Gunpoint is a short game. Just under 3 hours. I could have played it while watching Return of the King, and still have 20 minutes left before the credits. On the other hand, each hobbit foot probably took 9 people to make, and that’s the number of bodies left in my wake by the time the game ended. James Bond has a license to kill, but I don’t.
Pictured here: Something I did not do a single time in the game.
It may just be that I don’t make a very good noir PI. As I made my way through Gunpoints levels, I found myself wondering what the game would look like if someone else was playing. Would they elegantly rewire switches? Carefully trick guards into opening doors for them? Swiftly and effectively smash down windows, and call elevators?
Or perhaps they’d still just play like me: a crab in a trench coat. Scuttling about and turning off the lights, and almost brute forcing their way through the level.
While Gunpoint is ostensibly a sort of stealth platformer, the Crosswire device is its standout mechanic.
You can make the lights turn off when a guard pulls the trigger on their gun, or call the elevator with a motion detector. Or you can just make the security camera open the door for you instead of setting off the alarms.
However, levels only start with the ability to rewire objects on the red frequency. For any other color/shape of wire, you need to get to and attach a hacking device to a breaker. In later levels, reaching this is a large portion of the puzzle.
It’s also a good place to talk about the flaws of Gunpoint. None of these are big, but they all feel like things that would have gotten some more consideration if the game released today.
For the Crosswire, the flaw is that two of the primary colors are red and green, which feel like it would be quite easy to screw up if you were color blind. And while symbology for what can be linked together, the symbols only appear when an object is moused over.
The narrative and the mechanics are often in conflict. The biggest example would be how much fun it is to jump on guards and beat them up. There’s a fun audio cue, a button prompt, and then at the end of the game, I get told how many people I killed and injured.
It just feels bad.
None of these are dealbreakers. Just small annoyances. And perhaps Gunpoint would have overstayed it’s welcome if it had been longer. Still, I do wish there was a bit more too it.
Another Night In A City That Goes To Bed On Time
Gunpoint is fine. Eleven years ago it was probably an incredible indie experience, but these days, the bar is higher, and frankly, in that time Tom Francis has made better games like Tactical Breach Wizards. It’s not my worst use of $10 this year, but it’s not my best either.
As a final brief note, I want to mention something. Once you beat the final level of Gunpoint, you get the door-kickers. These are a pair of boots that allow you to just run full tilt and kick down doors. They are incredibly fun, completely break level structure, and I really have to wonder why it wasn’t possible to give them to me before I beat the game.
Like, yeah, they’re busted, but it would have been such a great finale.
Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.
They’re not hard to get, but still.
By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.
That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.
Why You Might Like Deadlock
Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.
And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.
The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.
This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.
These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.
…and Why You Might Want to Wait
Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.
Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.
And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.
Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.
Overall, Though
Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.
There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.
I accidentally locked myself in my bedroom this morning, a problem I dealt with by climbing out of a window. This is an actual thing that happened, because I am an idiot.
It does however, provide a useful segue. After managing to get back into the parts of my apartment that aren’t where I sleep, I sat down to play more Tactical Breach Wizards, a game where problems can also be solved via windows.
Most of the time that solution is to shove someone through them.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics/puzzle game by Suspicious Developments. If you’ve ever played a tactics game before, you’ve seen at least the bones of what’s on offer here: Given a small set of elite units, you’re forced to fight your way through a series of mooks in a linear campaign, played in turns on a grid map.
Except in Tactical Breach Wizards, where the enemy has assault rifles, chain guns, grenades, and automated turrets, you have a skull named Gary, a wand with a scope on it, chain lightning, the ability to raise the dead, rewind time, and illegal narcotics.
The end result is that there’s a lot less laying down strategic overwatch, and a lot more trying to figure out how to shove someone into a bullet you will fire in the future to get enough mana to make a body double of yourself to hack a turret.
Image taken several seconds before throwing myself out a window. Just like in real life!
And while the game starts out simple, it builds up to be far more complex. Fortunately, the you also get a much wider variety of tools to use as additional characters join the party, and as you use the perk system to boost those characters.
The characters are quite well rounded, and tend to have both a personal consistent theme, and a synergistic gimmick. As an example, let’s look at Jen.
Pondering the orb.
Jen’s basic ability is a “non-damaging” lightning blast. The non-damaging is in quotes because while the shot does not do damage, being shoved into a wall, exposed electrical cables, or another enemy still hurts! Her primary spell is a bit like a boosted version of the shot: a set of chain lightning that can link multiple enemies together and shove them around. Finally, she has a broom that can be used to jump out any window and then enter via another, and a grenade that knocks everyone back.
In addition to all of this, many of her upgrades focus around giving her additional movement phases. The the end result is a character that can move themselves and others. And while on the surface, Jen doesn’t have any direct damage, the ability to throw yourself out a window, jump to the other side of the map, and throw a grenade that tosses 3 battle priests out of a fancy stained glass window is incredibly effective.
