#this is the problem when i play solo rpgs. i make characters and i get INVESTED in them. INVESTED

[bmpmp3]

juniper

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hi folks, it’s Mint.

I’m on a mini-vacation this week so I’m going to be releasing some recommendation posts for things that aren’t related to requests (easy to queue), and I’ll be back to doing regular rec posts when I get back!

THEME: Cryptids

Whether you’re tracking them down in order to give them your heart or running as fast as you can in the opposite direction, these games are all about mysterious creatures (that usually live in the woods).

OKCryptid, by Tadhg Lyon.

You’ll never forget that night.

You had heard the legends before, of course, everyone had.  Now that you know the creature is real, one thought keeps playing through your mind:

Their eyes were… beautiful. You want to see them again.

Okcryptid is a tarot-based, GMless roleplaying game about finding mysterious, secretive, beautiful creatures, and hopefully, dating them. It can be played by 2-5 players, or as a solo journaling experience.

Regardless of whether you play this game solo or in a group, you will be investigating a single creature or cryptid. You can create a cryptid of your own, or roll from a provided table to make a completely new cryptid. You use a deck of tarot cards to represent facts about the Creature, bring you closer to the final Meeting, or provide prompts for each investigative scene of the game. Characters also have personal scales that will measure how much the Creature either wants to kiss them or kill them, which will affect how the final Meeting goes. If you want a game with a mix of romance and creepy thrills, you might want to check out OKCryptid!

Cryptid TV, by yanahn.

A plague of Reality TV stars has descended upon the sleepy town of Mountain Lake ready to hunt down (and capture on camera) anything that looks even remotely like a cryptid - your crew is among them to cause drama, fake hoaxes, and enact sabotage beyond all reckoning.

The catch? You have only a passing familiarity with eldritch world of Showbiz, also you are all SPOOKY CRYPTIDS.

Cryptid TV is a truly charming hack of Honey Heist that pits your characters against the world of reality TV. You can choose whatever Cryptid you like, although there are six recommended cryptos that come with special powers to make situations really interesting. Will you unveil yourself as a Cryptid and lose all sense of peace and quiet? Will you sell out and move to Hollywood to seek out fame and fortune? Or will you succeed in driving the producers away without blowing your cover?

If you like goofy situations and you want a chill one-shot for the cryptid - lovers in your life, you’ll want to check out Cryptid TV.

Cryptid Rescue, by Renasdoodles.

One of your own has been captured and you’ve taken it upon yourselves to rescue them! One problem: you’re all cryptids and need to keep from being discovered or you too will be captured!

Cryptid Rescue is a one-page RPG that can be played through within a few hours. 

This is a cute little game with two main stats: Stealth and Fright. Each cryptid also has an Attention bar that leads to your capture should you fill it all the way. You fill this bar a little when you successfully frighten someone or fail at stealth, and you empty it a little when you fail to frighten someone or successfully sneak somewhere. The game also comes with a few small roll-tables for the GM to figure out who was captured, where they are now, and what kinds of obstacles will stand in the way between our adventurous little monsters and their friend. If you want a cute, free game with a simple premise, you might want to check out Cryptid Rescue.

The Mystery Creature of Claytonsville, PA, by Nick Wedig.

That summer, our small town deep in rural Pennsylvania was abuzz with strange tales of the supernatural creature.  No two stories of the creature entirely agreed with each other. Everyone who encountered the creature seemed to see what they needed to see. 

Some who found the creature were terrified. Others were spurred out of their stifling, mundane lives. In the end, the creature left the town with more questions than answers. But the lives of the each witness would each be changed forever.

Once the stories started, they came in more and more frequently throughout the year. Then just as they reached a crescendo, the encounters suddenly stopped.

This game can be played in a group as large as 7, or as small as one - just by yourself. You use a deck of playing cards as an oracle for answering questions, both about the town that you live in and the protagonist that the group will be telling the story about. No matter the group size, there will only be one protagonist! After you set the scene and define your main character, the deck of cards is used to determine what obstacles show up, whether the character succeeds or fails, and what aspects of the story come to the forefront in each scene.

This game feels like a cross between a narrative storytelling exercise and a card game, so if you want to introduce storytelling to a group that likes that tactile sensations of board-games, you might find some luck with The Mystery Creature of Claytonsville, PA.

Expedition: Incredizoology, by Imagined Chaos Games.

Explore the Wyldes, pockets of our World where fantastical and mythical creatures roam freely. Trap, train, hunt and co-exist with these creatures and explore the incredible lands they inhabit. 

Incredizoology can be played solo, cooperative or with an 'Expedition Leader' leading the expedition. The Imagined Chaos System utilises the full gamut of your polyhedral dice, moment cards to resolve combat and encounters as well as extensive roll tables for exploration. 

I don’t think this necessarily needs to be focused on cryptids, but there certainly seems to be room for it. The focus is not just on the creatures that you’re exploring, but also the environment they live in: you’ll have to navigate the natural environment, account for the weather, and interact with strange plants as well! There’s also room to explore how people make themselves at home in wild places, although the fact that the default setting is in a colonial period may be a bit of a downside for some players.

I wonder if you could alter the setting to allow for expeditions in different times and places. For example, if you are explorers in a sci-fi setting or a space setting, what changes might you make to make exploration challenging? I’m also curious if you could combine this game with a creature creation game, such as Exquisite Biome, a creature generator that also considers the ecosystems of various fantastic creatures.

You can download free character sheets if you want to take a look at a few bits and pieces, and look at a review for this game on The Gaming Table’s Youtube channel!

MOTH//MAN, by Witch & Craft Games.

A night in the woods…a light in the darkness…an unearthly transformation…

Can you survive the MOTHMAN?

Armed with nothing but your wits, tools, and the clothes on your back, you must brave the forest that this mysterious creature calls home. Your reasons for walking this perilous path are your own…as are those of everyone around you. Every bump in the road is a potential danger, an irresistible call drawing the beast ever closer. One wrong move, and you might find that it had been lurking closer than you ever thought possible.

When the monster finally reveals itself, the night really begins, and only one question remains:

Who is MOTH, and who is MAN?

This game looks to be more suited for fans who like to mix a bit more horror into their Cryptid mix. Moth-Man is likely a real threat - especially since it looks like some party members might actually turn into a MothMan! If you want a game of suspense, surprise, and perhaps even a little PVP, you might like MOTH//MAN.

Loveland, by JD.

Hundreds of years after climate change killed humanity, the cryptids inherited the Earth. Living in the area once known as Loveland, Ohio are the Frogfolk. Not as strong or sophisticated as other new societies, their success can be attributed to their teamwork. Within their village each Frog is a member of a guild. Some are craftsmen, others provide services, but all are equally important in the survival of the village.

You are a member of the Gatherers Guild. It’s your job to venture out of the village, gather supplies, explore ancient ruins, and communicate with other factions.

I find the idea of playing Frogfolk very charming, and I also like the fact that there are various Cryptid factions in this world, including goat-men, moth-men, and green-furred Grasskin. The game seems to revolve around gathering items that various guild factions can use to craft items for you, which will in turn help you venture farther and farther afield. Magic exists in items called Wands, and can only be used once per day before it needs to re-charge. The game is very well suited for dungeon-crawls, pointcrawls, hex-crawls… name a crawl and you can probably do it in this game. If you’re a bit of an OSR fan and you like exploration, you might be interested in Loveland.

Other Games You Might Want To Check Out

Sleepaway, by Jay Dragon.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mina Lenahan.

Cryptozoologist by riseofpanic.

Camp Cryptid, by Certified Milkboy Games.

[woodchipp]

Currently replaying OMORI because I'm a masochist with my best friends @beevean and @the-crow-binary providing emotional support lmfao. Even despite how soul-crushingly boring it is, I think we're still having some sort of fun with this clusterfuck of a game

Highlights (and the misc. problems we've managed to spot) so far include:

I already knew that this game's length was detrimental to it during my first solo playthrough, but this playthrough is helping me put into perspective just how bloated OMORI is, even when it comes to an aspect like dialogue. For example, a single conversation between Space Boyfriend and the main cast took us approximately 5 minutes to get through, and it's not like the writing is gripping enough to make us give a shit about the characters or anything they're saying

Speaking of the dialogue, you can just see how hard it tries to be witty and Quirky™ the way Earthbound and indie RPGs like Undertale were. Needless to say, it fails horribly, and the end result of that was me having to fast-track some conversations because they were unfunny and weren't relevant at all

I got unintentionally (!) stuck in White Space for 15-20 minutes because I couldn't find the map the game needed me to find to let me open the door. Beev came to hate the repetitive 8-bit BGM the area had by the time I finally found the map lol. game_design.exe

Headspace's music is so ear-gratingly abysmal oh my god. I can only call it "dollar-store Kirby music" because that's the most appropriate description that comes to mind and I'm pretty sure Lost at a Sleepover gave Beev severe PTSD. Of course, the music of Faraway Town isn't any better: the "track" that plays in the first fight with Aubrey is less music than it is the result of an .exe file being put through an audio player. Sonic Chronicles might have some serious competition in the "worst video game soundtrack" category asdfghjkl

The plot of the Faraway Town segments is so cookie-cutter that it genuinely hurts to sit through. Character writing (or the lack thereof) aside, Sunny and Kel spend half a day loitering around the town and asking Aubrey's cronies where she is even though Kel could've easily gotten that information from Mikhael had he just indulged the latter's delusions of grandeur a little bit

Faraway Town's daytime sky is literally a scrolling JPEG of a cloudy sky. The battle backgrounds of the real world segments are edited JPEGs as well. Everyone's houses look exactly the same on the outside save for some of them being a different color. The developers spent six years and more than $200,000 on this game.

Sunny's fights against his fears are boring. You just need to wait until a particular turn when the game grants you a special skill you use to end the fight immediately. What was the point of designing these hallucinatory monsters if the player doesn't get to fight them at any point during the main route?

Aubrey (ostensibly) swinging a nail bat at Sunny is not treated with the same degree of realism as Sunny slashing her with a knife. Additionally, Aubrey rides away on her scooter just fine even though she's supposed to be bleeding

Mari's picnic baskets are inexplicably scattered all across the town and fulfill the exact same function as they do in Headspace. So much for realism!

I won two of the fights against Aubrey's goons even though I was trying to lose. gameplay.exe

Sunny is even more unpleasant than I remember. He doesn't respond to Basil - who is supposedly his best friend - when the latter talks to him, stays silent while (and after) Kel vents to him about Hero yelling at him and barges into the church despite Kel advising him to wait until the sermon ends. Why should I feel bad for him again?

Kel generally seems to treat Sunny like an actual baby, spelling out incredibly obvious things to the latter (e.g. that Sunny shouldn't be carrying a knife or walking in the road because it's dangerous) and making all of Sunny's decisions for him, to the point of not allowing Sunny to return into his own house until nighttime under the pretense of "there's so much to do! it's a brand new day!"

Finally, the "fight" against Sunny's fear of spiders comes completely out of nowhere since nothing triggered said fear during Sunny's adventures outside

Peak game, everyone.

And it's going to get way worse down the line!

[lilia-dabbles]

solo rpg actual play: woven threads pt. 2

part 1 here, all woven thread posts here

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊

We left off with Liora witnessing her parents being killed from the basement during the raid on her village. With this in mind, I'm thinking Liora's next goal/steps should be to find any potential survivors and anything useful for her quest of getting answers.

For this next turning point, I roll two personal plot points (bad decision and a figure from the past) and two tension points (heavily guarded and a problem returns). With the plot point, a figure from the past, it requires me to roll a new character that Liora had known previously. From the roles and characteristics I roll, I decide Nina is a teenager who went to work at the palace as a maid when she was just a child. Maybe the bad decision she made in the past is what led to the raid on Liora’s village.

After searching for any survivors (she finds none), Liora comes across Nina mourning at the center of the village.

I roll for the following:

Does Liora immediately recognize Nina?→ Yes, and... Nina is instantly recognizable by the red thread still braided into her hair, a relic of their shared childhood. Does Liora approach Nina, or just watch her? → Yes Liora approaches slowly and calls her name.

So Liora and Nina recognize each other, and Nina confesses the bad decision she made. Based on her careless characteristic, I'm thinking that she carelessly let something slip about the legend of the Woven Gate to one of the guards, leading to the raid. Perhaps she led them to the village without her knowing what would happen.

This is going to be an emotionally charged scene, so I decide to loosely adapt my emotions system from Crimson Threads to be more platonic (removing the desire and obsession emotions), giving the relationship between Liora and Nina the following initial stats:

After Nina's confession, Liora has to decide whether to forgive her. I roll Deepen the Bond for both empathy and trust:

Deepen the Bond (Empathy roll: 2d6 +1 = 10) → Success Deepen the Bond (Trust roll: 2d6 = 6) → Miss Result: +1 Empathy, +1 Resentment, Trust remains at 0, +1 tension, +1 surge

Their shared experience of both having lost their village is just enough to make the empathy roll a full success. This also raises the surge count and pushes Nina closer to eventually taking action. But trust doesn't land, which causes both tension and resentment to rise.

I interpret this as Liora being able to see Nina's grief as authentic but not understanding how she couldn't have known that what she did would lead to this tragedy.

Liora doesn't trust Nina but realizes she's her only link to the capital. She presses Nina for any way to get close to General Dorian or the royal family.

I want Liora to go to the capital to meet the remaining love interests, so let's think of a way to narratively explain this:

Nina explains that noblewomen are sometimes invited to palace events, especially balls and formal receptions where high-ranking officials—including the Crown Prince and Dorian—are often present. If Liora could pass as a noble, she'd have access to places no servant could reach.

Great! And now, let's link this to the two remaining plot points (heavily guarded and a problem returns) for this plotline I will be naming, "The Mask of Nobility."

Liora needs her fake noble identity to be believable, so let's have an abandoned registry outpost near the village. Maybe the knights are still nearby from after the raid, making it heavily guarded.

Inside, Liora and Nina find old noble lineage documents, some with intact royal seals. But can they successfully forge Liora's fake identity on them?

