Slay the Spire was the original digital deckbuilder as far as I’m concerned. At least, it was the first one everyone played.
Since then, we’ve had countless riffs on the theme. Dicey Dungeons, Monster Train, X-Angels(maybe don’t click this one), Monster Train 2, and many more. I don’t think we get any of these without Slay the Spire. Some are a bit copy-paste like Across the Obelisk. Others were genuinely transformative like Inscryption.
Now Slay the Spire 2 is here. The true sequel to the original. What does it bring us?
Mostly more just Slay the Spire.
There was nothing I ever found particularly “bad” about Slay the Spire. I went a bit crazy for it, tried to persuade all my friends it was cool, and dropped out around 62 hours. It was genre-defining. Emphasis on the word “WAS”, because it’s been six years!
I’ve gotten to ascension 10 in Slay the Spire 2, and I’ve “played” about 52 hours. The “played” is in quotes because a lot of that time was spent in multiplayer, and some some of that time was spent dead.
I’m going to say one nice thing about Slay the Spire 2: I like that their multiplayer implementation isn’t turn-based, and lets everyone play cards freely. I would have liked it more if they hadn’t chosen to make their ascension system progress separately between single and multiplayer.
Here comes the new game, same as the old game.
Games like Hades have proven that you can tell meaningful characters’ stories in roguelikes. Games like Inscryption have proven you can wrap in alternate puzzles and mechanics to deckbuilders.
Slay the Spire 2… does none of that. This is the level of mechanical and narrative innovation I grudgingly tolerate in Pokemon games, not what I expect from best-selling sequels to indies.
So what do we get? There are also two new characters, bringing the grand total up to five. The Regent has an alternate resource pool that doesn’t refill between rounds and he spends for attacks. The Necromancer has a skull hand familiar that shields her. I don’t really love either of them to be honest, and as lame as it sounds, most of my time has been as the starting character: the Ironblood.
There’s also multiplayer. A lot of my playtime was spent in multiplayer, and it was spent being dead.
Overall
Slay the Spire was a good game. But when I put it down, I was finished playing Slay the Spire.
If you loved Slay the Spire, and your fundamental problem with it was that there wasn’t enough of it, maybe this is for you. I don’t know what it says that I can play 50 hours of this, and remember virtually nothing about it. I’ve enjoyed all of the games that came after it more.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a themed week on the blog, hasn’t it? I think the last one was Lorcana, and before that it was Disgaea. Both were motivated by different things. In the case of Disgaea, it was blatant pandering to NIS America in the hope they would give a prerelease copy of the newest Disgaea game, and as far as I can tell, it worked. In the case of Lorcana, it was to perform some early analysis of the game and its pricing.
And now we have the third theme week: Grump Week. Why, you ask?
I have been playing a pretty decent number of games over the last few weeks, and nothing has really grabbed me enough to write about. As an amateur writer, I perform my writing by entering a fugue state, and committing my mental state to paper as best I can.
I try to be positive about things. This does not mean that I write good stuff about things I think are waste of time and money. It means I try to focus my efforts on things that I like. Again, I don’t do this professionally, so I can decline to write about things I don’t like.
At least, most of the time. Dear readers, everything I’ve wanted to write about for the last few weeks has existed somewhere along the “Fuck this bullshit” spectrum. I have tried new things. I have branched out. I have played older things in the hope of finding something to review. Upon looking within, the only feelings I can find resemble spite.
So I’m going to give in to anger and write about some of these games I do not actually like. Also, I am going to be talking a lot of shit about things that other people really like. Often things my friends really like! Spoiler: one of these games is up for the Spiel! (And I think it’s a bit shit.)
I am not good at portioning things. I read books in a single sitting, sometimes two if they are especially long. I’ve eaten an entire box of Oreos over a single day, and back when I had peanut butter in the house, eating the whole thing with a spoon was not an uncommon occurrence. The same is generally true of games. When I pick up a new game, especially a roguelike, I find myself playing for hours at a time.
