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licensed games are fucking back, baby

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Review: Little Inferno (+ DLC)

They added an actual yule log mode! How cute is that?

  The first game I ever bought on Steam was Little Inferno. I think even as a kid I could tell it represented a lot of great things about indie games. It's unique, it makes me laugh, it's a bit macabre, and most importantly, back when I first bought it, I could buy it with some saved allowance money.  

  Little Inferno is an evening-long game where you fuck around in a fire place, throwing around household objects, toys, and art as you watch their unique responses to being set on fire. You start the game with access to things like blocks and plush toys, later toying around with living things, dangerous machinery, and minuscule versions of astronomical phenomena. A more specific reason I found the game to be appealing as a kid is from this simple gameplay concept. It really feels like a premium version of one of those physics based browser games. It's not quite a puzzle game, it's more of a sandbox for dragging things around with your cursor and watching things happen. Sometimes you just build something to watch crumble. Other times you see how many explosives you can pack into one chain reaction, and sometimes you just torture a little creature for the hell of it.

There is a small barrier of progression in this game, where the catalogs of burnable items are not unlocked until you find a set number of combinations of items to burn together. If there's anything in this game that could have been done better, it's this system. You satisfy a combo by reading the name of one and burning the two or three items the combo's name is alluding to. The items don't need to actually have some sort of reaction to each other, and if they do, that reaction does not have to take place to complete the challenge. They just need to be alight at the same time. I would have preferred if at least a few of the combos actually required some unique effect, like the flamethrower effect items mutually burning each other. I'm sure this would have not been easily programmed. It's not a big deal.

  What I was able to appreciate much more this time around, with the Holiday DLC that launched at the end of last year, was how much I loved the setting and atmosphere of Little Inferno. While your screen is only ever the fireplace or the catalogs of items to put in your fireplace. You learn the world outside is cold, and increasingly inhospitable. Your only communication with other people is photos and letters, delivered through the same mail service that brings you your improvised kindling. This game didn't need to have memorable or charming characters, but it does. As much as Little Inferno satirizes consumerism, games as a whole, people who play games, and itself. It has a lot of small moments of warmth that will surely create a Little Inferno in the fireplace of your heart.

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reading about chinese dominoes and:

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the suits known as "Chinese" and "barbarian" were renamed to "civil" and "military" respectively to avoid offending the ruling Manchus.

no escape from wokeness in gaming

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life got worse once nintendo turned their backs on the 3ds

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Review: Pentiment

𝕸𝖞 𝕻𝖚𝖕𝖎𝖑𝖘 𝕰𝖛𝖎𝖉𝖊𝖓𝖈𝖊 𝕱𝖚𝖈𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕾𝖚��𝖐𝖘 𝕬𝖓𝖉 𝕴 𝕬𝖒 𝕲𝖔𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕿𝖔 𝕲𝖊𝖙 𝕶𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖉

 This review is gonna be a short weird one for two reasons. First is it is extremely difficult for me to talk about why this game has it’s hooks in my brain without robbing others of discovering those brainhooks for themselves. Second is I feel weirdly insecure about my ability to discuss stories, and Pentiment is all about stories and how stories be stories. Pentiment is definitely by and for history guys and personple who write good and read gooder. But, I feel like I lived 25 years in 16th century Bavaria against my will and felt and loved and suffered all of it, like that star trek episode, with the flute.  There is no greater feature games love to pretend to have than “Your choices matter.” In Pentiment your choices matter so hard you will be laying awake at night in either pride in your foresight or guilt in your meddling. The peasants you live with and monks working along side you can found guilty of murder by the state or remembered as heroes by their ancestors, depending on what you learn, what you say, and what you choose to believe.   Despite this amount of “control” it sounds like I’m promising, the line between your character and NPC feels blurred. The people of Tassing aren’t skill checks that you can mold by saying the flattering or even honest thing. The dialogue choices you’ll have by deciding your character is an Occultist are often perturbing to others, and as a university student your characters knowledge is as useful for recognizing something as it is to get someone to say “stop being pedantic asshole”. When you do succeed or fail to persuade someone, your actions that helped or prevented you from doing so are shown. Everytime this happened I either thought something like “Oh yeah that’s how an actual 16th century christian pig farmer would react to that, huh” or “Oh I guess I actually didn’t have this guy figured out”. It’s all real. I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever appreciated characters being so real in a video game this much since the Fallout New Vegas DLC where you lock the old man in the gold vault of a haunted casino.   No flowchart bullshit about “well if you like these kinda games if its on sale if you’re a wise ass tree” on this one. Xbox Gamepass is like one crunchwrap worth of money. Play Pentiment, and leave the fancy text styles on if you’re able to.

