Q-UP Demo

Okay. We’re back. I may have lost it a little talking about Unfair Flips earlier in the week, but now it’s time to talk about Q-Up, another game about flipping coins.

I really liked the Q-Up Demo. I actually played until I couldn’t anymore, because the demo stopped me. I thought it was great.

You may notice a slight tonal shift here between Unfair Flips and Q-Up, despite the fact that they’re both pseudo-incremental games about coin flips. This is because Q-Up is doing everything that Unfair Flips wasn’t.

I’ve mentioned before that I somewhat dislike idle/incremental games because if I’m not careful, they eat my time like a blackhole. I also don’t necessarily have any fun with them. To quote myself:

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

Unfortunately for me, Q-Up has it’s hooks in me already, which means escape options are limited. Perhaps this writeup will be one of them.

There’s a lot of different layers to Q-Up, and I don’t think I’m even going to identify all of them, let alone write about them. The game is framed as a competitive e-Sport, with all the trappings of such, including ranks, stats, an in-game shop, skins, and a fake TOS that has to be agreed to on launching the game.

The team bit isn’t a joke by the way. You can in fact play the coin flip with your friends, and make synergistic builds. It’s incredible.

The E-Sport in question of course, is just a coin flip. But what a coin flip it is! Complete with matchmaking, exciting animations, and being put on either the Q or Up side. (Fun note: while playing with a friend, he audibly groaned when we got into a game, and were Up side, as he “prefers being Q side”. In a game that’s a literal coin flip.)

Of course, the faux esport/live service game feels like it’s just the tip of the iceberg in a sense. There’s also an in-game mail client where as you play, you end up somewhat accidentally agreeing to “work” for the fictional company making the game in question. I don’t think I can spoil too much from the demo, but even what I saw there seemed to get really weird quite fast, with a weird sci-fi narrative around corporate sabotage.

Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the gameplay! Because yes, there is gameplay. It’s not just a coin-flipper. Instead, fairly early on, you unlock a node based skill grid, different for each of the available characters. This grid is a set of triggers and chaining activation, and by moving nodes around, you can build sets of synergies to make it so that even when you lose, you still win!

I’d say something about my build, but I actually just realized looking at it that it’s a tad bit awful.

Look, it makes more sense if you play the demo, maybe just do that.

Oh, and there are items! To be honest, they’re probably the most standard part of the game, being constructed in such a way that you can build item sets and collections in order to grant yourself additional bonuses. What’s less standard is the incredible weird item shop upgrades, which at one point gave me gems instead of costing them?

Ah yes, the ability to roll for a 5-Star character with a zero percent chance of getting them. And the customer of the year is a whale. It’s all so perfect.

Q-Up, like Unfair Flips, is a game about coin flips. But unlike Unfair Flips, it’s not really about flipping coins. Instead, it seems to be a weird satire on live service games at every level, from the design, the development, and the weird nature of E-Sports.

And it absolutely nails the tone. Probably my favorite part so far was this message, with that absolutely perfect “Exec typing things into ChatGPT to summarize them” energy.

It’s just an incredibly fun and weird experience. I only stopped because I hit the level cap on the available characters.

In short: the Q-Up Demo is great, I hope the full game is just as weird, and has even more twists. I’m going to go see if I can get a code to cover it before it comes out, but I highly doubt that will work, in which case I’ll just have to buy it when it does release.

Landlord Quest

I’ve described a few games on this blog as “love letters to X.” The Plucky Squire, for its joy in the physicality of art. Holocure to all of Hololive. It’s a fairly common idiom I haven’t thought much about until I played Landlord Quest: the first game that I think might be best described as a hate letter.

I don’t mean Landlord Quest is bad. I just mean that if you took a love letter, and kept the passion, but inverted the feelings, this is what you would get. If love letters are sent with roses and chocolate, hate letters are probably sent with a mailbomb.

Landlord Quest is a short adventure game. And when I say short, I mean short. I feel fairly confident I saw the entirety of the game in about 42 minutes, and that was three separate playthroughs. I’ve never actually played an adventure game before, so it may have taken me longer than people who are actually familiar with the genre.

Because it’s so short, I don’t really have much to say on it that isn’t a spoiler for the experience. The art is good. I didn’t have to look up anything, which I’ve been told is some sort of gold standard for adventure games, but there’s also one a single room, and a finite number of things to “Look at.”

This is it. This is the experience.

I guess the one interesting thing I could talk about is that despite the game loathing the Doug character, from his bro-glasses and faux-cybertruck, I’m not sure I do.