Do they succeed in forging Liora’s identity? → Yes, and… It's so successful that the documents look very official. Nina is able to mimic the palace calligraphy style because of her time working there.

Liora will take on the name Liora Vale– an old noble line from the outskirts of the kingdom.

As they leave the registry, soldiers from a camp nearby spot them.

Do they recognize Nina? → Yes. This leads back to the plot points heavily guarded and a problem returns (the knights)

Liora will have to lie to get out of this. Even if Nina came with the soldiers, they will be suspicious about why Liora is with her.

Liora will lie that she is a noblewoman visiting her family in a different nearby village, and that's why she's dressed plainly. Nina offered to escort her because she knows the area.

Do they believe the lie? Odds: Somewhat Likely (≈60%) + Lie is strong + Liora plays the part well − Clothing is too plain Roll: 37 → Success → They believe her.

The guards step aside, but now Liora has so much more to do to complete her plan.

I end this session by adding our new plotline and Nina to our plot and character lists.

🎭 Noble Disguise Progress [✔️] Name and Cover Identity [✔️] Forged Lineage & Noble Documents [⬜] Court-appropriate clothing + status symbol [⬜] Claim to Land or House [⬜] Successful entrance into a noble setting

Narrative Scene: From the Ashes

Liora pushed open the trapdoor and climbed out of the basement, into a world that felt too quiet.

Smoke lingered in the air, thick and bitter, catching in her throat as she stepped onto what remained of the floorboards. The ceiling above had collapsed, open to a gray, overcast sky. Her home—what used to be her home—was now just a skeleton of blackened beams and cracked stone. Ash crunched beneath her boots. Every breath stung.

She moved carefully, automatically, through what was left of the village. Mirewood Hollow had always been small, tucked deep in the trees, quiet in the way only places forgotten by maps could be. Now it was nothing but char and silence. The scent of burning still clung to the ground. Thread-charms hung melted on doorways, swinging faintly in the breeze like whispers from the dead.

She checked each ruin. The bakery, the old mill, the forge. There were no voices, no movement—no survivors.

She didn’t cry.

Eventually, she reached the village square.

The Elder Tree stood at its center, scarred and stripped, its bark blackened by flame but still upright, still rooted. It had been the heart of the village for generations. Children used to tie red thread to its branches when they had a secret too big to say aloud. Liora had, once. She remembered the feel of the thread between her fingers. She remembered what she had asked it to keep.

There was someone beneath it.

Liora stopped cold.

A girl knelt at the base of the tree, shoulders hunched forward, her body curled as if trying to disappear into the roots. Her hair was tangled, streaked with soot, but the braid was unmistakable—thin red thread still woven into it, fraying at the ends.

“Nina?” Liora’s voice cracked. She hadn’t meant to speak.

The girl looked up sharply, her eyes wide with shock. And then she was running.

“Liora!”

She threw her arms around her, sobbing openly. Her whole body shook with it.

Liora didn’t move. She stood frozen as Nina cried against her. She let it happen—let the weight of it press against her chest, let the familiarity twist something inside her—but she didn’t return the embrace.

It was too soon. It was too much.

Nina pulled back after a long moment, her face blotchy and wet.

“I thought you were gone,” she whispered. “I thought…”

Her voice trembled, and she didn’t finish the sentence. Her eyes searched Liora’s face, full of grief and guilt and something else—something harder to name.

“What are you doing here?” Liora asked quietly.

“I didn’t know,” Nina said immediately, too quickly. “They just… they asked about the Gate. I thought it was just a story. I didn’t think—”

“What did you do?”

Nina’s lips parted, then shut again. She looked down at her hands.

“I didn’t know they’d burn everything,” she whispered. “I thought they wanted folklore. I didn’t know it would be real.”

Liora stared at her. She saw the girl she remembered from childhood—always running behind her older sister, always tugging at her sleeves, always tying too much thread into the charms so they hung like tangled ribbons. The thread was still there, faded and dirty, tucked into her braid like it had never been taken out.

She remembered the day Nina left—barely more than a child, riding away in a crowded merchant cart bound for the capital. Her family had sent her to work as a maid in the royal palace, one of the few ways a village girl could send coin home. They hadn’t seen each other since.

Now she was back. And everything was gone.

Liora saw the tears. She saw the pain. And yet—

“You should have known,” she said.

Nina looked up. “I didn’t—”

“That’s the worst part.”

They stood in silence.

Liora felt something sharp uncoil in her chest. She didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t rage, not exactly. Not yet. But it was something just as dangerous.

“I was trying to help,” Nina said weakly. “I didn’t know they’d kill people. I thought they were just… looking for stories. For rumors.”

“And so you gave them ours.”

Nina winced.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she whispered.

“That’s not an excuse.”

She didn’t say it with cruelty. Just finality.

But despite the ache still burning under her ribs, Liora understood. She saw it in Nina’s eyes—that she regretted it, that she would carry it like Liora carried her grief. It didn’t change the past. It didn’t make anything better. But it was real.

And it meant something.

Still, trust was something else entirely.

After a long moment, Liora asked, “Are there others like them? In the capital?”

Nina looked up slowly. “You want to go there?”

Liora nodded. “I need to. If the Gate is real—and they think it is—then there’s more to this. I need answers. I need to know what Dorian wants. And what the Crown knows.”

Nina hesitated. “There are ways to get close. But not as a commoner.”

“I could pose as a servant.”

Nina shook her head quickly. “No. Servants don’t get close, Liora. They’re invisible until they’re punished. Or worse. If you’re caught where you don’t belong, they won’t ask questions.”

Liora stared at her.

“You’ve seen that.”

Nina didn’t answer.

They sat for a while beneath the tree. The wind stirred the leaves. Ash shifted across the ground like snow.

“There’s an old registry,” Nina said eventually. “Outside the southern woods. Half of it’s crumbling, but the seals are still good. If we can find something from a forgotten line… I could forge a name. I know the calligraphy. The format. The seals.”

Liora was silent for a moment, then nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

—

The outpost was buried in ivy and rot. A stone building folded in on itself, half-eaten by moss and time. But the inside still held what they needed—stacks of brittle scrolls, faded parchment, water-damaged ledgers.

Most were useless.

But some still bore the marks of nobility: a wax seal here, a crest there, a signature scrawled in golden ink.

Nina worked with eerie precision. She copied everything—names, titles, dates—until the forged documents looked untouched by time. She gave Liora a last name: Vale, plucked from a long-dormant house that once ruled a quiet borderland in the east.

Liora kept her first name. It felt like defiance.

The documents were flawless.

Nina handed them over wordlessly.

“I didn’t think you had it in you,” Liora said.

“I didn’t either,” Nina replied.

They stepped out into the clearing.

They weren’t alone.

In the clearing ahead, the glint of armor caught the sun. A camp of soldiers, still stationed in the region after the raid. One of them turned—and stopped.

His eyes locked on Nina.

“You. From the palace. You’re the one who led us to the gate village. What the hell are you doing here?”

Liora’s spine went rigid. Her fingers curled around the forged papers.

Nina stepped forward before she could speak.

“She’s Lady Liora Vale,” she said. “She was visiting family in a nearby village when the raid happened. I volunteered to guide her back. I know the land.”

The soldier’s eyes narrowed.

“She doesn’t look like nobility.”

Liora stepped forward, spine straight, face composed.

“I was under the impression the Crown’s soldiers had better things to do than harass traveling nobility,” she said. “Especially with all the raids you’ve yet to finish.”

The soldier looked her over—peasant dress, soot-stained hem, tangled hair. Not a single jewel. But she stood like she belonged on marble.

He blinked. Then slowly stepped aside.

Liora brushed past him without another word.

“I want to return to the capital,” she said coolly. “I’m tired of mud. And I’m tired of the smell of burning rot.”

The guards didn’t follow.

But one of them watched her go, long after she had disappeared into the trees.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊

part 3 here

[theresattrpgforthat]

THEME: Lesser Known Solo Games

Hello! I’m not sure how many of these are lesser known, but many have been added recently to my Solo folder, so why not talk about them?

Death Knight, by Lucas Rolim.

Death Knight is a solo tabletop RPG that plunges you into a dark and immersive world where a once noble knight fights against a curse in a land ruled by terror and despair.

As the Death Knight, you’ll journey through shadowy caverns, cursed forests, and desolate wastelands, battling the malevolent forces of a powerful lich lord. Magic, tainted by corruption, adds an unpredictable edge to every encounter.

It is a hack of "Against the Wind" by Cezar Capacle, this game blends modern and traditional RPG elements, giving players narrative control as they explore a world steeped in darkness. Face your curse, forge bonds with allies, and embark on a legendary pilgrimage to cleanse the land and seek your ultimate destiny.

If you want a big solo game, Death Knight has you covered. With 196 pages, it’s a grim and gritty adventure game, about a knight fighting a curse in a world that just wants them to give up. The layout of the game reminds me of plenty of old-school sword & sorcery games, but with a class that reminds me a little bit of Mork Borg. The game describes itself as procedural, with a flow and tables to help you generate new things so that you don’t run out of ideas, with a focus on exploring the dark world around you. It also comes with a neat hex crawl for you to track your progress, although I wouldn’t exactly describe it as print-friendly.

Laika, Come Home, by Master_Bishop.

In this game, you will experience the final hours of Laika orbiting the Earth, but unlike the real world, you’ll have the chance to create a different ending for this story. You will witness the wonders of space and memories of your life on Earth, but be careful! There might also be problems on the ship.

All you need to play is: a deck of poker cards, a d20, and something to record your logs.

This game looks to be in part educational, as it includes information about other that have been sacrificed in the name of science. You use a deck of cards as an oracle, as well as a way to track the events of your story, while you roll a d20 to determine whether the event or problem has a happy or not-so-happy outcome. You end the game when you have 5 highs and 5 lows, and your ending depends on the nature of your records by the end of the game. Because the ending can be different from what actually happened to Laika, I think it makes the history a little more personal to the person who plays this game.

Forest Burial, by nealyboy.

You’re another fool on a quest to the center of the forest. The deeper you go, the greater the dangers will become. Ancient powers. Monstrous guardians. Strange landmarks. Villages make terrible pacts. Heroes die.

Forest Burial is a TTRPG for one player, designed to fit into a gum case. Just get a 35 pack of Extra or Five gum,  and print, cut and fold.

This neat little game is meant to be printed out, cut up and slotted over (and inside) a case of gum, great for a game that you can carry with you. The inspirations are from games such as Cairn and Tunnel Goons, and like both of those games, it packs a lot in very little space. There’s mini hex maps, cards for characters and quests, and roll-tables to give you new obstacles when you need them. Overall, the game feels rather low-magic and high-danger, so if you want a fantasy game that will not treat you kindly, consider Forest Burial.

Dark Tides, by The Gaudy Goblin.

Something or someone is trying to warn you. It is written in the tides, in the eddies formed in the sand as the waves push to and fro as you walk past the docks. But you cannot read these signs.

You are the proud captain of a trading vessel soon to set sail from Europe to India in the year 1903. You have sailed this route before and you know it can take over a month. You command one of the finest ships at the dock (it’s even equipped with a telegraph!).

Your ship will mysteriously disappear on this voyage. Your ship’s log will be the only record of what happened, and hopefully, someone will find it to learn what fate befell you and your crew.

Dark Tides uses a journal and some dice, which is to be expected of many solo games, but it also makes use of a tarot deck. This means that the acts that you play through can be rather interpretive depending on how you decide to use the meanings of your tarot cards. You’ll be rolling to generate a ship and events, but your tarot cards will determine motivations, and what your crew’s final fate is. If you don’t have your own preferred oracle for the different tarot cards, the game has a page with a guide to various meanings, as well as archetypes attached to the Major Arcana.

The Fairy King’s True Name, by emigiosia.

The realm of the fae is closer than most people know, but you are intimately familiar with it. You are the consort of the Fairy King, a position you neither asked for nor necessarily wanted. Everyone in the fae realm, especially the mortal humans, know it is unwise to deny the Fairy King. And so you agreed, regardless of how you felt about the idea.

The Fairy King, a dour-looking creature of pale skin and luminous eyes, with black hair, soot-coated fingertips, and a crown of bone, is not known for being gentle. They are known, instead, for their cunning and their cruelty. 

If you are to escape them, you too must be cruel and cunning. If you are to escape, you must slay the Fairy King. Escape is not your only choice, however… Your future is yours to decide.

The Fairy King is a journaling game that uses 2d6 and a prompt table to navigate the story of escaping and/or killing the King in your attempt to gain freedom. You roll the dice to find a spot on the grid, and use the corresponding prompt to jump-start your journal entry. Most of the items are freely up to interpretation in terms of what they mean for your journey, but there are a few that will help you defeat the Fairy King. When you gain a special item, you write one final entry to determine how exactly you bring about his ruin - or whether you decide to kill him at all.

I Love You, Alive Girl, by anna anthropy.

In the nightmare future of 2026, the last remaining avenue for communication out of Lockdown City is in reviews of online products. If you want to reach your lover in the Outlands, you’ll need to hide your messages in reviews of products - from sites like Amazon and Ebay - you’ve never owned.

I LOVE YOU, ALIVE GIRL is a cyberpunk epistolary game. You play by writing internet product reviews that contain coded messages to your partner in the Outlands. Metaphor, allusion, and subtext are your palette, as the Algorithm that swallows inappropriate messages isn’t subtle enough to detect them.

I really love the idea of the setting for this game. I don’t own it, so I can’t tell you how it works, but it looks like involves writing product reviews using a series of Subtle Messages provided by the game in order to be able to reach your lover. I think that this game can technically be played as a two-player game, but if you don’t have a partner, you can still write the reviews and keep them in a journal.

Also…

You can check out all of the Solo Games posts I’ve recommended before by checking out my Solo Games Tag.

I've been running a casual solo ttrpg club (pretty much like a book club) lately on my discord.

Anyone have any good recs for lesser known solo ttrpg's? I'm always down to expand my list of options

[kalianos]

The best ttrpg players are people who do not treat tabletop games like video games.

This has not changed.

The best DM's are ones who can create any world and make it engaging for their table.

Things I remember when randomly in conversation another fellow DM on call was practically gushing about taking a player for a solo session. Classic Monster is killing our animals scenario.