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Review: Lost in Random

The giant hand attack should collide with itself into a big clap attack that instant kills anything in the collision zone. Story’s great though.

 The first few hours in Lost in Random are the most excited I’ve ever been playing a completely blind playthrough of a game I just happened to pick out of my steam recommendations. The combat system is completely unique and the world is a joy just to explore. Every NPC is worth talking to, and every minute you want to just look around and gaze at the environment. But as I got further in, I just started to dread combat encounters and was a little picky with what side quests I actually pursued.

 LiR’s combat/card draw system is a fantastic concept. Every other implantation of real-time combat with deckbuilding rarely goes deeper into feeling like a card game than just having weapons and equipment represented as pieces of paper, that you might get randomly through some rouge-lite system. But in LiR you are firing at weak points and precision dodging attacks to actually draw a selection of cards from your customized deck. Then you toss your dice buddy to determine how many points you can actually spend on your cards. This first card draw and dice roll sets the tempo of the rest of the battle. You can play a weapon card that equips your character with brittle equipment that lets you directly attack enemies, or a hazard card that will let you place something on the field that will passively damage enemies for you. While the system of randomly drawing cards and having to manage your card’s costs are pleasant replications of table top TCG systems, what I found lacking was the actual amount of cards to experiment with, and synergies between cards. Most cards do have rewards for double-drawing them, weapons get a damage bonus and reset their durability, multiple bomb hazards in the field will set each other off, and buffs/debuffs have their timer extended. But there’s few real combo strategies to build, you wouldn’t be at much of a disadvantage for letting the game select your cards at random. The card pool also has “Cheat” cards that enable you to play higher cost cards more often but the more creative choices in this category are rendered irrelevant by the boring “0 cost draw 1″ and “1 cost, all other cards cost 1 less” staples you get very early in the game. The bombs and turrets are fun at first, but the reliable options of the higher cost weapons and high damage crystal-breaking debuff quickly become the best options at swiftly ending the repetitive combat encounters of  enemies that either slowly walk towards you or fire at you from a distance.  The feeling of progression suffers greatly as a symptom of the meager and unbalanced card pool, by the time I was halfway through the story I had perfected my deck and unlocked all the cards in the game for purchase, leaving the main quest and side stories only gameplay reward being duplicate cards or currency I wasn’t going to spend. For some side quests talking to the characters was it’s own reward, but when an NPC in the final town cried “Have you seen my missing book?” I kept following the main quest marker without hesitation.   The story itself and the performances of the voice actors is mostly worth fighting through the the repetitive combat encounters, but the final act was a bit too fast and predictable for me. I’ve purposefully given no details on the whole thing because I do think it’s worth seeing for yourself, but I have to get this off my chest: It was a bit shocking to me for a game that came out as recent as late 2021 would just have you beat the shit out a character you’re trying to call back from the dark side like you would any other boss. We’ve had enough RPGs about forgiveness and redemption where I shouldn’t be wailing on my sister with a hammer until her healthbar is depleted, immediately followed by a cutscene where she’s normal again. I don’t care if it’s derivative of other indie games I demand my ludonarritive to be harmonious instead of dissonant.

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Demo: DoubleShake

The best kickstarter games are apparently the ones I never heard of ever despite being exactly the kind of shit I want.