There’s a few incredibly brief moments of him ruminating on his relationship with his father. They’re short, and I think the intent is mostly to show that Doug is a useless nepo baby. I’m sure they work if you’re the sort of person who had parents that cared about you and your interests. I imagine if I was that sort of person, I’d be able to look at Doug and laugh, visualizing a chain of shit heads stretching back years eternal.

Unfortunately for the designer, I haven’t spoken to my father in close to 10 years, so the attempt to paint him a shit brat who coasts on his father’s coattails fell flat. Instead, it made me a bit sad for him. Someone cared about him once.

Anyway, I think the credits for Landlord Quest do a better job of speaking to the game’s purpose than I could.

Landlord Quest is a short, and either horrifying or cathartic experience based on how you feel about landlords. It’s six bucks on Steam. It’s very well made for what it is, and it made me feel something.

I’m just not sure how I feel about those feelings yet.

Unfair Flips

Unfair Flips is the first game to really aggravate me in quite a while. As as result, this write-up features a lot more profanity than I would usually include. But my ability to form coherent thoughts without resorting to the f-bomb has been so reduced that I can’t express how frustrated I am any other way.

I was really trying to write a fair article about Unfair Flips, a incremental game by HEATHER FLOWERS. I really was.

I played the whole damn thing, even if I set up an autoclicker about an hour in. (Gods bless you, creators of AutoHotKey.) Then someone called me an idiot for being disappointed for buying a game where nothing happens, and having nothing happen, and I just sorta lost it.

Either that or the can of Bang Energy I just chugged is kicking in. Could be both!

Point is, fuck reasonable critique. Everyone now gets 1000 words about the worst game I’ve played this year.

Maybe I’m just out of the god damn loop here, but I feel like the child in the story of the emperor that has no clothes. When I google Unfair Flips, I see endless praise. People are posting articles about how interesting it is. It’s rated very positive on Steam, with 276 reviews.

This is despite the game saying nothing, doing nothing, making no points. That might come across as the raving of a madman, so let me elaborate and clear up any uncertainty about if I’m lost my mind.

There are, loosely put, two genres I could put Unfair Flips into. These are either as a rage game, or an idle/incremental game. I’m going to compare it to incremental games for the purpose of discussion, but notably, Unfair Flips doesn’t actually let you idle unless you set up a macro to play it.

As an incremental game, Unfair Flips is boring. The cost of upgrades is such that the “correct” choice at any point is to buy the cheapest upgrade available, instead of making any decisions or selecting strategic options.

An image of the game Unfair Flips, with the games four upgrades displayed, near the start of a game.
These are the only upgrades available.

This doesn’t immediately doom a game, but as a game, it’s less interesting than EVERY other entry in the genre I’ve played. This includes IdleOn, Journey to Incrementalia, Universal Paperclips, and probably others.

It also fails in the other place it could redeem itself: making any statement about probability, chance, determination, and such. This is more the space of rage games, like the narrator in Getting Over It. There is nothing to say after all. Unlike Deep Dip, it doesn’t challenge the player to be a master of mechanics. It makes no statement, requires no skill.

So why did I play it? Well, because I saw people posting about it. Because I saw people going “My new game is out, please play it.” And I like taking chances on weird things, on strange shit.

I don’t extend this generosity to everything in my life. If I go to a bake sale, and someone is selling burnt scones, I don’t fucking pony up to shove a clearly torched pastry into my mouth. There’s nothing to learn there.

But bad games often have redeeming ideas! Mechanics, settings, perceptions! Weird ass art can give us a unique perspective on the state of what others see, it can inspire us to view the world in a different lens, it can be part of a process of improvement.

But this isn’t that. There is nothing here. There is no statement, no idea, no perception, even a wrong or bad one. It is empty.

The emperor is wearing no clothes, and people are lining up to compliment his fashion sense.

Hell, while we’re here, it’s also not well made. It has no settings, and you can only mute or unmute audio. I had to set custom unity flags to get the god damn thing to launch in a way I could play it, something I associate with developers who are either newer (or have not considered that computers other then their own exist).

Normally this is something I give the benefit of the doubt here, but the lack of anything redeeming—any single thing—just makes it feel like the folks who made Unfair Flips just didn’t give a shit.

The only reasonable thing I can think of to explain Unfair Flips is that this was created as part of an experience in end to end development. Something to learn the process of taking a concept, building it, publishing it to Steam, and marketing it. In which case, it almost makes sense.

