This is perhaps not the most elegant piece of writing I have opened a blog post with, but it’s also all true. Dragonsweeper is a small, clever twist on Minesweeper. It doesn’t cost any money. It won’t eat your entire day. There are no microtransactions, or other bullshit. It’s just good.
To quote the office: “Why use lot word when few word do trick.”
That said, you’re still reading, which means you haven’t been persuaded yet. That’s okay. Maybe you missed the first link. Here, I’ll link to again.
It’s possible that didn’t work either. Unlikely, given the incredible rhetorical barrage I’ve assembled so far, but possible.
It’s important to note though, that since Dragonsweeper is a puzzle game, in order to talk about it, I will be spoiling some of the puzzles. As few as I can! But some. This is your last chance to just back out and play it?
No? Well let’s continue.
Dragonsweeper is a puzzle version of Minesweeper. It uses the general framework of Minesweeper the same way Balatro uses poker: as a structure with so many things grafted onto it that it’s almost unrecognizable. But understanding the general concept or the original will make the initial exposure more tolerable.
Like Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper consists of a grid of tiles. Clicking a tile reveals what’s beneath it. If the tile is empty, just like in Minesweeper, that tile then displays a number of the sum of the surrounding tiles.
Unlike Minesweeper, most tiles on the board are not empty, nor do they contain mines. Instead, they contain monsters. This is a problem for our boy Jorge.
As Jorge spawns with only 5 health, clicking on a Minotaur early is an easy way to game over.
When you click on a monster, Jorge loses health equal to its power. If Jorge goes below zero health, it’s game over. Fortunately, defeating monsters also gives experience, and after collecting enough EXP, Jorge levels up, refilling their health bar.
But after the first few levels, the amount of EXP needed to level up is higher than the Jorge’s total health, and just defeating monsters isn’t enough. Instead, it’s necessary to crack open treasure chests, use healing scrolls, or find some other sources of EXP.
If you’re just starting the game, you will almost certainly die.
And then the real game begins.
This is your Last Chance to Back Out Before I Start Spoiling The Puzzles I Mean It This Time
In the corner of the screen is a little tiny purple book. When you click on the book, it tells you which monsters have which values, and how many remain. It also includes this little bit of text.
This right here is the heart of Dragonsweeper. See, Dragonsweeper isn’t truly random. It’s randomized, but after a few death screens, you might notice that the 10 value monster, the Mine King, is always in one of the corners.
Or you might instead pick up on the fact that the Slime Wizard is always guarded by six 8-value purple slimes, and always on the edge of the map.
You might spot that the 4 value gargoyles will always be facing another Gargoyle in a cardinal direction.
There are at least another five or so little patterns and rules like this. There are some I haven’t even found, and there are several that I didn’t spot until I had beaten the game, and was showing it to a friend.
For me, spotting these, and figuring out how to use them is what makes Dragonsweeper so brilliant. It’s very clever puzzle design where learning about how the board can be laid out, and how some things interact is the progression.
I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.
Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.
Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:
To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.
I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.
So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?
In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.
The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.
Mechanics
Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.
There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.
Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.
That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.
And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.
It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.
As soon as it stops crashing.
Conclusion
Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.
Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.
Limbus Company is very weird, and just a bit nuts.
Authors Note: I’ve played more Limbus Company since this writeup, and I’ve realized a few things I said were incorrect. You can read those corrections here. I’m leaving this writeup as is though, in order to preserve my initial understanding and perspective.
It would make sense that after 10 hours of Limbus Company, I would have a strong feeling on whether or not to recommend it. Thing is, I really don’t.
Limbus Company is fascinating. It’s unlike any other RPG I’ve played, and it’s tonally different than any other F2P game I’ve played. But its F2P mechanics, poor tutorials, and awful information display make it a very tough sell.
Side Note: I saw someone mention that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand this game. I asked my friend who worked at NASA to try it, and they completely bounced offit.
Limbus Company is a game from Project Moon, a Korean indie game studio. Project Moon’s other games include Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina.
All three games share the same world and story. I mention this because I will be talking about Limbus Company’s story, and that means general spoilers for the other two games. Sort of.
It’s a bit hard to explain. Much like the rest of Limbus Company!
Story and Art
Limbus Company has a strong visual style. I’ve always really liked 2D images in 3D environments as a design choice, and it’s done very well here. The story is unusual, and tonally a bit wonky.