  Mischief Makers is one of two Nintendo 64 games I actually will use an N64 emulator to play. Everything else has been remade, ported, or just replaced by a sequel. It’s already hard to convince someone that they gotta play something that can only be emulated. Especially if its an N64 game. Especially(x2) if it’s a sidescrolling N64 game. I just can’t force my friends to play Mischief Makers, but I WILL force them to play DoubleShake.   DoubleShake is much more than a Mischief Makers successor, however. Its wonderful artstyle can’t succinctly compared to either modern indie games or the early 3D titles it’s inspired by. The two islands that the demo allows you to explore are dense with fun characters and whimsical landmarks, making it’s direction-switching 2.5D design a perfect experience of exploration and platforming, with much time spent finding gift-bearing dogs to pet, puzzles to solve, and enemies to throw, and little time spent getting lost or backtracking. These devs are masterminds of both retro and modern game design, and seem to have little care for the antiquated idea of faceless npcs or the post-wii plague of constant handholding. Almost every character you can talk to is as lovingly rendered as the protagonist, and new enemies and obstacles can be faced without of a momentum stopping tutorial sequence.

  The demo even has it’s own new game+ feature, where after completing the handful of quests the preview gives you, you can restart it with all your unlocks maintained, and the world populated with more obstacles and enemies, aswell as new costumes and powers to find. Even a test room with items hinting at full-game content, and some more dogs to pet.   Fortunately, DoubleShake’s inspiring demo isn’t going away with the other Next-Fest demos, it’s on their Itch.io page! So you don’t have an excuse!

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Review: LEGO Bricktales

Actually a good deal when you consider how expensive those tiny ass Lego sets are

  Most Lego games have fuck-all to do with the actual toys. Instead they’re weird 3D platformers games with a million characters and unlockables. The visuals of Legos are there and sure theres some parts where your little character builds something, but most of the time you’re fighting and exploring your way through a level or forcing Yoda to commit suicide for the funny noise.

  With Bricktales, Lego goes the opposite direction and has you actually building things, pretty much all the time. There are some secrets and unlockables but it’s damn right PALTRY compared to the Traveller’s Tales Lego games endless bounty of tertiary Star Wars and Lord of The RIngs characters. A lot of the builds are puzzles of some kind. Sometimes you have to fit chunks of bricks together to recreate a statue, sometimes you have to build a vehicle that can haul cargo, and sometimes you have to build a bridge to get across a gap (Actually like 1-in-5 objectives are just engineering some kind of bridge.) Occasionally a build will have a simple objective like “Use atleast 5 build elements” and give you the chance to be creative, these ones are hit-or-miss for me and they’re pretty much all the game has going for it in terms of replay-ability, as you can redo these ones with a bit more flair once you’ve unlocked some additional building accessories. (See: rat stairs)

 The overworld stuff is kind of cute, but the amount of backtracking combined with character movement very obviously designed for mobile platforms gets tiresome. Bricktales is at its best when it’s being a virtual Lego set and puzzle hybrid, and at its most tedious when you’re required to talk to the dragon, and then the wizard, and then the king, and then the wizard again, and then the king once more. Grab this on sale, and you’ll probably love it.

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Sorry for the first couple reviews here just being next-fest demos. I’m trying to only publish the ones that are still playable or that I liked talking about.

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Demo: The Entropy Centre

what mom means when she says we have first person puzzles at home

  I don’t have the misconception that(I think) a lot of other industry-critical nerds have, that demos went out of fashion because publishers are scared of giving part of the game away for free. I know that having a demo means more dev time, possibly even meaning a later release than what was first promised. Anyone putting out a public demo at all has earned praise for taking that time and risk. So I can’t say that every game should or even realistically can “prove itself” with a half-hour long preview that shows what makes the game great. Sometimes its just gotta be the intro sequence or zilch. Unfortunately if Entropy Center has anything exciting going on, it’s definitely not here.   The few things in this game that you couldn’t find in Portal 2 are has follows:

A talking protagonist

A cheery virtual assistant

The mystery of whats lurking behind the massive viewmodel of your science gun, eclipsing at least 24.11% of your screen.

