Author: MrBlueSky

Odd Realm

Odd Realm has promise, but just isn’t finished yet.

I really like Odd Realm. I’ve played a bunch of it prior to writing this review, most likely 10-15 hours and I want to be able to recommend it… Right now, I have two big reasons I can’t, and a few small ones. If you already own the game from the itch.io racial justice bundle, or some other event, you should play it. But if you don’t own it yet, you may want to wait until a full release.

Odd Realm is a colony builder, and has the most in common with Dwarf Fortress. You pick a starting race, pick a place to start, and then proceed to try to keep your settlers alive. Doing so requires making sure they have water and food if you picked humans. Or they might require chambers in which keep their animate bodies forever functional, if you picked the immortal skeleton race. Y’know. Normal stuff.

I mentioned two big reasons I can’t recommend Odd Realm just yet, and they are the following: First, the game is buggy. And second, it feels fairly content-lite compared to its obvious inspiration of Dwarf Fortress.

Let’s talk about the bugs first. 95% of the time, the game runs smoothly. I’ve had no crashes, or straight failures, even if I have had points where stuff gets a bit laggy for a moment.

5% of the time, something weird will happen and the game will just die. I’ve listed a few examples below.

  1. Settlers decide that the most fascinating thing to do is to all simultaneously move back and forth onto a resource deposit zone, instead of doing anything else you might want them to do.
  2. Settlers get stuck in the move action, and refuse to actually move.
  3. Settlers move jerkily and refuse to take any additional actions.
  4. Settlers don’t move resources to appropriate resource deposit zones.
  5. Production queue of items, and information just absolutely dies.
  6. If you make the mistake of digging underwater, prepare to watch as your game slows to an absolute crawl.

The problem isn’t that these bugs are common. They really aren’t. The problem is that they absolutely destroy the game when they occur. I was having a hard time writing this review, so I fired up the game to try to figure out what I wanted to say about it, only to spend more time trying to figure out why I could no longer manufacture glass panes, and spend an hour or so trying to fix the issue.

To the developers’ credit, they seem to be aware of this issue, and fairly active on their Discord in requesting sessions and save states to try to patch the problems, but right now, having your entire fortress just blow up because of of a stupid bug feels real bad.

The second big issue is that the game feels very content-lite at the moment. There are only 4-5 types of ore, and they all function more or less the same, but with better stats. The same thing feels true of most of the plants you can grow. There are only a few pieces of gear, a few spell books, etc. Some types of stone can be used for making roofs, but not for anything else. Right now, once you have rooms set up, there just isn’t a lot to do.

There are a bunch of other little things that I find annoying, like not being able to tell settlers things like “Stay in here, don’t go outside” and the number of random events being exceedingly limited. But these are all minor.

This is why I think if you don’t already own the game, but find it interesting, you should wait until release. Many of the bugs and glitches will hopefully be ironed out. And hopefully they’ll also be a lot more to do. But right now, Odd Realm is a bit buggy, a bit frustrating, and still unfinished.

P.S. If you do have Odd Realm, play the Ancients race instead of humans. They are way more fun.

Didn’t Make the Cut #2

Another week or two, another set of games that just didn’t hold my interest long enough for me to give them their own full article.

Welcome to Didn’t Make the Cut #2, where we continue our way through all the games in the itch.io Racial Justice Bundle that just didn’t want to make me play them. The ordering here doesn’t reflect anything other than how interesting I thought they were. These are all the things that just didn’t keep my interest long enough to warrant a full article.

Extreme Meatpunks Forever

I can’t write an entire article about Extreme Meatpunks Forever because I didn’t play the game for longer than like 20 minutes. I feel like this was a fair shake, but I really wasn’t feeling it.

Like, here is the summary of the game from its itch.io page.

A visual novel/mech brawler about gay disasters beating up neonazis in giant robots made of meat.

Heather

Which is. I dunno. I think you can probably read that and decide if the game is for you or not.

My one sentence review of the game would be this: the game feels like a playable Zine. The game feels very cobbled together. The backgrounds are ASCII, the characters are single images, and the writing wobbles between really neat sci-fi and dialogue that doesn’t include things like capitalization and punctuation.

This one just wasn’t for me.

Music was fucking banging though.

Walden

I can’t find my notes for Walden, but more or less, it feels like a very light survival simulator.

