All the games I played, but didn’t grab me enough to get their own full article.
A massive amount of the stuff I’ve been playing has been from the itch.io racial justice bundle, and there’s a lot of stuff that for whatever reason, either never grabbed me, or I didn’t feel like writing a full article about. So here are three of the things that were just sorta “Meh” to me, but might be your cup of tea. Or not. Maybe they’re just kinda lousy.
You have a team of robots. Control them with a robust visual programming languages. Solve challenges with them. I did the tutorial, got through a few levels, and just sorta dropped it. Nothing about it really grabbed me, or made me super interested. I found myself just spamming the same sets of AI over and over, and then tweaking them if they lost, then just spamming them again. For games like this, I feel like the moment that really sells the game is where you try to get some sort of tricky or clever plan to work, and you pull it off. I never had one of these with Gladiabots.
For some reason, when I downloaded it, this game was like four gigs. I’m torn between calling it Instagram Filter Simulator and Acid Trip Simulator, but since I’ve never actually done acid, I’m just gonna call it Instagram Filter Simulator.
I do not know why you would play this. It’s trippy without purpose or rules, and by the end felt like I was having a headache. If you have to run a Call of Cthulhu game, and have no idea how to describe things that are unseeable, this might be a decent placeholder. Otherwise, I’d say skip it.
Bestiary is far more “experimental writing prompt” than game. Look at semi-randomly generated pictures of monsters. Write something down. Rinse, repeat. That’s it. It’s amusing for like 5 minutes, but after that, feels pointless.
Blast through the air in a minimalistic flight game/dog fight game.
I like to beat games before I write about them. I have not beaten Sky Rogue, but I’m gonna write about it anyway. This is because I don’t think I’m going to beat it anytime soon.
Sky Rogue is a minimalist flight sim and dog fighter, where you select from a set of colorful planes, load them out with enough weaponry to wipe out a small country, and then proceed to blow up repeatedly when you fail to accurately estimate the distance between you and the ground. Or you and the hanger you’re trying to bomb. Or you and the two enemy drones with chainguns. Or a surface to air missile turret.
Your experience may vary.
What I’ve learned primarily from Sky Rogue is that I am very bad at flight sims, even those of the most simplified kind, and even if I can usually finish a run of a roguelike, Sky Rogue demands a level of execution that I currently don’t have. If I beat it at some point in the next week, I’ll update this article.
So, what’s the loop then? As the name would suggest, Sky Rogue is a roguelike. The roguelike element is primarily present in the set of unlockable planes and weapons. While unlocking equipment is permanent between runs, the upgrades you purchase with cash for your planes and gear are not. There are two main resources:
Tech, which persists between runs and functions as a sort of exp for unlocking more equipment/planes.
Cash, which is lost and death and is used to upgrade gear during a run.
As far as roguelike elements go, it’s pretty minimal. Missions and environments are randomly generated, and upgrades are lost on death, but you don’t really have to scavenge for parts or weapons. Destroying enemy structures and planes during a mission grants cash, which can be spent on upgrading the planes or equipment of your choice. Most of the upgrades I’ve seen so far have been primarily numerical, i.e., extra capacity, damage, or targeting range. This meant I usually just upgraded whatever gear I was using, instead of being forced to adapt my run based on pickups.
In addition, you can fully heal and re-arm at any point during a level by returning to base (as long as you haven’t completed the mission), so there’s not as much resource conservation as there might be in something like Dead Cells or Slay the Spire.
So we have a roguelike with permanent unlocks and weapon configuration, free health refills, and a wide selection of gear. In theory this would be easy, which brings us to actual gameplay: flying your plane around, and in my case, into things.
One of the things I was hoping to find in the itch.io racial justice bundle was exposure to a bunch of games and mechanics that I wouldn’t otherwise engage with. I’ll be honest, I mostly expected to find narrative games, dating sims, that sorta stuff. Instead, I’ve gotten my ass repeatedly handed to me on each of my runs of Sky Rogue. I’ve gotten about half way through what I think consists of a full run, and I’ve gotten to the first big “Boss” once. It wrecked me.
If I had to give any advice to anyone else tempted to play the game as the result of this review, it would be the following:
Turn off arcade mode. While it might feel better at first, it ultimately prevents you from flipping yourself over, and doing other tricky flight things.
This game is probably better with a flight stick. I wouldn’t know. I don’t own one.
Spam the flares.
Sky Rogue is $20 on itch.io, and Steam. The team does have a little blurb noting that if you buy it on itch.io, they get more of the money, and you can still get a Steam key if you buy it there.
As 2020 continues to be some sort of Twilight Zone or Tales From The Crypt anthology of garbage, stay safe, wear a mask, and take care of each other. I’ll update this article if I ever beat Sky Rogue.
Per Gametrodon editorial policy of not burying the lede, I think Night In The Woods is really good, and that you should play it. It’s closer to, say, a point and click adventure game than anything else. While the game might describe itself as a platformer with a few puzzle elements, I suspect these mechanics won’t really challenge anyone. Actually reading the dialog in game was more challenging, not because it’s bad, but because it was so real and accurate that I wanted to close the game and do something else. That might just be a me problem though.
The character interactions and character writing is hands down the strongest part of Night In The Woods. While I don’t want to go too far into the plot, the player primarily controls Mae Borowski, a college student who returns home after dropping out. Her hometown of Possum Springs felt to me like a sort of old town that’s falling apart. A majority of the game is spent traveling around and interacting with her old friends, citizens of the town, and her family.
I think that Night In The Woods is the best written game I’ve ever played. I think it’s better written then Gone Home, and far more human, despite the fact that the characters are all semi-anthropomorphic animals. While I wouldn’t say it achieves the same mesh of narrative and gameplay that defines Celeste, or maybe even Undertale at points, I think the characters, interactions, and world utterly nails the feeling of being there.