Player who rarely played tabletop games proceeds to: Ask around town, gather information. Figure out when it strikes, where it goes.

As a ranger. Goes out to the field it targets, holds up in a tree and ambushes the monster.

....I haven't seen any player do something like that in years it feels like.

I would kill to have players like that.

Then there was the conversation about the nine layer lasagna that another party is climbing through to get to fight Garfield at the end who trapped them in it before the lasagna cools trapping them in it. But you know that's just table top games and I was still reeling from knowledge that those players still exist.

I'm starting to look at the things my players do and wonder if I'm the problem. After years of dealing with people who do not want to engage in the investigation, only want combat non-stop no stop no roleplay want to roll dice never stop to think about our actions. Too scared to make moves as...people.

Last night went over all the ttrpgs I own now.

I own: DnD 5e with Humblewood, Eberron, Crit. Role settings.

dnd 3.5, Mongoose Traveller 2e, Lancer, Savage Worlds adventure edition: Deadlands, Savage worlds adventure edition: Super Hero's, Little Fears, Monster of the Week, For the Dungeon!, Cyberpunk Red, Paranoia, Pathfinder 2e, Starfinder, Konosuba TTRPG, Call of Cthulu, Sea of Thieves role playing game.

:V Brought it up to a friend last night how I keep colllecting these tabletop games. He asked how many have I actually played. He is one of my players so I counter-asked him how many has he joined.

When he couldn't answer I told him two technically three. DND, Deadlands, Monster of the week.

I said as I was flipping through Lancer's core book which I just got two days ago.

Made a few non-commital noises and said something along the lines of not really being into tabletop games. -_- Like yeah I figured when you never engaged in anything we set out for you and you were basically dragged by your older sister to join in.

....I should remake my solo intro scenario for new players.

Its been almost ten years since I ran the first players through it.

Sides one of my players has been talking about for almost a year how much they want to play dnd again so maybe. Though Last week during our friendsgiving did get him to make a character in Traveller real quick using the munson character generator. He really liked it.

*side glances bookshelf of all the money spent on Traveller alone*

...man I even bought a cd containing pdf's from the original company with a set of adventures to convert to the newer edition of Traveller.

Truthfully I feel like I am turning into an old man with a hand made cane sitting in the courtyard of his slowly decaying palace watching the few apprentices who made it and become dm's going off and spreading the joy of gaming.

Not sure I deserve even that much but oh well.

My GF joked this morning that if the apocalypse happens and we lose all electricity at least we'll have entertainment. >_>;

(Also I am planning on driving out to the bigger city to an old rpg shop and possibly seeing if I can buy Pulp Cthulu or Mouseguard if they still have it.)

[solostripe]

Solo RPG Review: Skirmish of the Sorciere

itch.io link

I was really looking forward to finally digging into this one! Skirmish of the Sorciere is a tarot-based GM-less ttrpg that can also be played solo. In the game, 1-3 witches who have to face a Disturbance. Each round of gameplay represents the trading of blows, with witches in a multiplayer game able to help one another out.

I think the concept for this game is really fun - who doesn't love getting to play a witch blowing up an enemy with some magic? I also really enjoy games that use tarot-based mechanics. That said, this one unfortunately fell short of my expectations.

The major problem is that things feel heavily weighted in the player's favor. The gameplay has a similar system to war, wherein the higher card wins, but the player gets to choose which cards go against each other after drawing five for the "enemy" and a number of their own. Maybe I just got lucky with my draws or misread a rule somewhere, but I didn't lose a single round of the 9 that it took me to get to the end, and since every victory leads to the major arcana cards getting more powerful when you play them, things quickly snowballed into being kind of boring.

The extras also didn't offer quite as much inspiration as I'd have liked for inspiring the narrative turns of battle or complications - the tarot-based prompts were vague and not very concrete, and apart from a general "when you draw a major arcana, use that to inspire the scene," there wasn't a lot of meat on the bones. I feel like this would have been fine if I'd been collaborating with another person or two, but it made for a pretty uninspired solo experience.

I do feel like with some tweaks, this could be a great GM-less game for 2-3 players - the conversation at the table could make up for the bland prompts, and one or two tweaks to how battles are resolved could make for a tighter challenge. (Plus, the problem with compounding power would be Much more limited with another character soaking up the power). I also will admit that I like the bones of the story that came out of this, even if it is very bare bones.

That said, even though this game has an option for subsequent playthroughs, I don't think I will be picking it up again.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Epistolary: Great RPG Mechanics #RPG Mechanics: Week Five

You may or may not remember De Profundis. I died a little inside when I discovered it came out in 2002. In English at least. The Polish original came out even earlier. It was among a group of smaller, indie publications launching at the time– a few years later we’d start to see things like My Life With Master and The Shab Al-Hiri Roach. De Profundis, though, was a little more abstract. It’s literally play-by-post, because you write physical letters. 

The basic concept is that you write sprawling, meditative letters about weirdness in a character’s life, possibly a thinly glossed version of yourself in another place or time. The letters themselves should be artifacts– physical objects you can mark up, annotate, and leave little additional clues or objects in. You send these to another player who then replies to your strangeness with queries or their own experiences. You continue this back and forth with an escalating sense of things being off. 

The game leans into a Lovecraftian vibe, though it is not particularly specific about the mythos itself, which is great. That allows you to lean into one of, IMHO, the best aspects of Role-Playing": being able to consider and describe something from the first person. What would this strangeness actually look like to someone unfamiliar with the interior intricacies? There’s a whole series for the original Hunter: The Reckoning rpg from White Wolf built on this– humans trying to make sense of all the supernatural bs of the world.

The touchstone here is the work of Lovecraft and a lot of his followers. But it also points to Dracula, not the original epistolary novel, but the shadow which looms over this form for literary form in horror. That’s notable for being a strongly mixed-media piece– with different voices over time as well as newspaper clippings and summaries.

De Profundis is also interesting in that it comes about right at the turn of the millennium, when most people were starting to have email as an ever-present and constant feature in their lives. Folks began to realize that this would always be something they’d need to have and be connected to. De Profundis reacts to that by asking the players to create something concrete and not ephemeral.  

It’s also interesting that De Profundis is among the first solo rpgs, a movement which has become stronger and more developed in recent years. In this sense the game really offers just a loose form– more an idea that you could do some writing like this. I don’t think there’s a direct line from De Profundis to something like Thousand Year Vampire, but there is a connection.

I never got more than a couple of exchanges into a De Profundis game. Some of that’s my own problem with solo gaming. I’ve never been able to get into play by post either. I go in with the best of intentions, but inevitably crash out. There’s not enough feedback to catch my lizard brain. So I was a little worried when I played the Good Society, with its dedicated epistolary phase. 

Good Society’s gameplay has a tight structure: Novel, Reputation, Rumor & Scandal, and finally Epistolary. In this last phase players write letters, I believe 1 or 2, from the characters  under their control. These can be written out fully or sketched out and then summarized by the player. I’m glad the game encourages the former and permits the latter. 

These are an absolute joy. These letters offer the chance for characters to regroup and consider the implications of events from earlier. You can reveal new details, comment on occurrences, set up new plot threads, question people’s motivations. They’re dynamite as a moment of commentary. I get that they’re echoing the original literary sources, but I think it is worth considering how well they operate as a moment of reflection built into the game. That’s something I think a lot of games could benefit from mechanically.

Lots of groups do Stars & Wishes, Epilogues, Debriefs, but often these are either meta-discussions or done at the end of a campaign. Good Society has these connected to a regular cycle of play. You could build something like this into a campaign to serve as a breaker or signal for the changing of arcs. Ask each player to write or summarize a letter, journal entry, or email from their character. I think it offers way to explore character that we often don’t get in ttrpgs.

[rpgmgames]

May’s Featured Game: Verloren

DEVELOPER(S): Choko ENGINE: RPG Maker VX Ace GENRE: Horror, Adventure WARNINGS: Flashing images, loud sounds, sudden sounds/images, full list (contains spoilers). SUMMARY: Chris Winter, find himself alone and lost in a black void filled with nothing but coldness. The only warmth you feel comes from your breath. In this void the young boy sees a door filled with light, trying to reach the door only leads to the boy to fall deep into a world filled with nothing but nonsense. Only when you find the key, then you’ll be able to leave.

Download the demo here! Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! *Choko: Hello, I'm Choko! I'm the developer, artist, and writer for Verloren. I've been messing around with rpg maker since 2013 but finished my first finished game in 2016 which is Desolate Village. I've also made other games since then. Those being Demon Tea, Friend Hunt, and Star Detective. So Verloren isn't my first rodeo in the whole game development stuff, but it is the biggest project I've ever work on so far. Besides game dev stuff, I'm a huge rpg maker games, horror games, rhythm games, and just games with a interesting style to them.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create this game initially? *Choko: Verloren is a horror adventure game that focuses on Chris Winter, a young boy who finds himself alone and far away from home because of this he won't stop for anything to find a way home and learn why did he arrive here. During the course of the game Chris would meet others who have their own goals. What inspired me to make Verloren is a bit hard to say from what I first started to work on it back in 2017, I was mostly trying to work on another project after finishing Desolate Village. It could have been something else but I really forgot. But since I took a huge hiatus year break during 2018, I would personally say the time I actually initially started to work on Verloren was in February of 2019. Since everything was rework with a fresh outlook on everything, so the whole head space with Verloren is totally different from 2017-2018. What inspired me when I went back to rebuild/fix the game was friends, since their support made me feel I could go back to work on the game. During 2018 I would say I wasn't in the best mood while working on the game, so the support my friends gave me really helped a lot and encouraged me.

How long did you work on your project? *Choko: I've been working on Verloren for three years now. But will say 2019 to now is when actually development started/actually got going. 2018 I took the whole year off to cool down/chill. So the Verloren of 2017-2018 is very different from the Verloren of 2019 to now. If that makes sense....

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Choko: Oh boy, this section might be very long since there's a lot of games and media which inspired/ influences Verloren, though for many different reasons. Will say the two rpg maker games that inspire me a whole lot when it comes to everything they do is Mare and Akademia (I know it's just a demo still at the time writing but it's very good. Good demo, like the characters are great!! Everything is very nice!) Other rpg maker games do inspire me, mainly friend stuff but Mare and Akademia are two games I really love and wish I can make Verloren a game which has characters which feel realistic in a way they do. Like please go play them. Besides rpg maker games will say that NieR Automata, Okage: Shadow King, RE 1/RE 0, Deemo, Rule of Rose, Smile For Me, and the Kirby series are games that just really inspire me with Verloren, there's just certain aspects of them which I hope I can capture in Verloren. Other than video games, I do get a bunch of inspiration from artist I follow, comics/manga, and anime though if I mention all of them it would just lead me to ramble away, but will say Pandora Hearts and Death Parade are two series I really love and both. I just enjoy series that shows character interaction and bonds, because that's a main part in Verloren. I really just get inspire by character development if you couldn't tell..... ^^;

Have you come across any challenges during development? How did you overcome or work around them? *Choko: Besides the 2018 thing I mention earlier. There has been tiny bits of challenges, like with creating maps, since it takes me a while to get into the mood to make them, but wouldn't really call it a challenge. Since all the time I just have to take time away from the map to gain motivation to make them. Another challenge I guess would be writing cut scenes which I love, though it's a whole process of making sure the characters aren't just rambling or going off-topic since when I write I tend to get in character, as in voice act the lines or try to think how they would. Though the process isn't really a bad challenge since it just takes a while until I get it right.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Choko: There's been soooooo many changes to this game. The biggest change I would say is the characters, they had a lot of design changes and personality/motivation changes. But other than that, I would say the mood of the game change a lot, also how scenes play it, originally it just felt like stuff happen to happen. Now it makes a lot more sense and isn't just some random thing I added. Sadly I can't list everything that change because that's spoilers but trust me everything change for the better.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Choko: At the beginning there wasn't a team, since I wanted to do everything solo. I mostly enjoy doing art, writing, and eventing the game. Though currently now there is a team, mostly with people I know, it's more so just a critique/feedback team + voice actors. Currently there are only two VAs since I didn't want to focus on voice acting before I had most of the game done, in the far future I may make a post about it. But so far the whole team is more so just a chilling area then anything else and I enjoy all the fun talk that happen there.

What is the best part of developing a game? *Choko: The best part of creating a game is to see the characters you created come to life. I just really enjoy seeing everything come together. Idk I just find it cool that when making a game all starts out as concepts/ ideas and then after days/weeks/months of work it becomes a actually thing you can look at and show others. Most cutscenes in Verloren I get super happy when I finish them up, because I can see them as a real thing rather than a bunch of ideas of "this is what I'm going to do". Also the joke/shitpost memes....they are also the best part of making a game.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Choko: Yep!!! I play a lot of rpg maker games, I really enjoy seeing what other people do. I just find it cool that anyone can pick up the engine and learn how to use it. Also it's a fun way to find inspiration, just seeing other rpg maker games and being like ">:O I didn't know you can do that!!!".

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Choko: This question is very hard, mainly because I relate to because a lot of characters in the game I relate to in tiny levels. For my favorite character it's Vladimir....I do like every other character in game. Chris is my second favorite I have to say (kinda a lie since ties with another character) but Vladimir number one, he's just soo much fun to write. He's maybe the one character who has a lot of scenes which gets a huge smile from me.

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Choko: Not really, mainly since I was lucky to be able to take a huge hiatus which help me in 2019 to rework everything. So every problem I had with the game I fixed.

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Choko: I would just leave the game alone after I finish Verloren, it's a game that doesn't need any follow ups because I feel it would just take away from the impact when you get to the end. There really isn't anything I would need to explore, since Verloren is meant to be a single game and that's it.

What do you most look forward to upon finishing the game? *Choko: I look forward seeing how people react to the full game, I am low key shock on how people are reacting towards the demo and all the tiny predictions/speculations. Also the warm positive feedback towards Vladimir is shocking, since I thought no one would like him because of all those jokes/puns. I hope the final game has the same positive reaction, also that other characters get a warm positive feedback towards them.