At the same time, her kit is also very synergistic with other characters’ abilities. One party member has an ability that allows him to shoot into the future by picking a space with no enemies in it, and shooting if one enters. Another throws speedballs at enemies that increase their knockback taken. Jen can push enemies into the space locked down by the first, and blast enemies debuffed by the second much further.
And pretty much everyone who ends up in the party is designed this way: highly synergistic while also fulfilling a valuable roll on their own.
The enemy of all law abiding-ish citizens: the traffic cop.
I don’t really have any complaints about Tactical Breach Wizards, but I do have some observations. I found the game quite difficult, probably because I played on hard. But there were still several levels that felt a bit too puzzle-y for my liking. I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards the most when it felt like there were multiple solutions and paths to complete a level, and much less I was trying find the single right solution.
Now, the game absolutely gives you the tools to find those solutions. 99% of enemy actions are deterministic, there’s no penalty to restarting a level. Every single action on a turn can be rewound and replayed. At the end of each turn you can foresee the future, and see how enemies will act. It’s just that I enjoyed the game more when I felt like I was trying to punch my way out of a gunfight, instead of repeatedly restarting because I moved one square to the left incorrectly five minutes ago.
I don’t think it’s spoilers if it’s the start of the second level of the game.
There’s one sort of last big thing about the game I want to call out, but not really discuss: the writing and story. It’s very good. I’ve heard some people compare it to Terry Pratchett.
Pratchett is actually my favorite author, and I’m hesitant to say that that the game as a whole reminds me of Pratchett, or at least Discworld. There are are humorous moments that feel like Pratchett, but the game has a tone much closer to his work that he did with other authors, like All The Long Earth, or Good Omens.
The longer scope means games can do a lot more things than books or movies, and Tactical Breach Wizards jumps around tonally. It’s a buddy cop flick, then it’s an action thriller, and then it’s a war story. There’s a certain level of harshness and melancholy to the later parts of game that feels appropriate. But it’s not a level of harshness I would associate with Pratchett.
The best compliment I can give the writing is this: My investment in the story served to pull me back to the game each time I quit to take a break after finding myself struggling with a level.
More Like Tactical Beach Wizar- wait, they make that joke in the credits.
Overall, I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards. It took me around 14 hours and that was on hard while ignoring many of the bonus objectives and extra modes, so if I’d loved it 100% there would still be more to play. It was $20 well spent.
That said, I’m not super interested in playing more because I’m about to start playing through everything else Suspicious Developments have made, including Heat Signature, Gunpoint, and Morphblade. So let’s find out if they’re just as good as Tactical Breach Wizards absolutely is.
Ed Note: This write-up discusses content intended for an 18+ audience. There is no intrinsically 18+ content or art in this write up, but there are images that some might consider risque, and there are links to content that is 18+ (Though that content is age-gated a second time). All of which is to say: You have been warned.
Prologue
I played a great game recently that I probably can’t recommend to you.
That said, you can know for sure if you’d enjoy it by answering a few questions:
Do you like deck-builders?
Are you interested in seeing a very competent, if a bit limited execution of the genre? One that maps the whole thing into a much larger, longer run of an experience with some visual novels elements?
Yes to both so far?
Great.
How do you feel about hardcore animated pornography?
Ed Note: It occurs to me after writing all of this, I should probably be a bit more specific in who this game is for. The porn in X-Angels is very much geared toward straight men. Sorry for anyone else whose hopes I might have gotten up.
Act 1. I Play It For The Mechanics
X-Angels, by BaranceStudio, is an incredibly fun, if somewhat limited deckbuilder, probably best compared to Slay the Spire. Like Slay the Spire, each turn, you draw a hand of cards, and play them to deal damage to enemies and opponents. Cards have variety of effects, ranging from damage, to generating shields to block incoming, to generating buffs, de-buffing, or applying permanent triggers to yourself.
But if you’re still here, you probably answered “Yes” to two of those questions above. You know about digital deck builders. So let’s talk about all the things you haven’t seen before.
Now, is it a deep and meaningful visual novel experience? No. Not really.
Each “Run” of X-Angels takes place parallel to sort of visual novel experience. This on its own is actually pretty neat. The game feels more akin to full campaign than to a roguelike, and you can choose to do the games various areas in different orders. A single run takes a fair bit longer than comparable games, especially on the hard difficulty.
X-Angels also adds a system where, based on the first two characters you recruit (of four), those two characters define your deck-building and your X-Power, a sort of side meter.
When this meter is filled, it can be used to be activate a special power or ability based on which character you have active. The second kicker is that you can switch between characters mid-fight, allowing you to build charge on one character, then swap to another character to use their burst. It’s a cool little mechanic.