It’s not about the finished product, it’s about the process.

If that’s true, then yes, it has a reason to exist: it’s part of the journey of its creators as artists, a process as purpose.

Still doesn’t explain why everyone is acting like this is good! Like it was an enjoyable experience! Like other people should experience it!

It’s not, it isn’t, and no one should play this game, unless you want to lose 2 dollars, two hours, and be irrationally angry for no reason.

Failure is part of creation. But that doesn’t make it praiseworthy.

Also, the dev has several other games up on Steam, both of which look interesting, so I can’t really believe it’s about process either.

If you gave this game a positive review because you honest to god like it, sure. Fine. I don’t understand it, but that’s the nature of art.

But if you’re doing it ironically, as part of a bit, as part of some sort of performative thing, go fuck yourself.

Honkai – Nexus Amina

I spent a decent part of this week playing the beta for Nexus Amina, the newest game from Mihoyo. If you haven’t heard of Mihoyo before, they’re mostly known for making a god-scrillion dollars off Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero.

That’s a real number. Don’t look it up.

Nexus Amina is a monster collector autochess game, with a reasonably sized open world city to explore, quests, and a lot of autochess battles. Since this was a beta, I don’t think there’s much purpose in talking about the game as a whole yet. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of content, just that it was in a state that I’d call unpolished for Mihoyo.

I love my clockwork turtle.

Instead I want to talk about the two parts of the game that stood out to me: the quests and the combat.

Quests

If I was smart, I would have taken some screenshots of the quests, but I did not. Anyway, the thing that makes them interesting is that compared to most mobile game quests, they actually have a ridiculous number of branching paths.

I’m not actually sure if this is a good thing, but it’s definitely interesting. It was a bit of a shock to have to pay attention to what was happening at all.

Now, the reason I don’t want to pass judgement on if this was good or bad is mostly because while the branching paths are present, the current quests are in a rough state, and I often found myself more frustrated than anything else. One notable moment was a quest where I had “solved” the mystery, but there was no option to resolve it based on the info I’d discovered.

I’ve seen what Mihoyo’s polish looks like from their other games, and I can’t see them releasing a game that feels the way this currently does.

Combat

Anyway, let’s talk about the combat!

Nexus Amina is an autochess, more in the vein of Dota 2 Autochess/Underlords and Team Fight Tactics than Storybook Brawl or Super Auto Pets.

This means that it’s mostly about placing units on a board, and then having them slug it out. Unlike most other autochess games, however, its primary game mode is not an escalating PvP experience, and I don’t believe there currently is a PvP mode at all.

This turns it into a bit more of a puzzle game than anything else, where you can redeploy and shuffle units around after a loss with no penalty in most modes.

Generally speaking it’s fun enough, but I do have one big “observation” about the nature of the game. I found it very hard to develop an intuition about how unit aggro worked, and this had some interesting effects on how I played.

See, in other Autochess games I’ve played, I’ve been familiar with the units that are being used. This meant I had an intuitive sense of how units would move around the board, and choose targets, and when units would be defeated. But because I didn’t have that in Nexus Amina, I found I couldn’t really do much in terms of positioning based strategies, and instead just focused on synergies, and building up super units.

It’s an interesting little problem.

Anyway, that’s all from me for the moment. More actual games in the next few weeks, and hopefully an announcement of a cool project?

Randy Pitchford Confuses Me

I don’t really understand Randy Pitchford. He’s one of very few gaming CEOs whose name I remember, mostly because every time a new Borderlands game rolls around, he decides to randomly pick fights with people on Twitter.

And every time I have to imagine that there’s got to be a better way to manage him than this. Surely Gearbox employees must be envisioning the same thing. They actually know him as a person, I’m confident they could come up with a good solution.

Perhaps a good solution isn’t even necessary.

Please do not feed the CEO.

I don’t even think he’s rage-baiting people. I think he’s just like this. If I owned a company, and it had just released a product with more crashes than I-93 on labor day weekend, I wouldn’t be randomly picking fights with people on twitter.

Sure, there’s the flip side of it, which is that this behavior is so clockwork at this point, that he’s just a staple of “games journalism.” He is for IGN and Kotaku what pandas and tigers are for National Geographic. If I worked at either of those outlets, I’d have alt-accounts to constantly taunt him, on the off chance that I annoy him enough to get a reaction I could screenshot and post to r/games and meet my view quota for the month.

I would be tapping the glass all day long.