Was there something you were afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Choko: The only thing that worries me is that if I mess up and people can't understand reasons why x character did that. Since one of the main things with Verloren is that characters have their own way if viewing stuff. Like morality is pretty gray because I don't want to write a black and white story.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Choko: Main advice I'll give out is placeholders are your friend. Don't spend time making assets for a system you didn't test and you test it and it doesn't work. Just have a placeholder graphic which helps you test it and when it's done you can always slap on the asset. Following up with this, create a debug room. It would come in handy to test systems/ events than having to play through your game to test it and learn you need to fix it.

Question from last month's featured dev @cheesesteak-horror: Do you have creative processes you practice before starting development? *Choko: No, not really. I often just jump right into development and go from there. Most of my practice come from when I work on small stuff or just when I'm bored I often just mess around with things.

We mods would like to thank Choko for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Verloren if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[mnemehoshiko]

STAR WARS INTO DARKNESS

A (Salt) Review of Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker.

Warning 1: All opinions are mine and no one (sadly) paid me for them.

Warning 2: I’m going to strive to be charitable as possible. Keyword, STRIVE.

It finally came. The conclusion to the Skywalker Saga, a nine film series starting with Shmi Skywalker and her lineage. 

When we left the The Last Jedi; Finn was tenderly checking up on Rose who endangered her life to save him. Steadily finding his place in the Resistance and deciding that it was a cause worth fighting for. Ben Solo, also known to the galaxy as Kylo Ren, has just killed his life long abuser but failed to relinquish himself from the ties of the past. Rey was dealing with detaching herself from the idea that she needed to Be Someone in Order to Do Something only to realise that she, a nobody, was good enough. As Leia Organa said, we have all we need.

Cool right?

Yeah, just forget that movie. Actually, just forget like any development that occurred over the last two movies. Furthermore, turn your brain off. No, really please remove any kind of higher cognitive function and any knowledge of Star Wars beyond “pew, pew, pew” and “wOOO”. That’s literally the only way to truly enjoy this film.

This movie is a quest. A long big-budget multi-step fetch quest. Fetch quests are a common part of RPGs and can be enjoyable! Add to the narrative! Interactive. A movie that is nothing but fetch quest after fetch quest to the point that honestly, the first two thirds of the movie could have been dropped because it was so distressingly nonsensical. 

Loose summary; 

Ben Solo is on a planet. Being very very lorge and murking people left and right. Why? Because reasons. That this planet happens to be Mustafar and that he’s killing Vader Cultists evidently is not considered relevant. Even though Ben Solo introduction in TFA, which JJ wrote (with the assistance of Kasdan and Arndt), is basically as Vader’s #1 fanboy. But who cares about narrative information when you have sweet sweet red lighting and like a flight scene.

Anyway, Ben heads to Exegol because evidently that’s where the fancy schmancy totally Not A Holocron is directing him towards. In which he approaches some goth-esque temple with vats of Snokes. Yes, You Heard Correctly, Vats of Snokes. And Palpatine. Who’s just hanging on a crane. Just chillin’ and gleefully tells Ben Solo that he’s been every voice in his head since birth. So learning your abuser is still alive is totally dope. But hey, PALPATINE IS BACK! REMEMBER PALPATINE? ISN’T THAT COOL, yells JJ Terrio desperately trying to like Hype You Up And Remind You Of The Star Wars of Their Childhood.

Finn and Poe “I Have Literally No Purpose To Any of This Narrative and JJ Terrio is About to Fuck Over My Backstory” Dameron are getting data from a contact. For some reason a glorified dick-shaped Alien is there. Consequently, this is the same alien that replaced Rose Tico on merchandise. A reasonable person with minimal brain function would assume it’s because he plays a critical role in the plot.  Remember what I said about thinking? Stop it. Klaud is there primarily for you to admire that JJ’s tentacle kink is Alive and Well and Thus Everything Is True (tm) Star Wars Again. 

Rey is floating surrounded by rocks because That’s What Cool Jedi Do. Then she does a training course because after two films we have absolutely no proof that she has any fight training, according to Reddit and like JJ Terrio is trying to get Reddit to go to the Star Wars Prom with them. So, we need a training montage and Rey going to robo-Leia and saying that she will “earn [Leia’s] brother’s saber”. Why would she want to earn a grumpy curmudgeon who fucked over his only nephew and hid from his twin sister for years? Well, JJ Terrio dreamed of earning Luke’s saber and like what is the purpose of writing other than Wish Fulfillment.

Palpatine is back! Why? We don’t know and we don’t even know what he said because evidently it was decided that it belonged in Fortnite...instead of the film. Why? Here’s a lollipop and a pew pew to stop thinking sweetie. Either way he’s on Exegol and Rey saw notes scribbled in the margins that you need a Sith Holocro-- I mean ~Sith Wayfinder~ --because JJ has never seen Star Wars since he saw it in the theaters in 1983-- to get there. Which is on Pasaana.

WHICH IS HAVING SPACE BURNING MAN RIGHT NOW! (which happens every forty two years. Which is how long ago Star Wars Episode 4 Premiered. Remember fans! Isn’t that a Cool Thing To Drop? says JJ Terrio deftly skimming Reddit in order to gain fanbros love and affection and nostalgia boners.) LOOK AT ALL THE ALIENS DOING THE SPACE MACARENA! Because WOO DON’T YOU LOVE PARTY SCENES?

The force bond shows up and you can some how transfer stuff between the bond? Which like in the hands of another writer would be fascinating and engaging. Sadly, this is a JJ Terrio production and nuanced storytelling and dialogue is Fake and Not Star Wars.

Either way, Ben knows that they’re there and they are running from stormtroopers RIGHT INTO LANDO CALRISSIAN,-- remember him? goes JJ Terrio. You remember Lando right?. I do, I go. I’ve seen the movies and you’ve given no reason why Finn and Rey would know who the fuck he is seeing how he’s evidently been living as a hermit In The Same Outfit for over a decade. (BUT REMEMBER HIM, whines J.J. Terrio. Yes, I do. I SAW THE FUCKING OT JJ).

Anyway, more exposition occurs because JJ Terrio has no understanding how visual language works and it detracts from Real Star Wars Things Like - Space Chases - Pew Pew - Witty quips! because Witty quips! Are Important for A Star Wars, says JJ Terrio.

Nevermind that stormtroopers could fly since the Clone Wars and there’s literally no reason as to why Finn would not know this but like that would require you to give him

- a character arc - character growth - dialogue beyond “WOOOOO” and “REYYYYYY” (also side notes; it was depressing as fuck seeing Finn’s growth in TLJ to going beyond being Rey-centric to only spend the entire movie yelling a White Lady’s Name. I GO TO THE THEATRE TO NOT SEE REALITY, JJ.)

JJ Terrio: BUT HE’S FORCE SENSITIVE?? me, who’s been on the Finn is Force Sensitive Train since TFA: AND YOU DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WITH IT AND IMPLIED THAT IT WAS ONLY REASON HE WAS ABLE TO FIGHT THE STORMTROOPER PROGRAMMING??? (i.e. this is really fucking gross eugenics shit pls stop JJ Terrio and like just stop)

*deep breath*

ANYWAY, where was I? Oh yeah, Star Wars Into Darkness.

Either way, they find the Subtle Knife a Sith dagger? Along with force healing foreshadowing. But they have a dagger! Which They Can’t Read! But Threepio can! But He Can’t Say It Out Loud Because His Programming Forbids It.

And then the KoR, the galatic boy band, and Ben show up because of course. And they capture Chewie and put him on a transport.

Rey, of course, reaches out to Stop The Transport.

Ben, tries to stop her.

They to a back and forth that is similar to TLJ without any of the emotional build up of TLJ but that’s because JJ Terrio believes Emotions Are Not Star Wars.

And she lets loose LIGHTNING and makes the transport blow up and she believes Chewie is dead. Problem: Chewie isn’t dead. Which means she would be able to sense him in the Force. “But Mneme”, you say, “the Force isn’t like a GPS where you just Sense People.” That’s fair! Except....then...she does...when she’s on the Snow Planet. So like???

Either way, we have a Dagger that We Need to Read That Threepio Can’t Say Out Loud.

A Solution That Uses Braincells: well we know that the Millenium Falcon has three droid brains! So like we could just hook up Threepio to like the Falcon and transmit the codes and get some really great Easter eggs re: the Falcon and like the setup of the ship! 

....

JJ Terrio: OR WE COULD GO TO THIS SNOW PLANET me: wha-- JJ Terrio: SNOW PLANET WHERE POE DAMERON RAN SPICE me: did you just make....your Only Latino Character Into A---Drug Runner JJ Terrio: REMEMBER HAN SOLO?? HE’S JUST LIKE HIM!!! me: pls stawp pls, I’m begging you stawp JJ Terrio: ALSO LOOK AT HIM FLIRTING WITH A GIRL SO HE’S LIKE OBVIOUSLY STRAIGHT me: bi....people.....exist...like...that is...a thing JJ TERRIO: ALSO WE’LL SHOW U HER EYES TO SHOW THAT SHE’S HUMAN AND NOT A WEIRD ALIEN BECAUSE POE DAMERON IS A RED BLOODED AMERICAN LIKE REDDIT  me: pls....stop...why....

anyway, he needs a memory wipe in order for it. Which is a really touching scene....or would have been if it wasn’t immediately retconned because like R2 has backups. So like whoo.

So that’s like *two* instances of fakeout death because like Nothing Is Of Consequence Because Star Wars.

Except Leia dying because fuck moms, say JJ Terrio. Moms are Not Star Wars. The Reddit bros have now started to return their text messages.

More busy stuff happens. Hux dies. I wasn’t able to thoroughly enjoy it because by this point I had A Headache from all the Pew Pew and Wooooo~~.

Ben tells Rey that like ~her power is Palpatines power because like How Else Can Rey Be Powerful.” Does this make any sense? Not at all but like Don’t Think Too Hard.

He also finally takes off his stupid helmet that was glued together by ~Sith Alchemy~ that they bought from Space!Michaels.

Rey is vaguely disraught but like She Finally Has A Purpose and the Reddit Bros are Appeased.

More shit happens. Does it matter? Not really.

They meet Jannah! She’s cool and has the exact same backstory as Finn. Because in Star Wars There Are Only (2) Backstories for black characters.  They line up the dagger that is old as fuck with the death star wreckage. Which lines up exactly. Evidently erosion is Not A Thing. 

Finn and Jannah and basically go, Wow Isn’t It Rad That Because We Have The Force We [Finn, Jannah and her crew] Were Able To Reject Brainwashing and Bounce Because We Have The Force.

Rey runs off and Finn yells “REY!!” at some point but at least he knows his best angles while he does it.

Rey meets Dark!Rey who’s a vision....for five seconds. Because Remember if Girls Go Dark They Have Sinned In The Eyes of The Force. Ben shows up and crushes the Holocron because I refuse to call it that stupid-ass name-- dear fucking lord his hand is big--and WELP I GUESS I HAVE THE ONLY ONE.

They fight because We Need A Light Saber Fight Except This One is So Lackluster.

Then Leia reaches out to do something that will use up all her strength says Maz. How does Maz know this? Idk but she’s played by Lupita N’yongo so at least it sounds Deep And Wise because That’s Why You Cast Black People...to sound deep and wise. =_= **deeper breathe**

Anyway, she reaches out to her son! Her son hears her? I think? Either way it distracts him which lets Rey impale him. Except then she heals him?? And is like, I wanted to take your hand, Ben’s hand. which like I’d be fine with if like the movie had like worked for it. But like That Would Involve Actual Conversations Between Characters and We Are Going At 34243242432 pps (parsecs per second) and thus DO NOT HAVE TIme For That.

Ben then has a rehash of the scene from TFA because JJ Terrio is a fucking hack and is unable to create original material and this would have been meaningful if like Any of the Emotions Had Been Earn in The Fucking Film. But hey, I felt .75 of an emotion when Han Solo cradled his cheek so I will accept this. Then he yeets his saber into the ocean. Because. Yeet. Sadly, this movie is Not Over and My Suffering Will Not End

Poe and Finn head back to base with Jannah because I guess that’s what we’re doing? They find out that Leia is dead etc etc etc. The Resistance has a Circle Planning Session for the Final Battle that JJ Terrio lifted straight from ROTJ and the Reddit Bros brought them a corsage for Fanbro Prom. I am reminded that ROTJ was better than this garbage that I Paid Actual Money To Watch. Rey heads to Fish Nun island and decides to pull a Luke Skywalker move even we learned from the Last Movie (TLJ) why that was a Bad Idea but you know WE GET TO SEE LUKE AGAIN IS A GARBAGE WIG BECAUSE REDDIT BROS AMIRITE? We get the most hamfisted performance out of Mark Hamill and I’m just like damn The Last Jedi as a fucking gift and a _Jedi’s weapon is important_ platitude like his dad wasn’t yeeting his saber left and right. But Who Cares About Canon When We Have Pew Pew Pew Pew.

Luke tells her that Yes He And Leia Always Knew She Was A Palpatine which like means - Leia literally did not learn from the Last Time She Obscured Someone’s Parentage and the Fall Out - Actively lied to Rey - Luke actively lied to Rey - jfc this poor girl has been aggressively lied by most of the authority adults in her life??? - HER PARENTS SOLD HER TO PROTECT HER which is such a fucking damning think along with the fact that her parents are idiots and like didn’t think to take her to the new republic and like THERE ARE 23432432 things wrong with this set up but that is a Whole ‘Nother Rant

Also evidently? Leia ended her Jedi Journey (which abbreviated as JJ, coincidence? I THINK NOT.) because she saw her sons demised but evidently....couldn’t sense her son being groomed by Snoke, creation of Palpatine and like this entire movie makes Leia look like an ineffectual idiot?? Like I was really hoping that Leia was going to be able to escape the “Fuck Mom’s” curse of Star Wars BUT I GUESS THAT BECAUSE THAT’S NOT ~true star wars~

Anyway, evidently Leia gave him her saber which I guess she made but no one decided to show that but instead some freakish CGI (that they swore they wouldn’t do) fight scene because like Leia Obviously Isn’t A Real Force User Unless You Use A Lightsaber. The Reddit Bros Nod Sagely. So Rey decides to go to Exegol.....using the Luke’s X-Wing. The Reddit Bros are weeping tears of joy at this point.  The Resistance starts their FINAL ASSAULT! THEY HAVE SPACE HORSES RIDING ON A SHIP BECAUSE DOESN’T THAT LOOK COOL! FINN KIND OF USES THE FORCE. THEY DECIDE TO BLOW UP THE STAR DESTROYERS BECAUSE FUCK CHILD SOLDIERS AMIRITE (rip Finn’s Stormtrooper backstory that JJ constructed that He Couldn’t Even Be Arse To Complete or like Think Of Because Like That Would Be Nuanced Shit but like He Gets to - Jump Over Things! - Run! - Know His Angles - Yell desperately After A White Lady because ahahahahha fuck WOC when there’s white p*ssy on the line AMIRITE?)

