Author: MrBlueSky

Skin Deep

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.

Image of a cat locked in a purple box from the video game Skin Deep.

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.

Image of a Fusebox locked from the video game Skin Deep.

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.

Image of a Skull Saver from the video game Skin Deep.

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.

Here’s a link to the Steam Page.

The Player Experience of Puzzles in Blue Prince

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.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

FragPunk

Wikipedia says that Chess has been around 600 years, which coincidentally is the same amount of time I would need to play it to really review it. When a game is popular enough and played at a high enough level, I don’t think there’s much point in critiquing it as tourist, unless you’re specifically trying to observe the new player experience.

I feel a similar way about Counter-Strike, and as a result, its strange progeny: FragPunk. The tactical shooter as a genre, like Chess, is one of those things that people have been playing forever. As such, if you’re the sort of person who knows what ‘tactical shooter’ means, and likes the genre, you are not going to get anything from this writeup. There is nothing I can say that will tell you if you’ll like FragPunk or not.

You’re excused for today.

The main thing that separates a tactical shooter from its other FPS cousins is the primary game mode: bomb defusal. It’s played with two teams of five across several rounds, with one team on offense, and one team on defense. Players only respawn after a round finishes.

The team on offense needs to reach one of the two bomb sites, plant the bomb, and then defend it until it detonates. The team on defense needs to either stop them from planting the bomb or, after the bomb is planted, defuse it. In addition, offense wins if they kill every member of the defending team, and defense wins if they kill everyone on offense before the bomb is planted.

This, then, is the starting recipe for the genre, one that every designer then makes their own variations on.

Counter-Strike has an interesting economic system of buying weapons and equipment, occasionally putting teams into positions where taking a loss in order to pool resources for a stronger round later is the right strategic choice. Valorant takes elements of a hero shooter, turning each character into a specialized agent with special abilities.

FragPunk has cards.

At the start of each round, teams can spend a resource called Crystal on activating cards. Activated cards have an effect that lasts through that round. Cards range from “neat” to “what the hell.” My personal favorite is probably the one that lets defenders pick up with and run away with the locations the bomb is supposed to be planted at.

I will say that after playing 40 hours, the cards feel less random than they did at the start. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, but the sense of “Wow, they covered the map in grass and made us crabwalk!” has been replaced with a sense of “Yup, they popped big heads. Guess I’ll try to avoid peeking down long corridors.” The magical has become the mundane.

Finally, this is a F2P game, so let’s talk about the elephant real quick: In-App Purchases.

Macrotransations

FragPunk doesn’t feel much greedier than any of its peers. On the other hand, no single mosquito sucks less of my blood than any other, so that doesn’t count for much.

There’s a premium battle pass, and there’s an even more premium battle pass. There’s a gacha draw system for weapon skins.

I paid for the ($20) battle pass, as I did play like 40 hours. But I kind of hate the lootboxes. I’m not sure why I hate them more than I usually do, but I do.

Overall

I like FragPunk. It’s nice to play a tactical shooter where everyone else hasn’t been grinding it since before I was born. I’ll probably keep playing for a bit, or until everyone else in the friend group drops off. If you like first person shooters, and don’t have a compulsive urge to gamble, you could do worse then checking out this F2P game, since games are apparently going to cost $80 in the near future.

Super Battle Mon

Super Battle Mon is a sort of micro-TCG, where decks are 7 cards (10 total if you have a sideboard), games are 6-7 minutes long, and you can play without a table. More on that last one later. I quite like it!

Image of the Super Battle Mon Starter Deck Box Set

It’s also in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign for a pair of mini-expansion structure decks. So if any of this sounds fun, I’d encourage you to go check it out and consider pledging.

The goal of Super Battle Mon is quite simple. Each player starts with their entire deck in their hand, and each turn both players play a Mon. After resolving each Mon’s abilities, you compare your total Mons’ power to your opponents’, and the player with lower power discards a card. This continues until both players can’t play any more cards, and the player with the most Mons in play wins.

Two decks of Super Battle Mon cards are laid out on a card mat.

So what’s the catch? Well, there are quite a few. Many Mons can be cheated into play. Mons also have costs that have to paid by discarding cards, and each card spent paying those costs is one less Mon in play in the long run. There are mind games on what your opponent’s next Mon will be, and there are counter plays to overly devastating strategies. (Looking at you Capybara.)

And all of it is packed into a very short game that can be played in just a few minutes. And honestly, that form factor is a large part of my enjoyment. Games are so short that even when I did get blown up, I just dug into my collection and built a new deck.

Overall Thoughts

TCG’s as hobbies are notorious for being time and money sinks, but with Super Battle Mon, every booster pack is a deck. It’s possible to build a deck, play it, rebuild it, play it again, and then scrap it and build a new one in less time than a single game of Magic.

Is it a perfect game?

Well, no. Not yet. There’s a fair number of errata for the first set, and the ability resolution system is a bit clunky. Not a bad system. Just a bit tricky to parse correctly.

Still, Super Battle Mon does an excellent job of delivering on what it’s trying to do: the bite size TCG experience, without the pain points of most modern TCG’s.

And since they managed to fulfill their first crowdfunding campaign, I feel pretty comfortable pointing folks at the second one. So maybe if you want to play a card game with more playing and deck building then just buying cards, check it out.