There’s a type of game that exists which is biblical or religious, and they tend to exist in order to try to get you interested whatever religion or such they’re selling. The problem is, they tend to be made by people who are religious first, and game designers second. The intended result is usually to use the game like the lure on the end of those deep sea fish, where the fish’s jaws metaphorically represent joining whatever cult made the thing in the first place.

Usually they’re not very successful, because the other fish (game companies) have far more exciting lures, and those fish jaws only represent things like microtransactions and loot boxes. And I guess the risk of becoming a pathological gambler is better than becoming a member of the Mason family?

Regardless, Walden feels like a game made by that sort of person. Except instead of trying to convince you to give them your life savings and move to a commune in Pripyat to be one with the Everglow the Light Mother, the designers of Walden seem to want you to read the book that inspired them to make the game. If this was their goal, I think they kinda succeeded.

I’m actually fairly curious about reading Walden (the book) now. Maybe avoid it if you’re afraid of “transcendentalist philosophy.” (Apparently that’s what the book’s about. I just stole this from Wikipedia, so I hope it’s right.) Still not gonna play any more of the game though.

If you’re still interested in Walden, you can find it here.

Art Sqool

In Art Sqool, you walk around a weird world and draw things, given instructions and graded by what I assume is Microsoft’s mascot Clippy’s brother who got into hard drugs instead of software development. You can pick up more brushes and colors in this world, but that’s it. It’s not really a platformer in any typical sense. It’s mostly just exploration across the “Campus,” which gives the impression of what a wasting illness called “Clipart” would look like on skin.

Whenever I’m playing through these games, I like to take some brief notes that I can review later in order to give thoughtful, detailed opinions. For example, this is what I wrote about Extreme Meatpunks Forever.

-At least it’s a game
-Not a very interesting one
-Seems like it’s mostly visual novel
-I do not care about these characters
-Some aspects of the worldbuilding seem cool
-Rad Music

My Dumb Review Notes for Meatpunks

“Now wait”, you think. Isn’t this bit supposed to be about Art Sqool? Well yes, dear reader, it is. But I present those notes as an example. Let’s now look at the notes for Art Sqool.

-This ain’t a game
-Why does this exist
-Remember kids, when making games, don’t forget to include gameplay
-I hate this

My Dumb Review Notes for Art Sqool

Now, given that all interactive visual media can be more or less considered a game, and after discussion with someone else, I’d like to present the following quote.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for art that wasn’t stupid. Generally speaking, when a person constructs a thought-machine of this kind, what they’re actually trying to do is determine what isn’t art.

Jerry Holkins

And to be fair the same is true of games. Saying that something is or isn’t a game is arbitrary, and as such, I’m willing to concede that the first line of my notes is wrong.

In a secondary non-concession to the fact that this is still my article to write, I’m not linking the game here. I think it’s stupid, bad, and I loathe it. Fuck Art Sqool.

That’s all I got for today. Until next time.

Beacon

You can pass on Beacon. You will not miss anything. This entire article is just me being grumpy about every aspect of this poorly designed and carefully made exercise in frustration.

I wanted to like Beacon. I really did. But overall right now, given that the game isn’t even finished, I can’t recommend it. So what is Beacon, why might you want to play it, and why should you avoid it?

Beacon is a top down real time isometric roguelike. It’s interesting if nothing else for actually not being 2D, despite the fact that the player doesn’t have a jump, and the whole game takes place in 3D environments. Interesting isn’t the same as good though, so we’ll come back to that later.

So why shouldn’t you play Beacon? Well, for starters, the game isn’t actually finished. Currently you can play through about six stages, and then the game just kills you at the end, because there isn’t anything else there. Secondly, it seems somewhat unstable. It took me less than 10 runs to get to the end of the current final area in the game. The only reason it isn’t a lower number is because the game crashed on a very good run early on, and forced me to restart.

Let’s say you don’t care about these reasons. Well, Beacon does very little that’s actually new. The game plays like a Frankenstein of mechanics. Each run starts by selecting the DNA you’re going to use for the run. This includes things health, stamina (yes, they’re two different things), armor, crit, luck, and I stopped caring because there are too many of them. This is followed by the DNA being sequenced, at which point any DNA mods you got are applied, and DNA has a chance to mutate, which permanently changes functionality of your character during the run. You arm might split open and replace your melee attack with a sonic projectile. You might get the ability to…. lifesteal while set on fire. Or maybe your legs just become pus-filled blobs that leave a trail of slime whenever you dash. It doesn’t really matter though, because:

1. Most of these end up playing the same, and

2. You’ll get multiple runs with those pieces of DNA, after which they die, and you can’t use them anymore.

I couldn’t see a pattern in which specific mutations actually occur, so I couldn’t, for example, use DNA to build a fire-based build, or anything. Also, some mutations are just boring. I had one that just massively decreased crit, on DNA that I had picked to increase crit.