It’s hard to discuss Night In The Woods without spoilers, so I think I’ll save that discussion for a second article that I’ll talk about below. I find the game is strongest when it’s handling interactions and friendships, and while the meta-narrative story of the town that sits over it feels weaker, I wouldn’t say it ruins the game. The end also starts to drag a little bit, but I have to wonder if that was a deliberate choice.
If you enjoy games with a highly narrative edge, you should play Night In The Woods. If you want to see what the best writing in gaming looks like, you should play Night In The Woods. That’s not to say it’s a game for everyone. If you play games purely to experience new gameplay mechanics, or to relax, then it may not be for you.
Night In The Woods is $20 on Steam, $20 on itch.io, and it looks like every other console as well. But like, if you want to buy it on Switch or something you’ll have to go find it digitally in the store yourself anyway, so I don’t see any reason to bother linking to those places.
Take care of yourself during this very strange time.
Ed. Notes:
I had an extended bit about not burying the lede, only to realize that by writing that intro itself I was burying the lede, and as such, defeating the point of talking about how we don’t bury the lede. It was about pirates and it was great.
I started Quadrilateral Cowboy on Sunday, and finished it Tuesday. “Well then,” you might be wondering, “If you finished the game so long ago, why don’t you have a post about it up?” To which I would replay “Great question, theoretical fictional person who most likely does not exist outside of my head, but also somehow reads these posts and has an internal sense of how many articles should be posted on this blog per week. I’ve been wondering that also.”
I really like Quadrilateral Cowboy. I think you should play it. However, I’ve had a very hard time trying to figure out how to tell you that, because Quadrilateral Cowboy is supremely weird.
Quadrilateral Cowboy is made by Blendo games, a smaller indie dev that has an aesthetic of strangeness, and a catalog of other games I haven’t played. I’d say this aesthetic might honestly be the biggest thing that would prevent you from picking up the game, because it gives off a very “indie” vibe which I honestly sometimes confuse with entries in the “Move Around and Look At Things That Tell a Narrative” genre.
Some people call these walking simulators, but honestly, I don’t think that’s realistic. Death Stranding simulated walking, as did QWOP and both those games were hard.
So, if you get past the aesthetic and into the game, congrats! The game only has one other small ask of you: to learn a semi-fictional command line programming interface along with a variety of other programs/mild programing, and to be able to execute these with speed, precision, and accuracy.
As such, the game’s primary audience appears to be the coveted overlap of “People who are comfortable engaging with narratives and designs featuring non-traditional protagonists and stories” and “People who are willing to learn fictitious scripting languages and solve fairly tricky and convoluted puzzles.” I’ve provided a visual aid below in the form of a Venn Diagram I’ve titled “QuadCowboyMarketShare.png”
It’s the bit where the circles are touching. I should also note that I’m most definitely in that overlap.
Okay, so you’ve survived this extended intro bit. What is Quadrilateral Cowboy, and why should you play it? Well, primarily it’s a puzzle/heist game. But it has some of the most fun tools I’ve ever seen in a game like this, and they are some of the most satisfying things to use I’ve ever gotten in a video game.
You’ll unlock additional bits and pieces as you go through the game, but the primary way of interacting with the world short of just walking around and grabbing things is your Deck, a portable laptop-esqe chunk of hardware that allows you hack open doors, turn off guard lasers, and other functionality. And when I say hack, I don’t mean some lame minigame. I mean “telnet door2.open(3)” style stuff. Hope you like the command line!
There are other tools you’ll get as time goes on, but I’m gonna focus on the two other big ones. The Weevil, a very small remote control robot that can be used to sneak into areas that you can’t fit through, and the Autocase, the most satisfying gun to use that I’ve ever seen in a video game. More on the Autocase later. Let’s talk about the Weevil first.
Just like above, you don’t get a remote control for this thing. You’ll need to plop it down, pull out your Deck and micro-cctv monitor, and then use a series of commands to find and connect to it. Then, you’ll be able to instruct it to walk around, again via the command line, turn left and right, and jump. You might be thinking “That sounds difficult and mildly frustrating,” and you’d be right! Which is why getting it to do what you want is so satisfying.
On a side note, of the two minor gripes I have with the game, one is related to the Weevil, and more specifically, the fact that many situations where you use the Weevil feel a bit too “designed” to be solved in that manner.
Of course, then there is the Auto-case. What is the Autocase you might ask? Why is it great?
The Autocase is my favorite item in the game, and I feel like could sell the entire cyberpunk theme to the game on it’s own. It’s a command line controlled, remote deploy-able, briefcase packaged gun. And it is awesome.
The Autocase doesn’t feel like it suffers from the same problem as Weevil of being designed to solve specific problems. To give an example, sure, you can use the Autocase to just shoot things open, but you can also use it set off triggers and various other things that you would be able to do by hand, but remotely. And this sets up some exceedingly satisfying moments where you remotely can remotely blast buttons to open doors, shatter glass to jump down and escape from an airship, and remotely trigger an emergency release to launch something skyward.
If I have any gripes with the game, it’s that it feels short. I want to play more in this world, and more with these tools. But it also means that the game only feels like it drags a little toward the end, where it introduces a few new mechanics, only to more or less throw them away afterward. These levels were some of the least interesting, at least for me.
Quadrilateral Cowboy is a short game, and I still couldn’t quite tell you the plot, but it’s a fun game, and more importantly, it is a game. You can buy it on itch.io, here, or on Steam here. It looks like the normal price is about $20? The price does feel a little high, but its fun, weird, and worth playing. And if you don’t want to pay that much, wait for a sale. It’s definitely worth $10.