The 13 incredibly poorly adjusted and mildly sympathetic whackjobs the player has to lead.
For reference, the game opens with the player character cutting off their own head and replacing it with a clock. The individual story arcs run the gamut from “Haha, weird,” to “What the ever loving fuck.”
Notable moments in the first category include a casino run by people in Mariachi outfits who fight with maracas.
Notable moments in the second category include a sympathetic NPC being gutted and worn like a flesh-suit. By a giant apple.
Anyway, game mechanics. Let’s talk about game mechanics.
How Limbus Company Works (I Think)
I want to know who plays this shit on a phone.
I’m going to try to explain how Limbus Company works. If you don’t care, you skip this bit. The extra knowledge is useful for deciding if you’d like the game, but not necessary for me to explain my problems with the game, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Limbus Company is a combat game. The player controls a group of characters (sinners) in fights against enemies and abnormalities. On a given turn, the player chooses from two available cards and builds a chain of cards across the characters they control.
Cards have: Power, Coins, Damage, Attacks, Damage Type, Sin Type, and Count. Power determines who wins Clashes, but only after Clashes are resolved by flipping the Coins. There’s a secondary value that determines the increase to power based on the number of coin flips that land heads during a clash or one-sided attack phase.
Damage is the amount of damage inflicted. I think. Honestly not sure. Attacks are the number of attacks to be inflicted on the use of a card, or that will be used for resolution of Clash during a Clash. However, it’s important to note that Sanity has an impact on Coin flip resolution, increasing or decreasing the rate at which you flip heads. This makes the Coin Flip not actually a coin flip.
Damage Type is the type of damage inflicted. There are three types, which are modified by enemy resistance, but also change if the enemy is staggered or panic based on their sanity. Abnormalities though, don’t have sanity, and cannot be panicked.
Sin type determines resonance and absolute resonance. In addition, resolving an attack of a given sin type grants Sin that can be used to activate Ego.
Count determines how many copies of a card are in a sinners deck.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, good. Because I’ve played 10 hours of this game, and I don’t get it.
Anyway, combat! Combat is against either abnormalities or everyone else. In fights against abnormalities, individual abnormalities and body parts of the abnormality can be targeted, but in general fights, characters pick targets on their own.
Game Modes
Limbus Company has multiple game modes. I’ve only unlocked a few of them, but most are just “do combat, get different resources.” However, there is one mode that’s very different, and that’s the game’s mirror dungeons.
Yes, it’s a simulation run. I’m not wasting energy to get a screenshot.
Mirror Dungeons are semi-randomly generated path of various encounters, similar to a “run” in Slay the Spire or Inscryption. The characters are reset to start at level 10, and after winning a fight, there’s a reward of either a random item in the vein of Slay the Spires artifacts, or the ability to level one of the current party members up.
Personally though, I’ve found that Mirror Dungeons got stale fairly quickly. Because there’s no reward for experimenting, and Limbus Company is F2P, I usually just ran more or less the same team, and picked safe options.
Story mode has something similar. While 90% of the story is a set of single linear combat encounters, the mission of each story chapter is a large non-randomized dungeon. These have been some of the more interesting parts of the game for me so far, and feel more like playing an actual video game than a free to play game with a gacha system.
The Collision of Money and Mechanics
There are two large pain points I have with Limbus Company. The first is that the game did not spend enough time and detail explaining the aforementioned combat systems, and doesn’t display in-game information in an easily accessible way. The tutorial is brief, and while not unhelpful, is overwhelming. I had another friend download and try the game to confirm that it wasn’t just me being stupid, and they had a similar level of drowning in information.
While bad onboarding and scaffolding can be a problem with games, it’s not one that necessarily turns me off. As perusing this blog for any length of time will make quite clear, I am willing to play games with janky or unexplained systems. I will play games that are horribly broken. I will play games that are in a language I can’t speak or read.
But learning a game’s systems by experiencing them requires me to actually be able to play the game. Limbus Company is F2P play, which means it has an energy point system. As with every energy point system ever, it boils down to the following core loop:
Spend Energy to enter levels
Get more Energy over time, or by spending real money.
There is no three.
I mentioned in my Arknights writeup a while back how much I liked that the game had a parallel energy system that gave free tries at clearing levels without any rewards.