I’ve had Titanium Court for just under 2 weeks, and in that time I’ve played 10 hours of it. This is a shockingly short amount of playtime for something I like this much.
Listing the labels that apply to this game is an exercise in pointlessness. They’re all there. It’s easy enough to put them out. But it’d be like listing the ingredients for a cake without the instructions. It’s mostly pointless.
I could tell you it’s a roguelike match-3 puzzle strategic tactics game, but I might as well tell you lemon, egg, butter, flour, sugar. Giving these descriptors might tell you why you wouldn’t like it(for example, if you really hate roguelikes or match 3 games, or are allergic to lemons), but it won’t tell you anything else about the experience.
Anyway, welcome to Titanium Court.
Gameplay
It’s a little tricky to know where exactly to start with Titanium Court, but war is probably as good a place as any. Every day, the court will go to war, and you must lead it. War consists of multiple encounters, and each encounter has two phases, high tide and low tide.
High tide is the match 3 phase. In this phase, you manipulate the battlefield by swapping around tiles. Matching tiles removes them from the battlefield and grants the appropriate resource. Match water for water, match wheat for food, match hills for rocks, and forests for wood.
Each move removes a small amount of your bar, with multi-matches refilling it. When the bar empties, it’s time for low tide.
Low tide is the prep phase for the tactical strategy portion. In this phase, you can produce units and cast spells from the unit cards in your slots. You have five slots for units and spells, and they can be cast as many times as you have resources. Most spells are instantaneous, but producing units takes time. Units go down the time tracker on the left.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a strategy game if it was just your units showing up. Enemy castles that are left on the board in Low Tide will produce units. Some attack your castle, some just sit around, and some don’t do much of anything.
Oh. Hmm. The word Enemy is in pink text over there. How very odd. Probably nothing to worry about.
Narrative
I find it tricky to talk about the narrative of Titanium Court for two reasons. First, I haven’t finished the game, and even if I did finish the game, I suspect that I don’t really understand what is going on with Magic, and the Enemy, and everything else. Second, I think it’s a big spoiler to reveal what I do think I know, but maybe I’m wrong. Third, the game’s tone is something I think is best experienced rather than revealed.
That said, I can offer a sort of litmus test; a bit of a sampler, if you will, of whether or not you will enjoy the writing in the game. At one point, I was offered the option to skip a boss fight in exchange for watching a three minute musical number about Atlantic Salmon. During another, a funeral procession was held for a football that I routinely failed to protect.
The game also has a few moments I’ve found surprisingly unsettling, and an antagonist I’ve grown to genuinely dislike, despite the the high amount of space between the player character and myself.
Overall
I quite like Titanium Court. I think it’s going to be one of those sleeper hits that doesn’t get quite enough attention until someone bigger than me picks it up, and it turns into a cult classic. It’s clever, well written, and manages to be genuinely unnerving at times despite its apparent simplicity.
That said, I’ve also found it weirdly draining, and that it requires my full focus. It’s not particularly snacky, or bite sized, or other nice words we use to compare things to food that is easily consumed. It’s more like ice cream. Try to consume it too fast—stuff too much of it into your mouth—and you’ll get a headache.
Publisher Falling Whale Games has claimed that popular board gaming website Board Game Geek refused to run an advertising campaign for their game “Possess Me, Satan.” They say that their campaign was rejected due to its theme, with the unnamed employee rejecting the campaign stating that their personal experience with demonic possession and oppression.
The game in question bills itself as a social deduction game in the vein of Mafia or Werewolf.
This first surfaced on this reddit post. I reached out to Falling Whale Games, who confirmed that one of their team members had been the one to post the emails, and provided the full email text, which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.
