Partway through my last game of Tournament Arc, tragedy struck.
Mr. Bear transferred schools and was then immediately hit by a bus.
Obviously, this did not bode well for his odds in the hot dog eating competition (which was ultimately won by Bonk Dents, despite starting the game with most of their bones already broken).
More would be broken later.
Mr. Bear, and one of the folks I was playing with, moments before disaster.
These were just a few of the memorable events from my last game of Tournament Arc. A few other highlights included stacking three athletes on top of each other to make a single, suspiciously larger athlete, and the running favorite turning out to be their own evil clone.
All of which is to say: I like Tournament Arc. And if after reading the rest of this, you like the sounds of it as well, I encourage you to check out the Kickstarter, which will be launching on Tuesday, May 20th.
Tournament Arc is a light party game inspired by sports anime. After drafting a set of athletes, players take turns playing episode cards onto said athletes in attempt to prepare (or perhaps un-prepare them, when you start debuffing other players athletes) for The Big Sports Game.
What is the Big Game? Well, no one knows until partway through training, when the sport card gets flipped up. And even that is no guarantee it’s what they’ll actually be competing in, since some episode cards can change the sport.
This might sound like a bit of a chaotic mess, and honestly, that’s why I love it. The joy of tournament arc is in the incredibly wacky narrative it creates. Did someone make one of their players the coach’s favorite? Arrest the coach! Is one of your players suffering from insecurity? Well, that’s probably why they started doing steroids.
It’s very much a game about the journey, and not the destination. Especially when that journey involves someone being raised by Olympian parents who were also clowns.
I don’t have any real critiques of Tournament Arc. It’s a game about telling goofy anime-style stories, not one about the strategic decisions of running a coal mine in industrial Europe. The game is incredibly funny, the art is wonderfully cute. And it doesn’t play off “that” part of anime. You know. The one that makes you wince.
Tournament Arc is going to launch on Kickstarter on May 20th, 2025. If you like the sound of it, or are looking for a very funny party game, maybe check it out and help push it over the finish line. And if you’re not sure yet, you can learn more about it on the game’s website.
Also, quick shoutout to the folks at Little Creature!
It’s day three, and I’ve somehow managed to make it to the finals of the Omegathon. That fact is starting to become mildly overwhelming, but for now I’m gonna focus on other things before it becomes all consuming.
Anyway, day three.
I took today pretty slow. After showing up and looking around for a bit, I met up with another friend. I spent some time showing him around the show, and a bunch of the stuff I already liked, meaning I spent less time looking at new things today than I would have otherwise.
Still, before it was time for the Omegathon round of the day, I did get a chance to try out Don’t Wake The Beast and play a bit more Cappy and Tappy. I also played some Dining Deck, a two player co-op prototype deck builder. Dining Deck was interesting, but frankly pretty unpolished. I also played a bit more Re:Match!
And then it was time for the Omegathon. I’ll recount the events in greater detail later, but suffice to say, I’m now in the finals! So in less than 24 hours I’ll either be a champion, or swearing revenge for next year. Either way, it’s been an incredible PAX East, and I’ve had so much fun (and also stress) competing.
After that I got some food, and then finally got a chance to play some two-headed giant with a friend. We did reasonably well, finishing 2-1 overall.
Long time readers will know that I do daily writeups and wrapups of what I saw, and what I played during conventions. Unfortunately, I’m a bit busier this year than I normally am. So allow me to offer a brief and undetailed account, written in a mild fugue state, just around midnight of day 2.
First up, I’d like to explain the business: I’m competing in this year’s PAX East Omegathon.
Sorry, let me say that again.
I’M IN THE FUCKING OMEGATHON! AND I’VE MADE IT SEMIFINALS (after being carried in F-Zero by my awesome teammate)!
Anyway. More on that post show. But suffice to say: any extra energy has been redirected from writing to the Omegathon for the moment. I still want to document my thoughts, so let’s get started.