Either way they’re in trouble and Poe is dismayed and is like yo i’m sorry we’re doomed. Because...that’s.....what generals do. Give The Fuck Up.  BUT DON’T WORRY LANDO IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY BECAUSE EVIDENTLY WHILE THE GALAXY IGNORED LEIA ORGANA’S PLEAS, THEY LISTENED TO LANDO

(Crack theory: He hit up all his exes.)

Rey flies to Exegol to confront Grandpalps. Who never wanted her dead but to become Empress after spending 2.5 movies wanting her dead via puppet!Snoke. Also kudos to JJ Terrio to making a Sith Temple be so fucking boring and lackluster. That Took Skill.\

ANYWAY SHE SEES HER FRIENDS IN TROUBLE MUCH LIKE IN TLJ and in ROTJ but JJ Terrio really really loves his nostalgia and ROTJ was very very very formative evidently. She’s about to Strike Him Down In Anger And Absorb Grandpapa’s essence in order to save her friends but WAIT WHO IS THIS IDIOT RUNNING IN WITH NO FUCKING PLAN Yes, it is Ben Solo channeling his father. As carrying the blaster that Lando gifted to him in Aftermath but like we can only suppose that because who Needs Convos When You Have Pew Pew Pew~ His former Knights show up (who have also never spoken because hahahahah dialogue? Sounds fake. Also moment of Silence of Rian who kept them alive and used Praetorian guards in TLJ instead because he assumed that JJ made them for a meaningful reason because he was Unaware That JJ Was A Fucking Hack)

Anyway, Rey senses him! They do a super cool force bond moment that actually Pays Off and Rey hands off her saber to Ben. Through the force. It’s dope.

#BenSoloChallenge happens.

[In spite of like No Speaking At All, Adam Driver successfully channels the aura of Han Solo in spite of JJ Terrio desperately Insisting That Poe Dameron is Obviously Han Look He Even Ran Spice!!! Look!!]

Eventually they both stand before Palpatine Ready To Throw Down except in stand Palps leeches the lifeforce from them and then yeets Ben into a pit and Rey collapses.

THEN ALL THE JEDI FROM THE MOVIES AND CLONE WARS INCLUDE AHSOKA WHICH MAKES NO SENSE GIVEN CLONE WARS BUT WHAT EVER DON’T YOU FEEL VALIDATED!!! FANS!!! SCREAMS JJ TERRIO

me: no.

Rey pulls a Wonder Woman move because all you need to do to redirect Force Lightning is cross your light sabers.  Anyway, that effort kills her (or like maybe not? Says Terrio in multiple interviews because men from Harvard Literally Never Shut Up.)

Ben somehow?? Climbs?? Out of the pit?? Under his own power because The Jedi Still Haven’t Forgiven the Skywalker Line for Anakin. Even though Anakin also reached out to Rey? I’m just assuming the soul of St. Maul of the Pit was yelling angry motivational speeches to get him out of the pit while St. Ventress adding sarcasm commentary comparing Ben and his namesake.��

EITHER WAY HE’S OUT OF THE PIT! And is like in agony because Rey is uh in limp ragdoll mode so probably dead? We’re gonna go with dead.

He limps over to her because uh evidently getting yeeted into a pit is Not Good For Ones Health or Limbs.

Ben cradles her in his arms and at that moment I had to Apologize For Everyone I Dragged for Size Kink because Adam Driver is Fucking Large and His Hand is Fucking Huge and I, Mneme, Was Wrong You Are Valid.

*cough* where was I? Ah yes, he’s cradling her in his arms realizing she’s dead and I guess? Channeling the force to heal her. Which it does.

He’s happy! She’s happy!

She says “Ben” breathlessly. 

AND THEN SHE SNOGS HIM LIKE THE AWKWARD VIRGINS THAT THEY ARE.

The Force realizes that a Male Skywalker is Getting A Boner and Goes Nope. And he just collapses and fades away at the same time that Leia fades away because ~symmetry~.  Was a war going on? Uh maybe but like LETS NOT WORRY ABOUT LOGISTICS BUT INSTEAD CUT TO EWOKS!! WE ALL LOVE EWOKS RIGHT!! Rey flies back to Ajan Kloss. Poe, Finn, and Rey hug because this movie is almost over and they can stop trying to sell a non-existent trio created because JJ didn’t have the balls to let Poe stay dead in TFA.

Commander D’Arcy kisses her wife in the background but no one really notices and it was cut in Singapore but like JJ Terrio are Woke AF Y’ALL but not too woke because else they’ll get dumped by Reddit Bros.

No, we are Sadly Not Done.

LETS GO TO A SAND PLANET. No, it’s not Jakku it’s Tatooine~ DON’T YOU GUYS REMEMBER TATOOINE!! go JJ Terrio.

You mean the planet where Anakin Skywalker was a slave, Luke Skywalker desperately wanted to leave, and Leia Organa was put into that humiliated outfit? Yes. I remember.

REY’S HERE TO BURY LUKE AND LEIA’S SABERS HERE!! At the Lars homestead that is somehow intact....in spite of Jawas. 

What wha-- why??, you may ask.

Well Luke never got to show Leia his home planet, goes JJ Terrio. Literally anyone who saw ROTJ.....they were on it in then?? JJ Terrio: i can’t see mariah carey dot gif

Rey also shows off her new lightsaber that was evidently crafted from her staff but we were not shown that  on screen because like It Was Considered To Emotional for this Film.

Then finally some old woman passes by and is like Who are you? Rey: Rey Old Nosy Lady: Rey who? *Rey stares at the Force Ghosts of Luke and Leia looking like her parents* Rey: Rey Skywalker JJ TERRIO: SEEEEE WE DID REY SKYWALKER!!! AREN’T WE COOL me: she took the name of a grumpy old man who rejected her and whom she bounced off with his shit because he was being a dick....OKAY JAN

(ffs they could have let her take the name Organa but like Fuck Women amirite? *DRINKS*)

and yeah that’s it. Kid that was brainwashed as a child was reduced to going WHOOOOO every 5 seconds with no thought regarding his fellow stormtroopers who are still brainwashed.

Kid that was abandoned under the guise of ~love~ and sold to an abusive guardian and struggled and starved for years returns to a planet of sand and yes I know that she is probably going else where but that was a choice they made to have the last shot of her Alone with a Droid staring at the twin suns because JJ Terrio have been doing nothing but spraying nostalgia in my face for just under 2 and a half hours.

Kid who was actively groomed since childhood and only just now released from said clutches but lol can’t atone because he dead now.

Kid who lost her sister to the machine of war is pushed aside because she dared to exist.

and Poe.

The End of the Skywalker Saga y’all.

Bonus: “Uh, Mneme what about Rose?” She got exactly a 76 seconds that she acted her heart out in but evidently seeing a non-submissive Asian woman in Star Wars was too much for people last film so that uh Essentially Cut Her Out. Don’t worry they made sure to give her a quarter of a page in the visual dictionary and the Merry the Hobbit two page spread. So like Don’t Worry The Asian Girl Will Not Hurt You. “Mneme, what as the point of Poe?” Fuck, if I fucking know.

“Uh Mneme, the Only Reason Finn Didn’t Have An Arc Is Because of KYLE RON!!!!” 

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

trust me, it really wasn’t.

[sazorak]

Every Game I Played in 2020, Ranked

2020. Boy, what a garbo year huh? Didn't actually play that many games this year all-in-all. Happens! My backlog is getting pretty big, but I just find it hard to focus on games when I could be working on something. Or put off working on something, as it may happen to be at times.

My arbitrary decision from years ago to only attach a numbered ranking to same-year releases is getting increasingly silly, especially given my propensity to wait on playing games until I’m in the right mood, but whatever. That order matters than the dumb numerical numbering anyway.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Later Alligator – 2019 – Steam – ★★

The style of this game is very cute, and the jokes are funny enough. But… ok, look, I’m not one to be precious about what is or isn’t a game. But this really isn’t a game. It’s a series of disconnected, unrelated challenges clipped from Atari Free Mini Game Collection 100, wrapped in a very non-interactive adventure-game. It’s cute, it’s kind of sweet, but it’s dull. Dull dull dull. There’s a pointless, mandatory sliding block puzzle early on that infuriated me by its mere existence. Them giving the ability to skip it because “wow you’re bad at this huh”, which, while accurate, also just sold the whole point meaningless of the “““interactive experience”””.

Also: when a huge part of your game is WOW WE ANIMATED EVERYONE REALLY GOOD, text boxes that reveal word-by-word, far away from the animations that occur when said characters talk? Kind of stinks!

8. Carrion – 2020 – Steam – ★★

What Carrion does well— the whole “You’re controlling The Thing and just rippin’ people apart!” shtick— is really neat. They made that bootleg The Thing animate real-ass good.

The actual game as a whole though? Kind of garbage. Imagine a Metroidvania with zero actual exploration, where every opportunity you have to venture off the path instead results in immediate railroading with constant, utterly inexplicable one-way pipes. It’s not that it’s linear, it’s that it actively slaps you when you attempt to explore. It’s very frustrating! Add the fact that the tentacle-monster-shtick makes challenging to actually, y’know, move around and control all your bits…  the only reason I finished the game was due to foreknowledge of its extreme brevity.

I think if the game were more open and less obsessed with constantly handing out upgrades, as well as having less of a focus on pure combat, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays – 2019 – Steam – ★★

It is well documented at this point that I am both an active Gundam fan, and as well as an on-again-off-again tactical RPG aficionado. A SD Gundam game appearing on Steam with a good English translation and localization is… exciting, to say the least. That said, I have never had much context for this game series beyond the basic facts that the combat tended to be pretty well animated CG, and that it’s vaguely similar to Super Robot Wars. Turns out… it’s really different from SRW? I dunno how the rest of the series fairs, but Cross Rays is weird as hell.

For one, there’s zero tutorialization at all. None. Almost all of what I’m going to explain here is me figuring stuff out by trial and error, or by reading junk online. Gundam is insanely popular, you’d think they’d be interested in explaining how it all works, but… nope. Even Super Robot Wars has multi-level introductory bits for new folks to show them the rope these days.

So: Cross Rays is a tactical RPG where you can playthrough the storyline of various Gundam AUs. You can play through them in any order. These playthroughs are fairly literal translations of the stories. You take control of the lead mecha from those series, fight enemy mobile suits that show up in SRW-like tactical RPG combat, until all reinforcements cease. Pretty straight forward. There are occasionally mission variants like “prevent enemies from reaching X” or “prevent enemies from destroying Y”, but even those can be just reduced to “kill everything very quickly please.”

But here’s the thing: while there is a story progression, the characters in the story itself actually have no character progression. These characters and mecha are actually considered guests, despite it being ostensibly their story. Instead, you are able to field “permanent” mecha and pilots of your own choosing, which do have progressions. There is no plot justification for this or anything like it. The game does not recognize that it’s weird that during Iron-Blooded Orphans intro where nobody knows what a Gundam even is, you can have 25 Gundams show up at once and just fire lasers at everything. That’s because this game is actually about repeatedly grinding the same set of missions over and over.

Pilots are recruited by completing certain in-mission requirements. Mecha are acquired by either by getting enough kills with the progression-less “guest” mecha, combining mecha you already have gashopon-style, completing certain quests, or by leveling up mecha and then “evolving them”. This is the actual core of the game.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is basically Disgaea, it turns out? You’re grinding story missions at various difficulty levels in order to complete missions, try to recruit specific pilots, equip them with stats and levels to make them stronger, and then hitting mecha together in a sort of quasi-SMT fusion system until you get all the powerful mobile suits you desire.

The combat itself is kind of… bland? There’s a lot of systems, but they mostly seem in service of making an already easy game easier, or burning through tedium. There are four different difficulty modes, because there’s not actually that many different missions you can play through. The expectation is you’ll just work your way through every story beat while ramping the difficulty up over time to where the “guest” mecha would not be able to handle on their own. In fact, letting the story mecha act out the story beats is actually bad after a point, unless you’re still trying to get those lead mobile suits, or if you’re trying to complete some mission requirement in order to recruit Named Wing Grunt Pilot #246.

There is something to the notion of “I want to get N and N and N and N on a team, piloting weird but powerful mobile suits, and just solo every Gundam AU in a row,” but the whole premise seems kind of against purpose. Why bother recreating story beats at all, then? It’s not like the game even acknowledges any of that going on.

If the point is that I’m supposed to be, like in other grind-heavy tactical RPGs, breaking the systems to my own end in order to proceed… why not make the missions you play challenges focused towards that? The story progression literally only exists to facilitate the mission-based unlock conditions, which makes all the energy put into making them JUST LIKE THE ANIME really damn pointless.  

I like tactical RPGs, I like breaking RPG systems so as to beat hard challenges (I beat all the insanely hard extra bosses in FFXII for crying out loud), I looooove Gundam. I should like this. But I don’t really have the “god, I NEED TO FILL THIS LIST” gene that some folks have… except as an excuse to continue to engage in gameplay I enjoy. The gameplay here seems in service of the collection, rather than the way around.