A system like that is exactly what I want in Limbus Company. Something that lets me play the game, experiment with builds and try to figure out the incredibly obtuse systems that make up combat without “wasting” my energy on fights I can’t clear.
Right now, I felt discouraged from actually experimenting with the game’s mechanics, unless I hit a wall and had no other way forward.
Conclusion
Limbus Company has a compelling, if occasionally frustrating, story and solid art. The mechanics are interesting, and I wish I understood them better, or that they were easier to learn by playing.
If you’re looking for a F2P game, you could certainly do worse then Limbus Company. But enjoying it requires a high level of patience and tolerance for what initially feels like esoteric bullshit.
Limbus Company can be played for free on Steam, and also on phones. I suggest you avoid playing it on your phone unless you have an electron tunneling microscope so that you can actually read the text.
Holocure is a Hololive-inspired fan game in the shape of Vampire Survivors. If you haven’t heard of Vampire Survivors, it’s a 2D roguelite where you try to survive as long as possible. If you’ve never heard of Hololive/Vtubers, I’d suggest this video by Gigguk. While some of the specifics are bit out of date, the general coverage and explanation of virtual idols is handled really well.
If you’re already into Hololive, Holocure is a fantastic sort of love letter to the talents, and the fandom around them. All the enemies are mascots of the HoloEN branch, and all the items are in-jokes, or reference to various moments from Hololive history. The level of care put into everything is fantastic. I watch a lot of Hololive content, and so perhaps unsurprisingly, I also enjoy Holocure quite a lot.
That said, even if you have no idea what Hololive is, or don’t care to learn, Holocure is still worth checking out for its core gameplay. So let’s talk about that!
You start by picking a character to play as. There are 11 characters, 5 of which are unlocked from the start, and 6 of which can be unlocked with an in-game lottery system (don’t worry, it doesn’t use real money). After this, you’ll pick a game mode. Currently there are two modes, Stage and Endless. In Stage, your goal is to defeat the boss that spawns at 20 minutes, and in Endless, your goal is to just survive as long as possible.
Regardless of which mode you pick, you’ll get dropped into a large field, and the game actually starts. Enemies will spawn in, and move toward you. If they touch you, you lose health. Lose all your health, and it’s game over. When you defeat an enemy, they drop exp. Pick up enough experience, and you’ll level up and get presented a choice of several items and weapons.
This is as good a time as any to cover the aforementioned systems. Each character starts with the first level of their unique weapon, but can hold up to six more. Weapons fire automatically. Some fire in a direction determined by the player, and others fire in a completely random direction. This is actually a good thing, because you don’t have to spend as much time aiming, and can just focus on dodging everything being thrown your way.
In addition to weapons, there are also items and passives. Each character has 3 unique passives they can level without taking up a slot, and 6 items slots. Items have various passive abilities, for example, one gives regenerating shielding, and another buffs your damage if you go an amount of time without being hit.
The end result is that each run of Holocure feels different, while still giving a fair amount of agency in choosing between the various items and weapons that show up to pick from.
As a fangame, Hololive doesn’t cost anything, and you can download it on itch.io here! The game also has an official twitter here, and a larger content patch is expected later this year, sometime around September.
Two free things, ones a demo, and ones just a short game to check out.
Today we’re gonna be talking about two very different games, with… actually pretty much nothing in common. Maybe the amount of time it takes you to play through them? They are respectively, Peglin and Crow Story. Oh, also, they’re both free.
Crow Story is a very short 3D platformer. Playing through the entire game will take you less than an hour. You control a tiny little crow, and you try to make it to the end of each level. There is a story, but it’s told without dialogue, and it’s kind of “Blink and you’ll miss it.”
There’s not very much to Crow Story, but the game doesn’t ask much for your time, and as such it’s a perfectly reasonable way to spend an hour, just hopping around, and swearing when you screw up and get thrown off a ledge.
It’s a small, simple project, but it’s a complete project, and I think that’s worth praising. You can play it here.
Peglin is a roguelite game that uses Peggles breakout/pachinko style mechanics for dealing damage. You venture from area to area, collect items, and just try to survive. Right now it’s just a demo on Steam, but it could turn out to be something fairly interesting.
While I’m not sure how I feel about the trend of “What if we took X and bolted on Roguelike Mechanics?”, I like it a hell of a lot more than “What if we took X, made it a freemium mobile game, and added a lottery ticket system?”