Day 1
Day 1 started off with the first round of the Omegathon. More on the full experience post show, but the game was F-Zero X. I practiced a little once I got the game list, but I was still quite bad. Fortunately, my partner practiced a ton. Between my mediocrity, and her excellence, we won our round and advanced.
This was followed by hitting the show floor, and just generally browsing. I’ll be honest, it feels a bit weaker this year. There are a lot of repeats, and also a lot of gaming-adjacent stuff. Chairs, dice (god, so many dice), and not as many games.
I want to make a special callout to Elden Ring Nightreign having this cool-ass inflatable geodesic dome thing that you can go inside and… not the play the game? It wins first prize for “Wow, I wish this was more interesting!” I don’t know why I would want to watch an hour of streamers playing a game that I can’t play, but whatever.
I did get a chance to finally learn and play Crokinole, so that was fun. I don’t know that I can squeeze and entire post out of Crokinole, but I might try since I’ve been playing a lot at the show.
Crokinole was followed by something I’ve been looking forward to for years at this point: A chance to play Re:Match, the new name for Brother Ming’s Sento Fighter. I’m hoping to do a larger writeup on the game post PAX, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m excited.
Finally, there was an opportunity to play in a Starter Deck Gem Blenders tournament. I’ve always had a hard time refining my thoughts on Gem Blenders, and playing a competitive event seemed like good way to grind some more matches. So I did that, got to finals, and split the pool.
Then I played out finals for fun and lost, but it’s okay since I already got half a booster box.
Finally, I went up to the Jonathan Coulton concert. I stayed for the opening set from Paul and Storm, but then decided to go back down the show floor and just relax.
Day 2
I spent most of the morning practicing Push Me Pull You, a game that truly has some of the sound design of all time. After that, and some intense rounds in the Omegathon, my team came out triumphant, leaving me with the rest of the day spend futzing about.
I started my futzing with Crokinole, before moving over to UnPub.
UnPub has been interesting this year. I played a bunch of stuff, but none of it so far was super memorable—except for one thing that was memorable for… less than great reasons. That said, it’s a work in progress. I have nothing to say about an unfinished game anymore then I’d comment publicly on an unfinished painting.
On the flip side, though, I got to play Tournament Arc again! I wrote a bit about this in one of my PAX Unplugged writeups last year. It’s still just as funny and enjoyable as it was then, except now it’s launching a Kickstarter shortly! So more on this one later, but for now just know that it’s good. If you’re at PAX East, you should check it out.
After that enjoyable experience, I tried to sign up for some 2-Headed Giant MTG. That… did not work out. It was an incredibly frustrating and frankly, incredibly stupid experience. I’ll get into this post-PAX most likely in a full rant post. It was that bad.
For now, I just want to note that it’s not the fault of individual staff of supervisors at the Pastimes booth as PAX East, but it was still incredibly dumb.
So instead, I just went and played in another Gem Blenders tourny, won another half of a box, played some Wavelength, before finally heading out.
Tomorrow is another day of Omegathon, so wish me luck and I’ll edit this post into something more coherent after the show. But for now, I just need to sleep.
I like Skin Deep. I like it more than Quadrilateral Cowboy, the previous title by BLENDO Games. I wouldn’t have mainlined thirteen hours of it over two days the day it released if I didn’t like it. If you like weird indie stuff, and find yourself interested by an immersive sim where you save cats from space pirates, give it a look.
I’m front loading this so that when I spend several paragraphs complaining about the game in just a bit, no one gets the wrong idea here. I’ll say it again: I like Skin Deep. I recommend Skin Deep.
Give me more of this sort of thing please.
I just also happen to have some problems with the game.
Skin Deep is an immersive sim stealth sort of game. You are Nina, an insurance agent. The deal is simple: you get cryogenically frozen on long haul space trips. If the ship gets attacked by space pirates, you get unfrozen, at which point your job is to rescue the crew.