7. Pokemon Sword: The Isle of Armor – 2020 – ★★★

Pokemon’s first foray into actually doing DLC is… a mixed bag. As a positive, they’ve improved the Wild Area concept I liked from the main game, and even brought back buddy Pokemon walking behind you. That’s neat. On the other hand: the actual progression in it is completable in like an hour, it doesn’t scale with you, so you’re bound to be over leveled for it, and all the raid stuff, while still conceptually neat, is just as flawed as in the base game. And so, you’re just left with even more new Pokemon to RNG grind on to continue to catch-them-all. Nah, I’m good.

Astral Chain – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Platinum knows how to make good character action games. They’ve made a bunch of them. Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. They also know how to make some kind of mediocre character action games. Transformers: Devastation, Wonderful 101, their various shovelware character action games like Korra. Astral Chain falls somewhere in the middle, I guess?

Astral Chain has all the production of their good games. It has some stylish, cool action. It has a neat core mechanical idea, in that it’s essentially a two-character action game where you control both characters at once. It has a lot of the old mechanics from some of their best games brought in; witch-time last second dodging from Bayonetta, Nier’s shooting-and-slashing combination, the Zandatsu mechanic from Metal Gear Rising, even Wonderful 101’s multi-unit shenanigans. The setting is different, and there’s some neat world flavor all in all.

But, of all games I’ve played over the past few years, Astral Chain made me more vividly angry than any other. It’s not that it’s too hard— far from it, really, I found its combat incredibly mashy. No, the problem is that it has so many shitty mechanics slathered on that it become a chore to get to the “good bits”.

Why would you put forced stealth sequences in your character action game, especially when your movement controls are not suited for it?

Why the HELL would you put platforming sections in your character action game, constantly, especially when your stupid ghost buddy can accidentally yank you off the edge, your auto-combos can just throw you off the edge, or literally anything can knock you off the edge and make you lose life?

Why would you put so many constant excuses into the world to force me use the digital sensor in the game, that also makes it miserable to walk around while using it?

WHO THE LIVING FUCK THINKS THESE SHITTY BOX BALANCING MINI-GAMES ARE FUN???

These games are supposed to encourage me to perfect everything, right? Why keep putting fucking fights you need to complete in order to get an S rank behind backtracking, or Legions I don’t have yet? That isn’t adding replayability, that’s just wasting my time. There are even in-level missions that have fail conditions that you never even know about. Surprise!!! A lot of them involve chasing after guys and catching them with your chain, which is really obnoxious to do!!!! SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The story is just Bad Evangelion, straight up. Every story beat from Evangelion is here, executed worse. They also make your character have a twin just so they can have a character who can talk and feel emotions, because your boring-ass protagonist is stuck being an emotionless audience cipher. Cool!!!

Tetris Effect – 2018 – Origin – ★★★

It’s drugs Tetris. I personally don’t use, or have synesthesia for that matter. I imagine this game is better if you do. It’s an enjoyable enough experience but it feels incredibly slight for what I was expecting from it, or even compared to something like Lumines, which has tons of replayability by way of its difficulty. Tetris just isn’t that hard, unless you’re forcing yourself to do weird shit to get points. I WILL NEVER LEARN HOW TO T-SPIN. Never.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection – 2019 – Steam – ★★★

Kind of an unremarkable Castlevania collection. Neat that it has an official translation of Kid Dracula in there, but also… look, I prefer Metroidvania Castlevanias, OK?

6. Spelunky 2 – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

I’m not entirely sure why this doesn’t click for me where Spelunky 1 did. More annoying intro levels? Too many fiddly requirements for different ending-progression? Gameplay additions that just make things more annoying? Spelunky 1 was hard, but there was a kind straight-forwardness to it, even with its weird secrets, that made it much easier to grok and continue banging your head against. I’m just not having as much fun with this. Difficulty should be challenging, not a hassle.

5. Stellaris: Federations – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

This is the year that Stellaris just broke for me.

Federations itself is a good DLC; it adds some really interesting mechanics tied to various types of multi-national unions (the titular federations, as well as the Space UN), as well as the addition of unique “origins” that allow you to further specialize your gameplay. The origins in particular are a great addition that allows more specialization and roleplay.

I’m just tired of the sheer amount of busywork Stellaris forces you to do. Every DLC adds more junk you need to keep an eye on, and the fact that the AI doesn’t even bother with it (compensating with copious economy boosts in order to keep up) makes the whole thing frustrating. It’s like playing fetch with yourself; you just get tired of chasing after your own ball after a point.

I have to wonder if they’re pivoting towards a notional Stellaris 2 at this point? Might not be a bad idea for them, though it is weird with all they talked up adding more origins when Federations came out.  

4. GranBlue Fantasy Versus – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★

This is probably the fighting game I got most into over the past few years. There’s just this nice, almost Street Fighter-esque ease of execution to the controls, and that Arc Systems Works 3D-as-2D style continues to just do work. I don’t give a single shit about GranBlue Fantasy (frankly, I think I’d enjoy this game more if it wasn’t attached to a property) but the characters are fun enough to play and look at.

The big problem here is two things: no crossplay, and no rollback netcode. In the span of a month, this game became a total ghost town on PC, and it doesn’t sound like PS4 faired that much better. 

Ring Fit Adventure – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’ve fallen on-and-off this game all year. At its heart: it works, it’s a fun exercise game. I don’t think it really feels like a “game” (in the sense that I’m not really coming to it for riveting gameplay or anything) as much as just a guided exercise experience, but… that’s fine? The in-game story is kind of flat, but funny in the fact of it existing at all. Buff Nicol Bolas and all.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – 2017 – Steam – ★★★★

XCOM2: War of the Chosen is a great answer to what XCOM2 struggled with. As I discussed back in 2016 (Jesus Christ), XCOM2 tried to push against player’s worst instincts by incentivizing them to keep being aggressive through a whole bunch of timers— which, kind of just weren’t fun given how much accidentally walking into an ambush could “ruin” dozens of hours of play. War of the Chosen dials that back in some intelligent ways, by instead making the encounter designs themselves, as well as much more grab-and-bail mission types, encourage players to push ahead instead. Smart!

The addition of the Chosen makes the game feel more alive, and they really do make missions harder— particularly early on. But they’ve somehow accidentally fell into the hole, where XCOM just… isn’t that hard? Early on it’s challenging, particularly with the resource restrictions and all. But they keep giving you more and more options (that aren’t especially meaningful choices) that make your team more and more powerful, without increasing the strength of the enemy as time goes on. By the five-hour mark, you basically know if you’re going to steam roll the game or not.

The amount of additional character and variety in the gameplay is great, I just wish it had a more challenging difficulty curve. Maybe make the meta-layer of when enemies show up more targeted to where players are at. If a player is doing well, ramp up the difficulty, if they’re struggling, pull it back a bit. I should always feel like I’m just barely keeping ahead with XCOM, not like I’m bored. And by the end of War of the Chosen, I was kind of getting bored, really. Oh well.

3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2020 – Switch – ★★★★

This is probably the video game that I spent the most time with hours-wise this year. I’m not entirely sure why? It’s a nice evolution of New Leaf, in that the crafting, environment shaping, and general quality-of-life improvements made are quite nice. There’s clearly been some thought on how people play these games, and ways to make the experience less frustrating.

… and yet, they kept so much tedium in the game. Like yes, the schedule stretching is the point, I get it. As someone who for some reason decided not to play with the clock, I only just recently finished the fish, fossils, and insects for the museum. But there’s just so many weird, little things that just make it hard to keep coming back to it. It’s like… to what end? When I’ve unlocked everything, and basically seen the entirety of the item list at this point, and the holiday events all being the game meaningless collectathons…. Why? I’m not going to try completing the collection; the museum stuff is about my limit, really (and even the paintings I can probably pass on).

I guess even an idealized, digital representation of a quasi-domestic life has the spiritual emptiness of consumerism-for-consumerism sake. Thanks???

Hypnospace Outlaw – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

I grew up on the internet of the early 00s. I had an AngelFire website, mostly consisting of shitty sprite webcomics and hosted Gundam pics. I remember when Google wasn’t really a thing and you would heavily rely on website compilation sites like the Anime Web Turnpike in order to find anything of value online. It was weird, it was wild. It was exciting!

The internet seemed so different back then. There was a ton of garbage online, but also, like… there was a sense of optimism to it. Folks were shitty, there was plenty of bad stuff online, but it felt so disconnected from the fabric of the physicality of real-life that it was at the same time a perfect escape.

I was young when I first got “online”, something like 12. I remember having this notion that the internet was going to be this great equalizer, that it had infinite potential to change how people behave and interact. Boy, huh.

Hypnospace Outlaw is essentially a splendid alternate universe GeoCities recreation, where you’re a volunteer moderator of a grouping of websites on HypnOS, an internet-analog you access while you are sleep. At the surface level, it’s mostly about poking around the weird alternate-historical version of the internet they created, full of kids feuding, bizarre historical divergences, and plenty of amazing bespoke weirdness. All of this is great; there’s an incredible amount of content that’s just great to poke at, listen to, and explore.

Below the surface, there’s also a rolling plotline about the ethics of this industry-owned platform, those who run it, and the way corporations handle new technology, new platforms, and emerging digital societies. There’s a late game turn that’s pretty damn affecting. And as someone who has moderator his share of internet forums in his time, trying to balance ‘do it for the community’ and what your ostensible ‘bosses’ require of you, it was kind of a weird throwback in more ways than one.

Minecraft – 2011 – PC – ★★★★★

Turns out, Minecraft is really as good still who knew??? Started playing a bunch more of it this year due to Giant Bomb deciding to do so, and yeah: still good!

2. Hades – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again— Supergiant makes damn good games. I’d been holding off on checking out Hades until its full release due to my tendency to burn out on games easily, and I’m glad I waited. Hades is a fantastic rogue-lite experience. The way it makes narrative progression part of the reiterative, randomized rogue-lite structure is just perfect.

It’s got all the usual Supergiant bullet points. Great characters, voice acting, narration, and music. In terms of gameplay, it’s probably their least ambitious game— playing something like a cousin to their original game, Bastion— but it’s also been polished to a mirror sheen. It just feels really damn good to play, over and over and over.

That being said, the second (final?) ending feels kind of…. Tacked on? It’s fine as a goal to go for while continuing to do the game’s relationship mechanics for additional story bits, but it ends up feeling kind of unfulfilling compared to the payoff of the first one.

1. Crusader Kings III – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I never could get into Crusader Kings II. Despite my interest, the sheer mechanical heft and unintuitive interface made the game a wall that I just couldn’t get over. I’m sure if I’d dedicated myself I probably could have learned it, but… ehhhhhh.

Crusader Kings III, on the other hand, has a good tutorial, a cleaned-up UI, and a very helpful highlight and tooltip system that make it much easier to understand how to actually play the game through resources inside the game itself. And, as it turns out: I rather love this game.

I mean, conceptually it’s an easy sell, isn’t it? Historical politics is something I enjoy broadly. I liked Stellaris but wish it had more narrative, roleplaying elements. They outright say that “winning” isn’t really the point of the game. Instead, it’s more about emergent storytelling and playing with the different systems and seeing what you can do with it.

My current game has had me taking the Haesteinn dynasty from its Viking origins into England, forming a London-seated Northern Sea Empire that encompasses all of Britannia, Iceland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark. I am currently working on hegemonizing Norse religious control over enough Asatru holy sites to finally reform the religion, such that more unified feudalization can occur. To that end, my current ruler’s predecessor invaded West Francia and conquered the whole of its territory, substantially reducing the foothold of Catholicism in mainland Europe… which seems to have kicked the hornet’s nest, given the Crusade I’m going to need to contend with next time I boot up the game.

Of course, a complicating matter is that my current ruler— the Emperor of the North Sea, King of Ireland and the Danelaw, liege of the King of Denmark, was elected from the extended Haesteinn family via Thing, the Scandinavian council of his erstwhile vassals. Where the previous emperor, the one who manufactured the invasion of Francia, was quite religious and beloved for his adherence to the old ways, I discovered as I took over as his successor that he really, really is into just boning down across Europe. We’re talking constantly attempting to seduce neighboring Queens and Princesses. His vassals are not thrilled with this. They also don’t care for his propensity for torturing people to death, constantly.

I had no real say in this; attempting to stay on top of a dynasty is kind of like riding a bucking-bronco, so many things are only tenuously under your control that some weird shit can happen. This is especially true when you use the systems that make it easier to maintain the coherency of your domain. The Norse religion encouraging concubinage results in you having a lot of kids, which means there’s a lot of domain partition going on (someday, primogeniture, someday). Naturally, using Thing election reduces that, but also makes you sometimes end up having to play Emperor Stabbo-Fucko because they thought he was the best candidate at the time. Hell, I thought he was the best candidate at the time until I discovered just how many people he’d be laying with on the low. But you just have to roll with it.

The way the game forces you to play ball with character traits is great. Doing things that match with the character’s traits makes them lose stress. Doing things against their character increases stress. Too much stress can force you to make the character take up vices (which can make them suffer health or opinion maluses, as well as altering their aptitudes), or even die outright. And sometimes those vices and attitudes can be boons, given they open up opportunities for different character interactions.

Emperor Stab-and-Fuck-Kingdom is perhaps the most relaxed person alive, it turns out, because his sadism makes him really enjoy sacrificing infidels, which makes the gods happy. It also freaks the fuck out of all of his vassals, so they’re a good supplicant mix of both appreciative of my religious sentiments and also utterly terrified of my skull piles. Some especially brave vassals occasionally try to assassinate me, but my lovers keep jumping in front of the knife and saving my life mid-coitus. Iiiiiit happens! :D  

The game can be incredibly fun to just watch, as it becomes emergently weird. Georgia right now is incredibly Jewish in game. I’m not sure how that happened; I guess someone made a random Jewish guy into a vassal, who somehow moved up enough in the world to make it a movement? The Byzantine princes elected a Coptic as Emperor, which over the course of the decade resulted in very accelerated balkanization as Byzantium just lost its shit. The Middle East and notional HRE haven’t really unified in a meaningful way, so I’m curious how things are going to go if/when the Mongols unify and roll-on in.

It’s one of those “Just one more thing” games that can completely devour time. I have more than a few times checked the clock mid-game to see that it’s 4AM and that I’ve totally ruined my sleep schedule in the process of play. Oooooops.

I highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious; the introductory, pre-release video series Paradox put out showing off the game does a pretty good job of showing the core gameplay loop and also how weird it can get.

[theresattrpgforthat]

May I request some recs for games where you play as a dragon? ::D Thank you for your time!!

THEME: Dragon Games

@foggedover and @vanderlyon both of you asked this question so I am killing two birds with one stone this time around! These games were so much more cute and wholesome than I expected Dragon games to be.

Hot Gay Bro Dragons, by Riverhouse Games.

Bro, he’s your whole world. He makes you feel fabulous. His body is smoking hot, and when you look into his eyes they sparkle like gold.

He’s a dragon. So are you. You’re in love.

This is HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, a gay game about telling your boyfriend you love him.

This is a silly goofy game about dragons in love, that can work for 2 players but can also play with more! What I really love about this game is when you choose how big of a dragon you are, you also tell your dragon boyfriend about how you feel about him based on his size relevant to yours. The game also encourages you to use phrases like “oh my god bro” and “bro you’re so smoking” and “that’s bro-lliant my dude”. If you’re just looking for a fun goofy time with someone you love, this game can do that for you.

Dragonhearts, by FractalDragon.

You get to be a dragon

You get to kiss dragons

Need I say more? 

This Tabletop RPG is about about the clash of over-sized personalities between shapeshifters who can assume human or dragon form, or anything in between. It's GMless—meaning everyone has equal narrative authority—and plays best over one or two 3-4 hour sessions, with 3-4 players. 

As a Firebrands hack, Dragonhearts is rather poetic in its character creation and plays through a series of mini games. These mini games include fights, rituals, moments of intimacy, competitions and more - and most of them can be played in whatever order makes sense for your story. This game also comes with a solo game, which each player will play as they set up their characters but might be interesting to play if you want to explore this game by yourself. If you are interested in short, segmented forms of play that can be mixed and matched as your dragons wrestle with emotions and learn about who they are, I definitely recommend Dragonhearts.

Epyllion, by Marissa Kelly (at Magpie Games).

Dragonia faces a threat we dragons have all but forgotten. Inside each of us are seeds of Darkness waiting to take root in doubt, anger, and sorrow. You and your fellow dragons— although small now—must protect Dragonia from the growing Darkness…and learn what it means to be a true friend.  -- Tass the Gigantic, Councilmember

Epyllion is a tabletop role playing game about young drakes who investigate rumors, solve problems, and discover the truth of a growing evil in Dragonia. While you play, you and your friends tell awesome stories, explore what it means to be a drake of Dragonia, and discover the value of friendship through magical, whimsical, and heartfelt adventures.

This is an adorable game about young dragons, perfect for all ages. You are young dragons trying to save their home from evil. It gives me the same vibes as Land Before Time, although others have described it to have the same tone as Spyro, or My Little Pony. Epyllion has received many accolades in the gaming community, and its author, Marissa Kelly, is also one of the brains behind the gorgeously haunting game of Bluebeard’s Bride. If the kind of dragon you want to play is cute and trying very hard to be a hero, then this is the game for you.

Hearth Dragons, by M. Davis.

With powerful magic, someone has created you, a dragon. Not a true dragon, no, but one crafted with care and love and given a purpose: to protect your home. With a special ability you were crafted with and a dragon's flame within, many adventures await you and your fellow hearth dragons as you strive to be the best caretakers one can be. And you don't even need to leave the house!

Hearth Dragons is a Lasers & Feelings hack inspired by The Last Dragon Chronicles by author Chris d'Lacey and the Pennykettle Dragons who made the stories as magical as they were. With friends and a game master, you'll make your own clay, paper, or other kind of handcrafted dragon and work together to solve problems and tell stories using your own imagination or the random adventure generation table within.

This is a quick little game with easy-to-generate characters and goals. You’ll create a house together and then do your best to protect it from forces such as an ominous neighbour or a a dangerous creature, from doing things such as ruining brunch or capturing the family pet. This is a great little game, perfect for one-shots and pick-up games.

If you like this creator's work I also recommend their solo journaling game, called An Afternoon As A Dragon, a game about someone who's become a dragon because of a curse.

Baby Dragons, by Litza Bronwyn.

In this game, you are a fierce baby dragon, hatched amongst a variety of other dragon eggs and left to discover the wonders and dangers of the world with your draconic siblings. You must choose if you are better at mental or physical, and go out in search of food, loot, more minions, and/or a better lair.

A simple one-page game that is easy to pick up and play with little to no prep! This is also inspired by Lasers and Feelings, but rather than manufactured dragons, you’re just babies, and you’re more likely to cause trouble than prevent it. If you’re interested in Epyllion but you want something that requires less commitment, you might want to check out Baby Dragons.

[dcsthoughtsaboutgames]

Dragon Quest Builders

Dragon Quest Builders is the most recent game I've finished and it's a fascinating game, I *think* it's a good game but at times I was ready to drop it and move onto something else. Part of the reason I wanted to write this post is to work through my thoughts on it and try and dissect what worked and what didn't for me. On it's surface you could cynically dismiss this game as a lazy Minecraft rip off. It is after all a fantasy themed, block based, crafting, survival game. But it differs in a couple of critical places that solidly makes it it's own game. The biggest difference is that the world is not procedurally generated, instead each of the four chapters has a hand built world that is carefully designed to make exploration and questing more streamlined so you can progress the story at a satisfying pace.The other big difference ties into the first, this game is an entirely solo experience eschewing the social and collaborative aspect that makes Minecraft really special, and instead plays into the strength of the Dragon Quest series and focuses on being a cosy single player RPG with charming characters and writing. The story premise is fun albeit a bit goofy. At the end of Dragon Quest 1 there's a famous part where you have a choice to side with the Dragon Lord, and if you do you instantly game over and are thrown back to your last save. Builder's is a direct follow up to that bad ending. The game opens with your character being woken by the goddess Rubiss and told that Alefgard has been plunged into darkness and you the legendary builder need to venture out and rebuild the world and to teach the inhabitants how to build, because everyone forgot how to build things since the calamity. This fact leads to some fun moments like the first person you encounter being completely in awe of you combining a stick with a mushroom and cooking it over a fire to make a roasted mushroom skewer. Just the idea of combining two things blows this poor man's mind. A really clever thing the game does to tie plot and gameplay together is to have the goddess reassure you that you are not a hero, you are a builder and fighting monsters won't fix the world. This manifests in the game play by having no traditional XP and levelling system, instead to level up you have to build up your town, and to get stronger you have to make better equipment and build new buildings which will provide passive buffs for when you do venture out. This insistence that fighting isn't the solution unfortunately isn't that well realised, the main ways to progress the story are to go out and defeat boss monsters for rare items or to defend your town from waves of enemies. And the combat is just bad. Enemies are HP sponges and you have so few combat options at your disposal that you fight 90% of the enemies the same way, move in attack, step back to avoid their counter-attack, repeat. The wave based defence sections are especially clumsy since it seems like the game wants you to build defensive structures to aid you but every tool they give you in this regard is basically worthless and you are always better off fighting the enemies with your sword outside the town instead. To cap off my combat thoughts there's the end of chapter bosses which are the only time the game makes fighting interesting by forcing you to use special items to overcome some gimmick, the problem is that it's only interesting until you figure out the gimmick because actually executing it is not at all fun. In the end it was the very satisfying resource gathering / building loop that got me through the game especially in conjunction with the iconic DQ style vignette story telling. Also each chapter having a unique twist to vary up the challenge was really welcome seeing as this game was not short at all, with my completion time clocking in at around 50 hours. Final thoughts, this is a way more ambitious game than I was expecting and probably the most fun I've had with a survival crafting game since Minecraft, it didn't always succeed but I'm really curious to try out the sequel now and see where they iterated and what they kept.

[jackdawyt]

Following Jason Schreier's continued BioWare story, we have direct insight from many BioWare employees regarding the initial Dragon Age 4 BioWare were going to create code named 'Joplin' and envisioned by Mike Laidlaw, against the now in production Dragon Age project that has been code named 'Morrison'.  

Last time we talked about both projects - Joplin and Morrison, equally named after their respected music artists who died at the age of 27, but were both known for revolutionizing their respected industry.

This latest report examines everything that Joplin was going to be regarding the future of the next Dragon Age title.

Let's now delve into the potential game that Dragon Age 4 initially was going to be, before it was rebooted for Anthem and Andromeda's developments.

As I quote:

The plan for Joplin was exciting, say people who worked on it. First and foremost, they already had many tools and production pipelines in place after Inquisition, ones that they hoped to improve and continue using for this new project.

They committed to prototyping ideas early and often, testing as quickly as possible rather than waiting until everything was on fire, as they had done the last time thanks to the glut of people and Frostbite’s difficulties.

“Everyone in project leadership agreed that we couldn’t do that again, and worked to avoid the kind of things that had led to problems,” said one person who worked on the project, explaining that some of the big changes included:

1) Laying down a clear vision as early as possible.

2) Maintaining regular on-boarding documents and procedures so new team members could get up to speed fast; and

3) A decision-making mentality where “we acknowledged that making the second-best choice was far, far better than not deciding and letting ambiguity stick around while people waited for a decision.”

(That person, like all of the sources for this story, spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about their experiences.)

Prepare the tears for this next quote guys....

Another former BioWare developer who worked on Joplin called it “some of the best work experiences” they’d ever had. “We were working towards something very cool, a hugely reactive game, smaller in scope than Dragon Age: Inquisition but much larger in player choice, followers, reactivity, and depth,” they said. “I’m sad that game will never get made.”

You’d play as a group of spies in Tevinter Imperium, a wizard-ruled country on the north end of Dragon Age’s main continent, Thedas. The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition.

(In other words, they wanted Joplin to be the opposite of the Hinterlands.) There was an emphasis on “repeat play,” one developer said, noting that they wanted to make areas that changed over time and missions that branched in interesting ways based on your decisions, to the point where you could even get “non-standard game overs” if you followed certain paths.

A large chunk of Joplin would center on heists. The developers talked about building systemic narrative mechanics, allowing the player to perform actions like persuading or extorting guards without the writers having to hand-craft every scene.

It was all very ambitious and very early, and would have no doubt changed drastically once Joplin entered production, but members of the team say they were thrilled about the possibilities.

The first big hiccup came in late 2016, when BioWare put Joplin on hold and moved the entire team onto the troubled Mass Effect: Andromeda, which needed as many hands as possible during its final months of development.

The Joplin team expanded with people who were rolling off Andromeda and kept working, prototyping, and designing the game. After spending months of their lives helping finish a Mass Effect that didn’t excite a ton of people, it was nice to return to Dragon Age.

One thing that wasn’t discussed much on Joplin was multiplayer, according to a few people who worked on the project, which is perhaps why the project couldn’t last.

By the latter half of 2017, Anthem was in real trouble, and there was concern that it might never be finished unless the studio did something drastic.

In October of 2017, not long after veteran Mass Effect director Casey Hudson returned to the studio to take over as general manager, EA and BioWare took that drastic action, canceling Joplin and moving the bulk of its staff, including executive producer Mark Darrah, onto Anthem.

A tiny team stuck around to work on a brand new Dragon Age 4, code-named Morrison, that would be built on Anthem’s tools and code base. It’s the game being made now. Unlike Joplin, this new version of the fourth Dragon Age is planned with a live service component, built for long-term gameplay and revenue.

One promise from management, according to a developer, was that in EA’s balance sheet, they’d be starting from scratch and not burdened with the two years of money that Joplin had already spent. Question was, how many of those ideas and prototypes would they use?

It’s not clear how much of Joplin’s vision will shape Morrison (at least some of it will, says one person on the game), but shortly after the reboot, creative director Mike Laidlaw left, as did some other veteran Dragon Agestaff.

Matt Goldman, art director on Dragon Age: Inquisition and then Joplin, took over as creative director for Morrison, while Darrah remained executive producer on both that project and Anthem.

In early 2018, when I first reported that BioWare had rebooted the next Dragon Age and that its replacement would be a live service game, studio GM Casey Hudson responded on Twitter.

“Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you’ll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about ‘live’ it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story.”

The game is still very early in development and could evolve based on the negative reception to Anthem. Rumor among BioWare circles for the past year has been that Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”—a snarky label conveyed to me by several people—but a couple of current BioWare employees have waved me off that description.

“The idea was that Anthem would be the online game and that Dragon Age and Mass Effect, while they may experiment with online portions, that’s not what defines them as franchises,” said one. “I don’t think you’ll see us completely change those franchises.”

When asked, a few BioWare developers agreed that it’d be technically possible for a game built on Anthem’s codebase to also have an offline branch, but it’s not yet clear whether Morrison will take that approach. If it does turn out to be an online game, which seems likely, it would be shocking if you couldn’t play the bulk of it by yourself.

(Diablo III, for example, is online-only on PC yet can be played entirely solo.)

One person close to the game told me this week that Morrison’s critical path, or main story, would be designed for single-player and that goal of the multiplayer elements would be to keep people engaged so that they would actually stick with post-launch content.

Single-player downloadable content like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Trespasser, while often excellent, typically sells only a fraction of the main game, according to developers from BioWare and elsewhere across the industry.

Yet this wouldn’t be a “live service” game if it was a repeat of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which compartmentalized its single- and multiplayer modes.

Fans in the past have grown outraged at the idea of BioWare putting a lot of emphasis on multiplayer gaming, but there are ways in which a service-heavy Dragon Age 4 could be ambitious and impressive.

For example, some ideas I’ve heard floated for Morrison’s multiplayer include companions that can be controlled by multiple players via drop-in/drop-out co-op, similar to old-school BioWare RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and quests that could change based not just on one player’s decisions, but on the choices of players across the globe.

Maybe in two or three years, Morrison will look completely different. It’s not like Dragon Age hasn’t changed drastically in the past. In the office, BioWare developers often refer to Mark Darrah’s Dragon Age team as a pirate ship, one that will eventually wind up at its destination, but not before meandering from port to port, drinking as much rum as possible along the way.