Cool. So, since that’s done, let’s actually play. Each level is randomly generated, but ends up following a pretty similar pattern. Throughout your run, you’ll pick up DNA to use for future runs, guns, side equipment, sidearms and grenades.

Taking a step back for a minute, weapons are one of the few things that feel like they’re done correctly. Many of them are quite interesting (bone boomerang gun) and extra weapons can be recycled for ammo mods, which give a permanent boost for the rest of the run to your remaining weapons.

Grenades are worthless. I don’t know why they’re in the game, and I don’t know why you’d use them. They’re boring, pointless, and hard to aim.

Okay, now let’s talk about pickups and auxiliary. I don’t know which one is which, and I do not care. All you need to know is that the game lets you have one of each, and the grouping of items in these slots makes no sense.

For example: an item that gives you a chance to fully reload your magazines on kill, as a passive. Or a 5-use boost jump. An item that caps your health at 75, but gives you permanent health regeneration. Or a 10-use of a set of daggers that lifesteal if you hit with them.

There is literally no reason to ever pick up the consumables instead of the passive boost ones, the passive are just that much better. Also, unlike guns, these can’t be recycled for ammo mods. You can destroy them to get a single extra grenade. Hooooorayyy.

This brings me to my biggest gripe with the game overall: the art.

Beacon has beautiful art, but it’s almost entirely counter productive to the actual gameplay, i.e. being a fast-paced run and gun roguelike. The readability of the screen is garbage. Everything is done in a sort of low poly style, but instead of making it easier to tell whats going on, it’s messed up with tons of unnecessary detail, lighting, and other graphical crap. My favorite example of this would be the fact that slime and acid look almost exactly the same, but one is simply an armor reducing debuff, and the other is a DOT that can kill you.

Oh, and speaking of death, the game has insta-deaths. Falling off a ledge won’t kill you, but if you make the unfortunate error of somehow ending up on top of a bunch of spikes, that’s it. Run over.

There are good moments in Beacon: the dodging can feel nice, the weapons are cool. But the game feels like a bloated Frankenstein monster. It tries to do too much all at once, and ends up a playing like someone tried to make an ice-cream shake by going to a variety of fast food joints, ordering a small milkshake at each, then taking them home, shoving them into a blender, straw, cup, lid and all, and then just lighting the thing up. Drinking this shake means that sometimes you’ll get strawberries and chocolate, and sometimes you’ll get strawberries and small shards of plastic.

Also, the game is cakewalk fucking easy. You’ll spend more time being annoyed at trying to figure out where you need to go than you will in interesting fights.

I feel bad about tearing things to shit.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Because Mario Party isn’t rage inducing enough on it’s own.

If you’ve seen Twitch at all recently, you’ve probably seen Fall Guys. If you haven’t, allow me to summarize it for you: imagine a battle royale game, but instead shooting each other death as teenagers, you’re all happy jelly bean blobs competing in Mario Party style mini-games to be the last person standing.

It’s simple, cute, and amusing, even if it isn’t particularly deep. Some of the mini-games are fun. Some of the mini-games are not as fun (looking at you Perfect Match). Some look like complete bullshit, but actually have some strategy like Tip Tap Toe.

Most the games are at least enjoyable, and the fun primarily comes from watching other players be launched, whacked, and otherwise smacked around, and also by being a winner. There are a few game modes that are legitimately great, like Hex-A-Gone, a multi level Tron style mode, where the last person to fall all the way to the bottom wins. Most of the team mini-games, like Soccer, Egg Collection, and Ball Rolling are also enjoyable.

When I was first writing this post, I actually had a bit where I was going to go into the worse game modes, and tear them apart a bit, but then a funny thing happened: see, with the exception of Perfect Match, most of the game modes are pretty good when the servers aren’t massively lagging. One particularly awful game, Tail Tag, is actually really fun when things like hit detection and stuff actually work.

I think Fall Guys is a ton of fun, and worth playing, but I have a few caveats to that statement. First off, I suspect there is a large section of individuals who just won’t have a good time. If you already hate stuff like Mario Party, or WarioWare, or just battle royale style games in general, you might wanna pass on this one.