The defrosting is how each of the game’s 13 levels (each their own individual spaceship) starts, with you transforming from popsicle to human and stepping out of your pod. From there, it’s pretty much up to you how you want to approach things. The only thing you have to do is save all the captured crew mates by unlocking them from their little cages with purple key cards.
Since this an immersive sim, it would be a bit tricky to cover every interaction available, so I’m going to quickly go over a few key ones.
Every level takes place on a space ship, with both an interior and exterior. The exterior is accessed a variety of ways, and as Nina has a third lung, moving around in a zero-g and zero-oxygen environments poses no problems for her.
Every ship also has a set of four systems available. These are: vents, windows, airlocks, and trash chutes. They function as a traversal tools with added benefits. Vents let you sneak around and hide, windows can be broken to suck enemies into outer space, airlocks let you leave the ship the normal way, and trash chutes let you leave non-normally, at the cost of becoming smelly.
These systems often start off locked. You can unlock them by finding and interacting with their respective fuseboxes to turn them back on. Later on, the systems become locked down even further by enemies.
Speaking of which: let’s talk about enemies. There are five types of enemies: 3 types of space pirate, a turret, and a floating knife fish robot. The space pirates make up the bulk of the challenge, with the turret and swordfish being mostly incidental.
The catch is that the space pirates are all wearing Skull Savers(TM) which, upon death, will transport their head to a revival platform, and regenerate their body. Unless—of course—you grab their head before that happens, and stuff it into your inventory.
Which is as good a time as any to talk about Nina a bit more. You have five inventory slots, so every head you’re carrying takes the space of one useful item. So the best way to deal with pirates in the long term is to chuck their heads into the sweet void of space.
Given that we’re five paragraphs in, hopefully I’ve explained enough that the next set of complaints is going to make sense.
Complaints
The very first level of Skin Deep opens with mini-tutorial that shows you the following message.
And it’s not wrong, but I want to contest it a little bit. It’s true that damaged enemies will find their way to health stations, and request repairs for broken control panels… but that’s all I ever saw them do. As far as immersive sims go, the game felt somewhat underwhelming. Enemies react to sound and smell, but won’t notice missing items, or change up their patrol patterns even after you’ve freed prisoners they’re supposed to be protecting.
This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does prevent the game from ever feeling particularly alive, if that makes sense. It also leads to my bigger problem.
Different Day, Same Ship
By the end of Skin Deep, I found myself frustrated because I was using the same general strategy on every single ship. It went something like this: sneak around unlocking all the doors. Next up, find and unlock all the subsystems. After that, take over control of the ship cameras. Only then would I finally switch over to taking out enemies, or experimenting with whatever that ship’s gimmick was.
And the result was that every level felt samey. Not because they are! But even when each level had its own special gimmick, I tended to never use the gimmick until after I had already dealt with everything else. This leads to my big complaint.
For an immersive sim, I never felt incentivized to change up my primary plan, and adjust for the situation I was in, or to try to improvise. I did the same thing over and over again, because when I died (and I died a lot!) I would lose 10 minutes of progress, and have to start again. And it is very easy to die when enough things start to go wrong.
The last level is probably the peak example of this. Without spoilers, its “gimmick” is that it’s a lot larger than any other ship in the game. It also removes a few of the fallbacks or safeties that are available in other levels. The end result is that it’s much more punishing if you fail.
I don’t know if it’s a Blendo “thing” to make their final levels skill testing like this. I remember Quadrilateral Cowboy doing something similar, but in that game, it was only the final level where you finally got access to all the toys at once.
But Skin Deep didn’t give me more tools or toys to work with. Instead it was just more of a slog.
Bonus Round
So now let’s go over a few other things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. First up, the writing is quite good, and narrative is quite weird. There’s one very clever soft touch done for building character relationships that I quite enjoyed. The setting is interesting, but mostly serves as a backdrop for the gameplay and the rest of the story about a specific set of characters.
Also, there are bonus objectives for each level. I have to wonder if having them show up at the start, instead of after you’ve completed the level, would have made me want to try to use the level gimmicks more?