  The Entropy Centre’s main mechanic is it’s “time reversing” gun. With it you can rewind physics objects to go back to where you found them, or turn a pile of rubble into a piece of concrete. Almost every puzzle is some variation of putting a box on one switch, going through a door, and then rewinding it to another switch. There’s no reason to even compare it to portal’s science gun, it doesn’t have any fun movement gimmicks at all. It’s just a gravity gun that requires you to do some set up first. One puzzle involved a shorter box that bounced me or another box upward when on top of it. My mind raced with possible movement-based solutions! Perhaps I could freeze the launch-box in the air and jump right to the exit of the puzzle? Or use it to launch the regular box into the air and use it as a platform? Nope. The launch box doesn’t work as a spring when it’s frozen in time, and the characters jump height is as impressive as my real life jump height. There’s no room for extreme vertical maneuvers in Entropy Centre. The solution to the puzzle was to use the launch pad to get up onto a platform just a bit above my head, and then rewind it onto a switch. Every puzzle was some form of moving and then rewinding boxes. Rewinding destroyed parts of the environment had nothing to do with the puzzles, there’s little more to it than rewinding the rubble in the hallway or the collapsed stairs you need to ascend, all highlighted in a bright orange outline so you don’t even have to think about what you’re actually rewinding or how it might have been broken in the first place. The closest the game gets to environmental storytelling is emails left on computer screens.  If your almonds are activated by Half Life 2 intro puzzles and Fallout 3 style storytelling. The Entropy Centre is for you.

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Demo: DREDGE

I am going to catch every godforsaken critter in this scary ass ocean.

  My biggest fear whenever I see a game marketed as “(specific genre)-horror” is that it’s going the creepypasta angle. You know how that goes, you launch the game and you see a tongue-in-cheek title screen evoking an innocent game like Mario 64. You’re treated to two or three levels of uninspired gameplay with a few unsettling messages or hints that something is cursed or haunted, and then the skybox is jeff the killer png and there’s a secret room with a demonic summoning circle on the floor and all gameplay elements of the surface game are pretty much abandoned so you can be chased by a low poly necromorph with Banjo-Kazooie eyes. At best a funny steam gift with some cheap scares. All this to say, that  you shouldn’t mistake DREDGE’s marketing as “fishing adventure with a sinister undercurrent.”  to mean it’s to Sega Bass Fishing as Pony Island was to King’s Quest.   DREDGE’s demo isn’t an “innocent” introduction of a mundane fishing simulator that turns in a whiplash of juxtaposition, there’s no mundane “normal” beginning of reeling in fish on a quiet river to serve as a waiting room for a horrifying terrorsquid to breach the surface ending the game. Instead, things start off pretty damn spooky. You arrive at a village in need of a new fisherman, the boat you arrived on is totaled, so the mayor gives you a new one in a Nookian bargain to pay off your debt for it as you earn money bringing in fish for the town. You’re immediately allowed to set sail and catch your first haul of seafood. This first excursion is a short one, as your new boat only has one engine and no lighting at all. You can’t move quickly enough to explore too far from your new home village, and the lack of light makes the mysterious evening fog even more deadly, as it hides every rock and obstacle that would threaten the hull of your ship. It’s in this loop of catching fish and returning home to sell them that DREDGE feeds you new mysteries. Bottles containing the journal entries of a unnamed married couple are hints of what other sailors have seen on the waters. “Aberrations” of normal fish species can be reeled in by chance, varying from bloated and strange colored specimens that seemed to have been struggling to survive, to chimera-like sea creatures that have impossibly large, human-looking eyes. You’re given the equipment to harvest resources to upgrade your ship, and with this upgrade the bounty of mysterious finds expands to lost heirlooms on shipwrecks and strange antiques sought after by a strange collector that enlists you to bring these antiques to his mansion on his private island. One of a handful NPC’s that will surely have a story to unravel as you find more haunted treasure and freaky critters.   The actual gameplay of DREDGE surprised me the most. Beyond the games expanded implementation of the usual fishing minigame of pressing A when the moving line is over the right box, there’s Resident Evil-style inventory management of everything on your ship. All your catches, fishing equipment, and machinery is kept in one boat-shaped grid. Adding another basic engine means losing one mackrel worth of inventory space. A fishing rod capable of angling in shallow waters will take up another two squares of cargo space, or three if its the more expensive model, with faster reel speed. Thankfully you have a large storage box on each island as well, with a shared inventory. So you won’t be having to sail back and forth between different islands, or sacrifice inventory space for quest items. The process of upgrading your ship to catch and haul different types of fish and treasure seems to be a engaging one, though the upgrade tree for this was not actually usable in the demo.  I honestly would have probably been still somewhat excited for DREDGE if it was some kind of meta-horror bass pro fishing, but the experience of navigating rocky waters to catch strange aberrations, and discovering treasures for strange characters made it my most anticipated game I discovered this Next Fest.