it something of a puzzle, even: can you make a build that fulfills X requirements that can survive a run? This can cause frustration when you have a great build that still ends up getting absolutely bodied right at the end, but them’s the breaks.

The dev is working on a tactics rpg set in the same world, which I am very excited for. The guy knows the best lore is to just say cryptic, cool-sounding shit and let people’s imagination do the rest. More of that is always welcome.

Sorry We’re Closed (Addendum)

Serves me right for giving it a writeup when I was still very early on in the game.

You know how I said that it’s doing some very interesting things with the themes of love and how it changes people? About that: Sorry, We’re Closed operates on fairy-tale morality and logic. You are going to be given binary dialog choices (of the sort where the choice you make and what the character actually says are entirely different things) with no room given for nuance, circumstance, or anything remotely resembling how people would react to these things in the real world. I didn’t realize this until I was already getting frustrated with the story: Yes, game, I am agreeing with you that love can be a profound driver of personal change and growth: no, I don’t think that love is going to save the character who feeds people into an industrial meat grinder in front of a live studio audience.

Under fairy-tale logic, with everything and everyone heightened to an operatic dreamscape where nothing and no one is actually real, maybe it works. I don’t know. You have a woman who was dumped three years ago and still has a framed photo of her ex on the wall, being stalked/cursed by a demon that feeds people (that it kidnaps and attempts to force into romantic relationships in order to fill the hole left behind from the absence of God) into an industrial meat grinder, and everyone else in the side stories is heightened levels of dysfunctional - and your choices are only ever “yes this is fine, carry on” and “I am going to destroy this person’s life.” There’s never an option to put your foot down and say “I think you can make it work, but you two need to sit down and sort your shit out and I am not qualified to help you”.

It’s one of those cases where I would rather not have any narrative choice at all, rather than be forced into choices that I don’t want to take.

If I decide to continue with this, I will probably have further addenda.

Ender Magnolia

Like its predecessor, Ender Magnolia is a dang solid Metroidvania. Looks good, sounds good, plays good, I 100%ed it (admittedly, this wasn’t very hard) and I never 100% games. It’s not going to win any awards for breaking new ground and revolutionizing the genre, but there’s nothing wrong with playing the hits sometimes. 

Time Wasters

Fun little bullet heaven game where you zip around in a little spaceship. Good if you want something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power to play. You’ll get more bang for your buck from Vampire Survivors, but I don’t think anything actually does so that’s not much of a mark against it. You'll probably run out of steam relatively quickly, but it's fun for as long as it keeps your interest.

ENA: Dream BBQ

The natural evolution of the series is here: a new ENA video, but interactive. Does it make a shit-lick of sense? Maybe. Do I care that I don’t understand it? Also no. It’s free and it captures one specific Vibe that is just otherwise impossible to capture. Dream logic is damn hard to properly invoke and even harder to sustain, so keeping it going for an hour and a half (give or take) of playtime (this is the first episode of ???) is an achievement. If you enjoy ENA, this is more ENA.

Also, since Mike had asked me on discord if I had any utterly deranged lore ramblings about ENA to tide folks over until Nightreign, here’s what I’ve got: I’m sticking with a theory that this is some sort of hyper-immersive VR (to use Orion’s Arm terminology, a virch) setup that is slowly decaying due to unknowable outside circumstances, and none of the inhabitants truly realize it. Some of them clearly know that something has gone wrong, but I don’t think they know why. Environments / regions are going offline, people are losing their identities / selfs and becoming NPC-like subroutines, so on and so forth. ENA herself, I think, is a user who has somehow managed to accumulate or create a gestalt personality (we’ve seen at least three of them: Red/Yellow, Blue, and Grey) that’s taken on its own life outside of and potentially suppressing the original.

Gods vs Horrors (Release build)

Same as it was in the demo, now with more gods and relics and a lightweight unlock system. Still love the design of the pantheons - each is visually distinct (since all art is black, white, and one primary color) and each has a dedicated playstyle that you can build around / hybridize. It feels fantastic to fall into a disgustingly overpowered build. All that is good.

The bad is that the game absolutely needs some rebalancing and some more content. While I've been able to clear the 10 tiers for the first boss, the difficulty dramatically spikes on the second and third bosses way outpace any benefit the progression might be able to give you. Like with Pyrene, the pace of unlocks is out of whack with the difficulty (even factoring in the occasional disgustingly overpowered build), so you will end up unlocking stuff well before you have reached the endgame (or even the midgame, honestly) - to this day, I don't think anyone has beaten Binding of Isaac for how to pace roguelite progression.

Really hoping this one gets more support later on down the road. All the pieces are there, they just need more time in the oven.

 

Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

I'd played this last year, but I completely forgot to add it to a roundup for reasons I cannot begin to fathom (spoilers, it's ADHD), so here is a long-overdue review of the game as I return to play through all the new material that got added since I last touched it.

**

There is a point in Slay the Princess where the clever twists on the visual novel format and the joy of Jonathan Sims talking to himself fade into the background for a moment, and the only way to describe the experience is 'transcendent'.  It's an encounter with La Revacholiere. No other way, no better way to describe it. You'll know when you get there.

And it's not a one-off, either. You'll find that place again. Don't play too much of it at once. Let those moments live somewhere in your soul and return when you feel the pull again.

 

Promise Mascot Agency

It's an open world mascot management sim yakuza crime drama made by the people behind Paradise Killer and it is a certified banger. A great game for weird people. I fell in love with it instantly, in a way that's honestly hard to quantify. Saying "I like the vibes" is a disservice, because vibes are vague feelings about aesthetics: the vibes are immaculate, but hand in hand with the vibes it's just fucking fun. It feels good to play. It feels good to drive your truck around a run-down backwater town and talk to people. It feels good watching the agency expand and the numbers go up. 

The pitch is that you're playing as Michi, "the Janitor". You fucked up and lost the family 12 billion yen. So the boss lady exiles you to a shitty depressed town in the middle of nowhere to take over a failing mascot agency operating out of a roach-infested love motel. Your partner in business / crime is a mascot (who are actual beings, not humans in suits) named Pinkie☆ (the star is part of her name) who is a giant severed finger with a face on it and has had it up to here with just about everything and is disappointed that you didn't need her to go bury a body in the woods. You need to make a shitload of money and clean up this run down town.

Two little things that stuck out to me: one is possibly the only funny version of "ha ha, the goofy cartoon animal is obsessed with porn" (because he immediately follows it with "I'm an advocate for responsible usage and want to start a streaming service where everyone is paid fairly for their work"), the other is the exchange teacher from London whose voice actress I would bet dollars to donuts had done the same at some point (which I think is very cool. Loads of media overlook the complexities and texture of how people speak so I always like shouting it out when there's a case of "folks cared about this". Like how the Chow family in Sinners all have southern Delta accents like the rest of the cast and that establishes that they're second or third generation immigrants without ever saying it directly.)

Anyway: game fucking good, it's on sale at the moment and even if it wasn't it's 20 bucks and that is absolute highway robbery for the quality you'll be getting.