Notable quotes include:
As a follower of Jesus, I routinely help people suffering from demonic oppression, and more occasionally, possession, and it’s absolutely devastating the damage he does to peoples’ lives.
and also
we’ve walked with one lady who was diagnosed with 32 distinct personalities as a result of horrific occultic abuse, and she eventually was one whole, complete individual, healed by Jesus, with no fragments or need of allher psychological meds
The employee also suggests that Falling Whale Games pull the entire project.
IMO, the responsible thing to do would be to pull the entire project, as there are *way* more people that suffer this than you could possibly imagine, putting on a good face (usually enabled by dissociation), but suffering terribly behind the scenes.
When Falling Whale Games requested clarification, they were rebuffed, and the employee also stated that if it were up to them, they would not be running ads for Pillbox Games’ “All True Believers” either, and that it’s “it’s not over religion, but reality.”
Update – 11:39 PM
Board Game Geek has confirmed the messages were genuine, and that BGG’s Advertising Manager has been let go. Scott Alden made the following statement.
“Due to a situation in which BGG’s Advertising Manager responded inappropriately in a business email to a designer, I have decided to let him go. His response does not reflect or represent our company or the way we conduct business.”
Reaction
Community reaction has been mixed, but often critical. Responses on reddit range from demanding an explanation from BGG, to stating that they will be ending their support for BGG. The community seems to have found consensus that this is an unusual and disappointing reason to reject an ad campaign.
Full Email Text
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee “Thanks for submitting your ad campaign. We’ll review it and contact you if we have any scheduling conflicts or errors.
Once your ad campaign is approved, you’ll receive a confirmation email.
Contact me if you have any questions.
Best regards [Name Removed by Falling Whale Games]”
Falling Whale Games Team Member “I just wanted to follow up to see if this ad campaign was approved for not? Last time we did ads with Board Game Geek we got a confirmation email the very next day.
I just need to make sure the ads are actually going to run on time since our crowdfunding starts on May 19th.”
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee “Thanks for the follow-up!
To be completely transparent, I’ve been sitting on this one and praying about what to do in this instance. As a follower of Jesus, I routinely help people suffering from demonic oppression, and more occasionally, possession, and it’s absolutely devastating the damage he does to peoples’ lives. It’s sometimes beyond what would even dare be depicted in a horror film. The amazing thing is that I get to see Jesus completely heal folks of even the most severe effects (we’ve walked with one lady who was diagnosed with 32 distinct personalities as a result of horrific occultic abuse, and she eventually was one whole, complete individual, healed by Jesus, with no fragments or need of all her psychological meds), but it doesn’t change the terrible reality behind the theme that this game is depicting.
So, I just can’t in good conscience approve this one; given what I’ve seen firsthand, the thought of displaying this subject matter makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t begrudge you personally, as many people just plain don’t understand the reality of it, but I’d strongly urge you to consider these things. IMO, the responsible thing to do would be to pull the entire project, as there are *way* more people that suffer this than you could possibly imagine, putting on a good face (usually enabled by dissociation), but suffering terribly behind the scenes.
I know this response was more than you bargained for, but I wanted to be 100% honest about where I’m coming from, rather than just ignoring the request. Even though you may not be on the same page, I appreciate your understanding.”
Falling Whale Games Team Member
“Thank you for getting back to us.
It’s very disappointing to hear you are denying us service based on religion. Is this the decision of Board Game Geek as a company or of just you personally?
Is there an advertising policy rule we are breaking?
There is currently ads on Board Game Geek for a game called “All True Believers” which is themed to the occult so it seems strange that our game is being singled out.
We are definitely not going to pull the project due to individual people not liking the theme. It is simply not for those people.”
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee
“Keep in mind it’s not over religion, but reality. It’s the same reason I would say a game would be in very poor taste if it featured being a sexual predator, or something that would directly trigger someone that’s been harmed by the subject matter. It’s about keeping BGG welcoming to everyone, and since I’m privy to this subject matter, I know firsthand that this is not friendly content, and incredibly triggering, put in front of some of the population that visits BGG.