Secondly, Fall Guys is a lot more fun with a friend. If you can get even one other person to play with, each game becomes less of a solo deathmatch, and more of a fun mess as you work against and root for each other. I had a lot of fun with the game on my own, but it’s undeniable that the joy of the game is dampened when every other character you beat or get beaten by is anonymous.

Fall Guys is $20 on Steam, and while it does have micros, they’re purely cosmetic, and not for anything you can’t get anyway.

Fall Guys will not cause you to look inward. It will not grant you peace, or force you to confront deep seated fears. But it’s fun. And when you are launched into space, or toppled into the void right as you jump because some rando grabbed you for absolutely no good fucking reason, it will give you something to be angry about other then the unmitigated nightmare that has been 2020.

Quantum League

A mind bending shooter that’s best played with a friend. Really neat unique time mechanics, but not a massive player base.

Update 2/15/2023: Quantum League isn’t 100% dead, but there’s no future updates to the game planned, and there’s no playerbase. That said, the game can still be purchased and played, meaning that I stand by my review. Just now the part where you NEED to grab a friend to play it with is 100% accurate.

I first saw Quantum League about 2 years ago at PAX East, and even though I didn’t play it then, I was interested in the premise. So what is the premise? Simple.

Quantum League is a 1v1 or 2v2 shooter played in rounds, where each round is a 15 second time loop that repeats three times. I enjoy the game, but it can be a little draining after a while, since there are only those two games modes, and you’ll only ever play against humans. For explaining the mechanics, I’m going to talk about the 1v1 mode only.

When a round starts, you have your dude, you have a pistol, and you have five other weapons. The weapons are pretty straightforward, you have a sub machine gun, a sniper rifle, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, and the only funky one, a kinda beam-stick flamethrower. All of them behave pretty much as you would expect from any FPS. In the first round, it’ll just be you and your opponent, and depending on the game mode, your goal will be to either shoot ’em, or be the only person standing on a given capture point at the end of the round, which (big surprise) will most likely involve shooting them. The round will end after 15 seconds, even if you kill them early on.

Loop two is where things get interesting, and where Quantum League really shines as its own game. Like I said above, the game is played in loops, and in round two, you’ll have the same starting locations, weapons, everything else, with the game’s one big mechanic in play: there will now a be copy of you, replaying all your actions from loop one in addition to your normal controlled self. Your opponent gets one, too. They will replay all actions you took in round 1, exactly as you performed them, and they can still be interacted with. In Quantum League, when you die, instead of waiting to respawn or taking other actions, you instead just continue playing, but as a ghost. Your ghost version can’t interact with anything, damage anything, or score. But it can still shoot, move and otherwise do whatever it wants, because there is a very real chance that at some point in a future loop, you might kill the killer before they kill you, and as such, your clone will suddenly remain alive instead, meaning that its actions are now a resource you can use.

Loop three is the same as loop two, except with clones from round one and two, and one big difference: rounds are only scored at the end of loop three.

This time mechanic is the thing that turns Quantum League on its head, and is what makes the game completely different from almost any shooter out there. The key to winning in Quantum League isn’t pure twitch reflexes, or more accurate aim, but to plan your actions, recognize what your opponent will do in response, and then move to anticipate their future actions.

Here’s an example: Iin any given loop one of Quantum League, my preferred weapon is the sub machine gun. The SMG is a medium range weapon, losing at long range to the sniper, short range to the shotgun and beam rifle, and lacks the inherent area denial and angle capacity of the grenade launcher. So why pick it? For me, the SMG is the most effective continual area denial tool in the game. My plan is to move up behind cover, fire a few shots down various angles that I suspect my opponent may try to use in future rounds, punishing them with chip damage if they do, before finally actually moving to try to take out my opponent and win the round. In short, I’m not even shooting at my opponent, I’m shooting at where I think they’ll be in the future.

And this is just a small fraction of the sorta neat stuff you can get up to. There are also respawn globes and a few other mechanics that make the game even mind melting then it starts out as.

The only two big gripes I have with Quantum League are the hyper competitive nature of the game, which makes playing it for a long period of time fairly draining, and the lack of other game modes.

If Quantum League sounds like your sort of game, you can get it on Steam and it looks like a Switch version comes out soon as well, but I haven’t played it. I really suggest find a friend who also interested, because that way you can do 2v2 matches, and 1v1 matches if no one else is playing at that point in time. The game’s player base is still pretty small.