These are quite neat, and range from conjuring extra cards into your deck, to purging debuffs on yourself. And again, this is an area where it feels like X-Angels goes harder than it needs to.
Many of Lia’s abilities effectively poison herself, or scale off poisoning herself. So instead of having to add cards to purge that poison, she can use her X-Power to do so.
Also, I really appreciate that the game has an actual story instead of just “Lore.” I am so tired of games that are just “Lore.” I would never say that X-Angels has better gameplay than Slay the Spire, Monster Train, or Inkbound but at least it has a story with an actual fucking ending.
Intermission 1.
Several years ago, while looking at the trash that shows up on Steam, me and my friends got into an discussion about what the worst possible mechanic you could combine with erotic content would be.
After a bit, we settled on Sudoku.
Then one of those friends, one who actually finishes their side projects, went and actually made the whole thing. It has multiplayer!
It’s called Operation Sexy Sudoku, but, here’s a little inside scoop: that’s just because the developer called it as “Open Source Software” as its development code name.
You will need to be logged into Steam to see this.
Anyway, they had made most of the game, and realized that they didn’t have one of the more critical elements for this sort of project: The porn.
At this point, we started trawling around on itch.io, looking to see if there was an asset pack, or some easy way to get a lot of anime pornography that could be used in the game. And while we found a pack, after researching, it turned it out it was someone stealing assets from a developer calling BaranceStudio, and trying to sell them for money.
This is how I found out about BaranceStudio, and ended up following them.
Act 2. Adult Content, For Adults
I did put a whole disclaimer at the front of this, so I’m going to keep this part brief, and non-explicit.
X-Angels operates off what I’d call “Porn Logic.” It’s mostly fairly vanilla, but there is an option to opt into what I’d call the “bad end” route, which contains the typical sort of dark ending content you might expect from anime porn.
If I was to describe the sort of adult content you’ll see in this game, I’d say: There’s nothing here that you wouldn’t find in a dark romance or hentai.
That said, there’s a lot here that is absolutely not part of a healthy adult relationship.
I think that’s enough of a disclaimer. If you want to learn more, the game has a mature content descriptor on the Steam page.
Intermission 2.
It’s kind of weird that sex, something that most people will do in their life, is much more taboo in games than murder, something presumably most of us have not done, and will never do.
The obvious take is that “sex” in games bears pretty much the same resemblance to sex in the real world as violence in games bears to violence in the real world.
After all, if I shoot someone in Fortnite, I haven’t actually murdered them. I’ve kicked them out of the game they are in. It’s less eternal void, and more being tagged out in capture the flag.
The parallel version, then, is probably something like “Sex in games is almost always porn or porn adjacent.”. It has the same relationship to the real complexities of sex and relationships that violence in games does. Which is to say, pretty much none.
Does anyone else think it’s a bit weird that most video games that have sex, it’s used as reward? It’s at the end of a romance option, or it’s unlocked in the secret ending. Porn games do the same. “You saved the day, here are some titties and/or dick” is not a particularly nuanced take regardless of whether it’s full frontal or not.
Also, it strikes me as odd that when something is “Adult” or “For Adults”, that almost always just means “It’s horny.” Not that it involves rent, or taxes, or the difficulty of meeting people as you get older, or the stresses of aging, or complexities of modern life.
No, “Adult” means genitals.
Act 3.
So why am I writing about this?
Well, there’s an interesting post credit sequence in which the developers talk about their intentions, and there’s a bit where they say, “Hey, this game was much harder to program and implement than our previous games! Anyway, our next game is going to be something much more complex then this!”
And I kind of respect that, in the same way that I respected it when they responded to me and my friend asking about their assets.
We live in an era where it can be super lucrative to make exploitative gacha games that sell softcore porn. Basically, selling microtransaction lottery tickets to children for the chance to see “not quite porn.” BaranceStudio could have taken this approach. Instead, they made a direct, interesting, and well thought out porn game.
I just find it refreshing that someone made horny deckbuilder and sold it for $11.
Conclusion
So do I recommend X-Angels? Well, again, only if you like deck builders and male gaze-y animated porn. Okay, that’s a lot of qualifiers, but I think they’re pretty fair ones.
It’s not a perfect game. I didn’t encounter any game breaking bugs, but the save-file system is very wonky, and the translations are rough at times.
But if you do like the things mentioned above, and you prefer to earn your horny cutscenes instead of having them handed to you after you click through 90 lines of text, it’s pretty great.
Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.
Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.
Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.
If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.
In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.
Gameplay Loop
After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.
Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies
There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.
A Hunting We Shall Go
Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.
Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.
Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.
It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.
A Noble Quest
Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.
Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.
Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.
Deliver these items. Into an active volcanic area.
They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.
The Weird Bit
If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.
See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.
You ready?
Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.
The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.
To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.
It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.
That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?
I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.
That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.
There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.
I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.
In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.