Similar to site moderation, there are of course judgement calls to be made when it comes to displaying ads on the site. If it were just my personal preference, “All True Believers” wouldn’t be approved either, but I have to factor in if something being displayed is going to be overtly triggering. In that game, it’s a bit less obvious from the title, whereas you went for the shock value. Of course, that’s a business decision on your part, but it also means it’s not responsible of me to put it in front of a diverse community of gamers.”
Sources and Confirmations
After reviewing the initial reddit post, Gametrodon reached out directly to Board Game Geek and Falling Whale Games.
Falling Whale Games stated to Gametrodon that they had indeed posted the messages on reddit. Board Game Geek has yet to respond.
Further down in the reddit thread, the user u/OctavianX, who we believe to be the community manager for Board Game Geek, stated that “Our advertising manager should not have presented his personal beliefs as representing the company. We are making sure he understands this was an inappropriate and unprofessional response”.
Falling Whale Games has provided us with the banner ads that they would have run during the campaign. It’s not clear to us why these or their other content would not have been approved.
Initial community reaction was skeptical: why would Board Game Geek make this decision? Was this a publicity stunt on the part of Falling Whale? But our investigation suggests that the email thread that Falling Whale posted is accurate and genuine.
Some Quick Final Thoughts
Everyone is entitled to their beliefs. Also, if your beliefs include the idea that someone can be healed by religion so that they no longer require anti-psychotics, I will fight you in a Denny’s parking lot.
I’ve tried to keep a neutral tone as I’ve reported on this situation, but I can’t remain neutral about these extremely harmful attitudes towards peoples’ health.
I believe that it’s the responsibility of Board Game Geek to address this appropriately, starting with an apology to Falling Whale Games for having someone on their advertising team tell them to cancel their game. If they don’t, I’m going to avoid using the site in the future. I encourage users who feel equally frustrated by this decision to do the same.
What the community should NOT do is actively harass or dox the person who made this decision at BGG. It’s not an appropriate or acceptable response, and frankly is likely to just make that person feel like a martyr than actually having them confront their fairly rude and spiteful decision.
There are a lot of things that go into writing about a game for this blog. Sometimes it’s desperation. When Sunday rolls around and I scrounge through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Sometimes it’s joy. I prefer when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).
Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. This is a post about nostalgia. A frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person than it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.
Just to be as clear as possible:if you do not want to listen to a 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.
Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo-MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo-MMO rather than a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts. But if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, and grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash and what was technically capable in 2009.
This is normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here,. Even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.
In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing most of the time.
Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.
Welcome to 2009
Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time than middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games is growing, and there’s just one problem: I never actually get to play them. My screen time limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.
Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friend’s house. Relatives’ places at Thanksgiving. Home again.
It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.
From this standpoint, then, Adventure Quest Worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.
In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this. And unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.
Glasses off, analysis on.
With the value of hindsight, Adventure Quest Worlds didn’t do much that other, bigger games hadn’t beaten it to punch on. Everquest had been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.
Its defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement, and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these drops were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars: events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!
As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the community’s success or engagement. But as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.
The defining feature, then, of AQW, was that it truly pioneered the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.
Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now
I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully on board. I loved the design notes (a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week) with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.
But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More than anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltaire, Paul and Storm: these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.
If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.
If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this story. At some point in High school, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of Glacier National Park, I remember very little of it.
But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company. And I was just completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happened. I doubt even he remembers.
From 2008-ish to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.
Returning to 2026
I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort. Not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.
Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.
I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite its update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon than Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market. In an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.
The story is, at best, mediocre, and at worst actually bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. Its endgame hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoke a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me. The sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots.
But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.
Back to the Past – 2011
This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.
There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more than a player. The game means more to me than I do to it.
Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine
This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more than anything else), I’d dissect why the game’s player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind for 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.
Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.