His is a team that, in the past, has iterated and changed direction constantly—something that they hoped to cut down for Joplin, but has always been part of their DNA (and, it should be noted, heavy iteration is common in all game development).

One BioWare employee summed it up well as we talked about the future of BioWare’s fantasy franchise. “Keep in mind,” they said, “Dragon Age games shift more than other games.

”Said another current BioWare employee about Morrison: “They have a lot of unanswered questions. Plus I know it’s going to change like five times in the next two years.”

There are other questions remaining, too: With BioWare’s Austin office gradually taking over Anthem going forward, when will the bulk of employees at the company’s Edmonton HQ move to the Morrison team?

Will Morrison be able to avoid following the lead of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which took on too many people too early and wound up suffering as a result?

And, most important, will BioWare work to prevent the burnout that has led to dozens of developers leaving over the past two years, with so many citing stress, depression, and anxiety?

End of article, so my thoughts on this, of course, I have my worries especially regarding the multiplayer part, it was to my knowledge that there is a separate Dragon Age team working on the multiplayer component completely estranged from the core team.

I hope that this is still the case, however, it's EA that're the ones who plaque BioWare to incorporate multiplayer and live-service.  

Honestly the biggest concern here is how much of Joplin's original vision and resources are going to be put into Morrison's production, because the description of Joplin is everything I've wanted in a Dragon Age game following from Inquisition.

To hear that this initial game has been canned is heart-wrenching, any signs of Joplin's ashes in Morrison is all I can hope for.

Hope is all we really have right now regarding the future of Dragon Age, and don't forget Mass Effect, which is also going to affected by this too.

Of course, I have my worries. But I am hopeful for what the Dragon Age team can do, and I feel to fear when we still haven't seen the game yet is a little blind-sighted. Who knows when we will see or hear anything, I imagine we may see something on EA Play's live-streams next June, just before E3, but honestly, I'm not sure!

The next Dragon Age project is expected to release within 2-3 years from now, all we can hope for next is a reveal of some-sorts, like a title or development update.

It would be incredible if BioWare could come out and share some insight on what the heck is going on with the next Dragon Age, like a development diary which they did with Mass Effect: Andromeda.

To get a glimpse of this next game and the vision for it is what we in the BioWare fandom all need right now. To know what is going on with the next Dragon Age and how true it will stick to Joplin's original vision.

But until we do hear something, like always, you're already in the right place...

[hi-i-love-u-bitch]

Excuse me! But where is my Sanders Sides Gamer AU???

Voices in my head: Gee Bunny, it seems you have no problem writing a lot of other fics and stuff yet you still haven’t even finished the next chapter of your Spiderverse fic???

Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP DISEMBODIED VOICES IN MY HEAD!!! IF YOU WANT THAT FIC DONE SO BADLY TELL MY LOGIC AND CREATIVITY TO GET THEIR ASSES IN GEAR AND GIVE ME SOME GOD DAMN INSPIRATION!!!!

Voices in my head:.....

Me: Yeah, that’s what I thought! Anyways, idk if I just missed a memo or something but I haven’t seen any Gamer AU of my boys and that is a crime in and of itself! Like, how dare! But fret not, I am here to provide content (Read: headcannons) that you did not ask for! Let us begin! Or should I say start!

(please note that I am not a gaming expert so feel free to add or correct stuff)

NOW WITH A PART 2!!!!

MAIN SQUAD

Roman Rosewood

Obviously loves RPGs! Anything with a good story line really! Or has medieval fantasy aesthetic!

Skyrim, Diablo, Undertale, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, Undertales, Dragon Age, God of War Dark Souls, Assassins Creed, Earthbound, etc.

Played West of Loathing just so he could rip on it but actually ended up loving it and spending way to many hours playing. Then he found out there was a game called Kingdom of Loathing by the same creators and went down that rabbit hole as well.

He was iffy about getting into JRPGs but then Virgil convinced him to play Persona 5 and he absolutely fell in love with the music!

All the music in his phone is either from musicals or Video games!

Also really likes choose your own adventure games like Detroit: Become Human, Life is Strange, and Telltale Games

So much video game merch! Usually figurines because he likes to make little shelves and display cases for them.

He also really likes multiplayer games because he’s a social butterfly and likes to play with his squad.

Sucks at first person shooter games but still willingly plays Fortnight or Call of Duty or Left for Dead with his friends because he doesn’t want to be a drag and complain. But also they sometimes die in game in the most hilarious ways and it just leaves everybody wheezing.

Virgil Dante

Horror games, obvs!

All about that dark aesthetic!

Devil May Cry, Silent Hill, Fran Bow, Sally Face, Resident Evil, The Witch’s House, Amnesia, Little Nightmares, Bendy and The Ink Machine, Alice: Madness Returns, SCP-Containment, Pony Island, etc.

Yes, he’s played all the Five Nights At Freddy’s games. It’s a good series and it isn’t his fault the fandom is bat shit crazy and full of ten year olds! Fuck you Roman!

Every time the Walking Dead comes out he knows he’ll end up crying by the end of it. He and the squad make and event out of it.

Japanese horror games are usually his favorite because they deal more with the psychological aspects of horror instead of the jump scares

So, yes, he’s also a fan of Corps Party and Fatal Frame

Also really good at first person shooters because he has a really steady hand (you usually have to when playing horror games least you want to restart the level) and it pisses Roman off to no end every time Virgil randomly headshots him.

Usually likes to by merch in the form of posters, t-shirts, or beanies. He only buys figurines if it’s a game he really, really likes.

At first didn’t know why people kept bugging him to play Doki Doki Literature Club but then he finally caved and...oh...that’s why.

Logan Mill

My boy loves puzzle and strategy games yo!

Legend of Zelda, Portal, Tetris, Unravel, World of Goo, Inside, Limbo, Pokemon, Shadow of the Colossus, StarCraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empire, Heart of Iron, World of Warcraft, etc.

He likes Overwatch but doesn’t like playing with people online so he usual solos or asks the others to play. But that too usually ends in chaos.

Hates rage games because he gets frustrated easily and has broken at least four keyboards and two controllers

He still plays them anyways because he can beat it damn it! Just give him a minute!

Enjoys the God of War series despite all the mythological inaccuracies

He plays a lot of Minecraft to relax or destress and has build beautiful works of architecture and sometimes entire cities.

He thought it was stupid and childish and was embarrassed about it for a long time until the squad came over to his house one day uninvited and caught him playing. He was getting ready for them to make fun of him but they instead gushed about how AMAZING everything looked and how TALENTED he was for building all himself.

Logan ends up showing them how to play afterwards and they work together to make weird sculptures and complex tunnels underground.

He likes practical merch like backpacks, coffee mugs, pencil holders, notebooks, ect. as well as a few t-shirts and novelty ties.

Yes, he does collect Pokemon cards!

Patton Adley

Silly dating sims, farming games, and any cute game really! Plus a few side scroller games!

Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, Slime Rancher, The Sims, Dream Daddy, Animal Crossing, Kirby, Monster Prom, Hatoful Boyfriend, Scribblenauts, Night In The Woods, Ni Nu Kuni, etc.

Big Nintendo fan!

He made the mistake of playing Doki Doki Literature Club without reading the warning tags and regrets it immensely...still a good game though.

He did the same thing with Huni Pop but that one made him laugh more then anything and he kind of got addicted to it. Then he found out there was a sequel called HuniCam so he went down that rabbit hole too.

He likes a lot of phone app games too like Cut the Rope, Neko Atsume, and Candy Crush.

Loves trashy dating app games, he thinks they’re so funny and cheesy

He was addicted to Mystic Messenger for a long while

Just because he has his preference doesn’t mean he won’t try other games too, Logan got him hooked on World of Warcraft (though really he did that to everyone), Virgil showed him Hollow Knight, and Roman suggested he play Undertales.

Prefers merch in the form of plushies and key chains!

He likes to bake and decorate cookies, cakes and pastries in the form of his favorite video game characters.

RED SQUAD

Duncan [Deceit] Adley (Patton’s twin)

A lot of first person shooter and combat games!

Doom Series, Super Smash Bros, Mortal Combat, Halo, Fortnight, Grand Theft Auto, Street Fighter, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Half-Life, Team Fortress, Destiny, Wolfenstein, Bio Shock, Splatoon, PUBg etc.

Patton was the one that introduced him to Splatoon and he won’t admit that it’s actually super fun.

Doesn’t mind story driven games and RPGs but he really just wants something he can zone out to and relax

He likes to troll people online, mainly assholes picking on little kids who just want to play.

He once teamed up with a group of kids on Call of Duty solely for the purpose of collectively kicking the asses of this groups of so called “real gamers” that were being jerks.

Has memorized all the combos! He doesn’t have time to sit and look up a cool finishing move, he needs it now!

Always mains the weakest/most useless character in fighting games and still manages to kick everyone’s ass.

Doesn’t have a preference in merch and usually grabs whatever he likes be it figurines, t-shirts, posters, plushies, or whatever, so long as he likes the game it comes from.

Has several tattoos from his favorite games

Emile Picani

Classic retro games, cartoonish games, and Nintendo are his jam broham!

Mario, Classic Sonic, Paper Boy, Transylvania, Spyro, Pac Man, All the Saga Disney games, Duck Hunt, Mario Kart, Galaga, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, Secret of Mana, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, etc.

Absolutely fell in love with Shovel Knight when it came out!

Remy got him into all the indie pixel games: Towerfall, Terraria, Owlboy, Hotline Miami, Papers Please, Celeste, One Shot, etc.

Duncan was the one that introduced him to Cuphead and the usually play it together and see how far each of them can go without dying.

The game is difficult but the art is still so breathtaking!

Likes the occasional psychological thriller game

Bet Virgil showed him Alice: Madness Returns and Doki Doki Literature Club (after he’s played it of course)

Likes plushies and figurine merch with the occasional poster and coffee mug.

Likes to doodle a lot of his fav video game characters and cartoons and is actually really good at it. He helped design most of Duncan’s tattoos.

Remy Knightly

Likes a lot of indie games and old online flash games!

The Stanley Parables, Oxenfree, Inside, Firewatch, Super MeatBoy, The Binding of Issac, Donut County, Henry Stickman series, Impossible Quiz, Crush the Castle series, Hyper Light Drifter, etc.

He always gets everybody hooked on one game or another

He convinced everyone to play Undertales so for like a month they all went through a HUGE Undertales faze.

Was the actual, ACTUAL one that showed Duncan Cuphead because he knew the dork would be reminded of Emile because of the animation and would want to show it to him and play multiplayer (*cough* subtle matchmaker *cough*)

(Do not be fooled, he is a pinning boy himself)

Is up to date in all the gossip of the latest games and consuls, indie or mainstream! He’s in the know, know and if you need to know something chances are Remy probably knows it.

Weeds out through all the indie horror games for Virgil and recommends what he thinks are the best ones.

Same thing with Logan and his puzzle games, he’s usually is able to find very strange ones and Logan seems to likes those best.

Obviously has a lot of merch in coffee mug and thermal form as well as a few key chains.

Occasionally streams on Twitch with Duncan and Emile (sometimes inviting the main squad too), they’re commentary is usual hilarious.

[carcharadroid]

Anyway here’s some of my own hot takes about some of the datamined changes people are going the most apeshit about so far.

AoE vs Cleave changes-

I’ll have to see how it plays out in practice. But the only way I can really see it bothering me at all is when I’m soloing old raids, since I find it fun to do big pulls and boom ‘em all down with one(1) button press. I doubt I’ll notice a huge difference in the relevant content I usually do, though, and I get why they’re considering the change.

No War/Titanforging and loot is generally rarer-

Good. Loot didn’t mean a fucking thing for the past few expansions.

No big class revamps-

Good, the bases of most class/speccs are fine as they are. They just need a heavy unpruning and tweaking. I don’t want to have to learn my character from scratch all over again when the fundamentals are fine the way they are. Heavy pruning and GCD changes were the problem.

Blizz considering making it easy to swap covenants if balancing doesn’t work out-

Mixed feelings. I like the idea of impactful decisions in an RPG. They'll have to make a lot of the abilities a bit lukewarm to achieve that though. That, or the playerbase will collectively have to realize most of them aren’t good or important enough to have to min-max their character with the same fervor as the 0.1% of the playerbase who are cutting edge world first Mythic raiders.

Seriously. A few % one way or the other won’t matter if the most you do is Normal and Heroic.

Male night elves getting face tattoos-

Mixed on this one. Night elves are my favorite race and the lore of the game is important to me. Facial tattoos is historically a sort of rite of passage that the women would take, but not the men. Curious about the lore implications here.

On the one hand, more options for character creation is fun. On the other hand, don’t like the homogenization of fantasy races. I’m pretty sure Blizz either forgot or discarded their lore here. Again. But then again, they’ve been leaning away from the matriarchal angle of Kaldorei society since WoW Vanilla, so I’m not really surprised.

On the other hand, tattoos are neat. And this opens up the possibility of trans or nonbinary characters, so hey. Cool stuff. Cool stuff that most players outside of RP servers won’t think twice about because they don’t know the lore implications but whatever.

Not looking forward to the inevitability of weird uwu fetishiziation shit of trans/nb identities though. -sighs in nb-

Also side note, I freely admit the paler skin option + blond-ish hair option for nelfs looks a bit weird but whatever. Maybe it looks better on the model, I’ll have to wait and see more than just the raw textures.

Blood elves with dark skin tones-

Who cares. We’ve had those before. I’ll probably make one cuz they look good. The only annoying thing here are how people are already whining that the darker-skinned blood elves don’t have different hair and facial structure to match.

They aren’t humans. Of course they’re not gonna have that. Stop.

Blood elves with blue eyes-

We don’t know that they’re blood elves. They could be high elf NPCs. Or additional eye shades for death knights.

If they are blood elves then yeah, this one I don’t like much. But I guess you could make the argument of some blood elves having their eyes turn back to something resembling their original shade as the Fel fades from them, instead of gold like we got in BfA.

Still, a little grumpy about this one since I think the people who have been asking for playable high elves in the Alliance fuckin deserve the chance. The “there’s too few of them” argument falls flat when you realize how shockingly few void elves there realistically would be running around.