The last time I devoted an entire week to talking about a single game or series, it was Disgaea, in a blatant pandering attempt to get a review copy of their newest release.
This is not going to be one of those weeks. For starters, I don’t think Ravensburger has any more Lorcana to send out at this point. If anyone from Ravensburger reads my set of writeups, here are a list of items I think it’s more likely they would send me:
For an omnipresent entertainment juggernaut, Disney has always kind of fallen flat on its face when it comes to making games. Pretty much every first party attempt they’ve made to create games has, while not failed, apparently never made enough money to justify its existence.
Propaganda Games, Avalanche Software, Wideload Games. Those are just a few names in the pile of corporate corpses the House of Mouse has produced.
As such, in 2016, they finally threw in the towel, and just licensed out their properties for other developers to make games with. And that’s how we get Lorcana.
Lorcana is a new TCG published by Ravensburger, by Steve Warner and Ryan Miller, and using licensed Disney IP. If you’re not familiar with TCG’s (trading card games), I suggest you take a minute to read our Guide to Card Game Terms.
This week we’ll be covering the game itself, the somewhat interesting launch it’s had so far, the game’s rarity system, and what the future could hold for Lorcana.
Is the game any good? Will it supplant the big 3 of TCG’s, or turn it into the big 4? How does Lorcana’s base set match up with other card games?
Gametrodon was conceived over 3 years ago now (how time flies!) and I made its logo in much the same way as I developed the site itself: in less than 30 minutes, and with very little forethought.
Now, three years later, in the vein of that incredible thinking, we’re pleased to introduce our new mascot: Dicey. Say hello, Dicey!
Expect to see Dicey in articles where we need to share hot takes, but also want to shield our garbage from consequences by putting it into the mouth of a poorly designed mascot until we get tired of this bit.
Escape Simulator offers the escape room experience, but offering a lot more content in the time/money department.
Escape Simulator is a set of digital escape rooms. If you haven’t heard of escape rooms: 1. Welcome, I’m not sure how you ended up on this blog of all places, and 2. in real life, escape rooms are sets of chained puzzles and challenges, usually with the end goal being to “escape” the room you started in.
Escape Simulator is a digital version of that experience, complete with full multiplayer for all official content. You and (possibly) your friends are all stuck in some sort of area, and need to solve various puzzles to get out.
The game has about 10 hours of content of official content. There are four 5-part challenge rooms, each about 10 minutes per part, and 6 more official larger rooms, each about 30-60 minutes each. (Yes, some of them have 45 minute completion times. No I’ve never finished a single one of them that quickly.)
Puzzles in Escape Simulator generally follow either a multi-chain or parallel puzzle structure. While there is a blueprint for how puzzles stack together in the structure of a room, the individual gameplay of a puzzle can vary a fair amount. Some arebased on decoding. Others are based on looking for hints in the environment.
Is it worth it?
Usually during a writeup, this is the part where I would explain game mechanics, and talk about their interactions. But since escape rooms consist of solving mysteries and puzzles, I’m not sure that does much here. Instead, let’s talk about something related for a moment.
Many video gamers video gamers do a certain kind of math before recommending a game (and I count myself as guilty of this as well). If the ratio of time to dollars is under 1 hour/$1, that’s no bueno. A game can be a brilliant, innovative and cleverly constructed experience, but if it clocks in at only 3 hours for $20, that’s already a hard sell.
It’s a bit weird, because I can’t think of another hobby group that actively does this, to this extent. Sure, the folks of Board Game Geek and the Board Gaming subreddits like to write about how much they care about replayability, while sitting on a throne of plastic wrapped purchases that they haven’t opened in the last four years, next to the other games they opened and never played more than once. But I don’t see movie buffs whining about the fact that Oppenheimer is $23 for only 180 minutes of film. Ski tickets can be $100 for just eight hours, and that’s not counting how much it costs to buy gear, get out the mountain, and the hospital bills after you fall off the chairlift.
Escape rooms, for example, are not cheap. I looked up prices for the ones around me, and one charges $38 per person for a one hour experience. Another was $100 for 4 people, and 45 minutes.
So, going back to Escape Simulator. It’s not really a “huge” amount of game. It’s also all puzzles, so it’s not really repayable. On the other hand, it works out to about $1.50 per hour, per person. Real escape rooms are about 20 times that.
Mods
Now, the other thing that Escape Simulator has on offer is fairly extensive set of mods. As good as the community content is, I have to view them as more of an addition than a reason to straight up recommend the game. The reason for this is that the quality and type of experience available in each one varies.
One mod I played was pretty much a straight up horror game. While generally very well put together, it did have a puzzle made vastly harder by the fact that the designer had chosen to add a spooky effect that made it hard to even see the puzzle.
Another mod had a particular brand of moon-logic in its answers. One room had a challenge that simply lacked mechanical feedback, rendering it incredibly confusing. And another was just a good solid puzzle experience.
The mods are amateur, in the literal dictionary definition. They are made by non-professionals for personal enjoyment. While the resulting experiences are interesting and fun, they often lack polish, or feel like they could have been playtested/tweaked to make a bit more sense.
In no particular order, here are a few mods I liked.
I enjoyed Escape Simulator, but I’d mostly recommend it as a multiplayer experience. There isn’t any overall story or narrative to give meaning to the rooms. It’s just a set of fairly well designed puzzles with a surprising amount of high quality community content.
A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.
Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.
Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.
ARPG’s in Brief
For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.
Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.
Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.
Skills and Skilltrees
But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.
Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.
The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.
As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.
Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.
Endgame
I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.
Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.
Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.
There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.
Life pro-top: Don’t try to take the screenshot of the early endgame boss during the fight.
Crafting and Items
A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.
There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.
There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.
Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.
Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.
The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.
In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:
Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.
Maybe I should have just written that instead.
Closing Comments
Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.
However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.
Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.
I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.
That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.
Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.
All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.
First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.
This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.
This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.
Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.
I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.
Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.
The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.
My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.
Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?
You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!
SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.
But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.