The controls are also a bit wonky at times, and I threw multiple guns when I meant to be firing them. As a general note: yes, this is less effective than shooting with them.
Overall
I enjoyed Skin Deep, but I wish I enjoyed it more. I still like it enough to recommend. It was $20, and I mainlined the whole thing over two days.
But I wish I felt like it delivered on the promise of the immersive sim more than it actually did. Or at least forced me out of my comfort zone with the strategies and planning, instead of letting there be an “ideal” strategy to beat most levels.
Still, if you want something interesting and weird, give it a shot. You might even enjoy it more than me.
I was gonna put this in my Blue Prince write-up, but it’s kind of its own thing, so I’m pulling it out real quick.
While playing Blue Prince I wasn’t hitting the same wall of frustration I’ve hit with other puzzle games like Type Help or Return of the Obra Dinn, or even things like Braid and Escape Simulator.
I think Blue Prince is uniquely designed to prevent puzzle game frustrating. It uses its new dual roguelike/puzzle structure. It’s also interesting enough that I want to talk about it for a bit, and make my best guess about how the design of the game leads to avoiding this common emotional experience that I’ve found in other puzzle games.
There are three main elements that make Blue Prince less frustrating than other puzzle games.
1. Puzzles in Blue Prince are a bit easier than puzzles in many other dedicated puzzle games.
This doesn’t mean they’re not challenging, but that they’re not quite as a evil as they could be. Instead, the difficultly is placed into finding the puzzle.
2. The roguelike nature of the game. Most of the games puzzles are self-contained… But many puzzles require combinations of multiple rooms and other manipulations, so it’s not always possible to find them on any given day. The result is that sometimes if you find yourself stuck with a puzzle, you’ll run out of steps, and be forced to take a break.
During that break, you’ll play the roguelike portion again, and get to experience some level of success and enjoyment, so that by the time you return to the puzzle that blocked you before, you’re not feeling frustrated.
3. Finally, because of the type of game Blue Prince is, you don’t need to solve all the puzzles to make forward progress. Solving puzzles helps! But unlike many of the games above, in order to get to the end of the game, you don’t actually have to solve very many things, if any at all. Instead, you mostly need to collect information.
SMALL SPOILER
In fact, I think it’s mechanically possible to find Room 46 on Day 1. That said, I don’t think anyone is actually capable of doing that completely blind, but I bet it can be done, because you mostly just need to know what you need to do, and how to do it. But it’ll also still be a challenge, because it relies on being a very effective drafter.
I have a very specific memory of absolutely losing my mind at Return of the Obra Dinn, and that one moment colored a lot of my experience with the game. But because of the way that Blue Prince is set up, the game actively prevents you from ending up in the sort of fugue/frustration state of just raging at a puzzle that refuses to be solved.
I only ended up slamming my head into a wall over and over when I actively chose to do so. If I didn’t want to, it was entirely possible to avoid any given puzzle and return to it later.
In This Essay, I will
So let’s put it all together.
First, the game splits the satisfaction of puzzle solving into two parts: spotting the puzzle, and then solving it, but cranks down the difficultly of the solution part.
Second, because the game is a roguelike, it actively forces you to restart in situations where you hit a wall, or cannot make progress on a puzzle, diverting your attention from a frustrating experience temporarily.
Finally, it minimizes the number of puzzles that are truly needed to make forward progress, with many providing bonuses or hints, but not stacking them in a truly linear fashion.
The end result is that making progress is mostly dependent on collecting information, not necessarily solving puzzles.
A Quick Caveat
I’m writing this having seen the credits for Blue Prince, but not having done… well, quite a large number of things actually. I have around 50 pages of notes for this game, and I suspect there are a huge number of things I haven’t put together yet!
So it’s possible I’m wrong about a few things above, especially the difficulty of later puzzles. But I still think the rest is a pretty fair observation about the roguelike nature of the game, and nature of forward progress lets Blue Prince avoid some of the frustration the genre is known for.
