Confession time: I loathe Warhammer 40k. I always have. I’d like to tell you I have a good reason for it, but honestly, it just boils down to the fact that I don’t like grimdark as a mood, or setting. I remember in Highschool that I joked that if I wanted to read something and be depressed, I’d just read a newspaper, a joke that remains accurate to this day.
This raises an obvious question: If I loathe this setting, why on earth did I bother to read 200+ plus pages of tie-in novel? Two reasons. First, as much as I loathe 40k, I do kinda enjoy orks. And second, I wanted to run a quick sorta fact check on a video I’d watched about Orks, that seemed to quoting a lot of it’s info from Brutal Kunnin.
It was mostly this fact checking that made me spend the $10 to grab this, and spend a few hours on it. There are 3-ish points of view in the book, and sadly only one of them is an Ork. The other two are a member of the human-computer mars people, and corrupted human-computer mars people. (Adeptus Mechanicus, and Heretek Adeptus Mechanicus).
Look, this isn’t really a book you can read for the plot. In order for a lot of things to make sense, you already need to be at least mildly familiar with the setting, and the action itself is a series of fights. Instead, this is a book you read because you’re curious about how these characters think, or what they prioritize, more then anything else.
Speaking of how characters think, lets return to that “reading this for fact checking” thing I mentioned earlier. I was a bit disappointed to learn that this video I’d enjoyed just kind of ripped a lot of it’s point about “how Orks think” in 40K straight from the primary Ork point of view character. I found this kind of annoying, because there are a few specific examples that seem exclusive to this POV character, and not really exhaustive of the species. Anyway, this is my particular brand of being an annoyed pedant.
Did I enjoy this book? Mostly, in a sort of turn your brain off, and be amused by the incredibly stupidity of the people in this setting. Shockingly, the most idiotic decisions are not in fact made by the green sentient mushroom people made for battle with zero self-preservation instincts, but by the human-computer mars people.
Do I recommend it? Not really. I don’t know enough about 40k to say if it’s a good 40k book, and I don’t think it would be much fun to anyone who doesn’t at least have an interest in 40k.
Will I think about it ever again? Probably not until I’m stuck on a bus or something, and decided to re-read it out of boredom.
Possibly this has melted my brain enough that I will try to read Dungeon Crawler Carl at some point in the future.
Dusk is a boomer shooter that came out in 2017, and then finally got released in 2018. Or maybe it’s an arena shooter, because there’s some verticality? Or maybe a twitch shooter, which is how it describes itself at one point.
Look, games in the vein of Doom have had 30 years of evolution. If you’re the sort of person whose played through myHouse.wad, you don’t need me to tell you shit about this genre. Honestly, leave this review now.
On the other hand, if you’ve never played a Doom game, or like me, you’ve only played stuff like Wrath and Strafe, this is the writeup for you.
I do want to quickly talk about the music in Dusk, quickly because I don’t really have anything to say about it. See, Dusk is going for a horror vibe, and no matter how much weaponry I ended up with, I found somewhere through the first act that game was scaring me.
So I opened YouTube, pulled up a mashup of Ready to Die/Party Party Party from Hellsing Abridged, and used that on repeat for a bit as my background music.
This is the energy I endeavored to bring to my play through. I don’t think it was the tone the developers were aiming for.
This gradually transitioned into a combo of AJR, Panic At the Disco, and other random songs YouTube thought I wanted to listen to.
If you’ve ever wondered what the inverse of Zen is, I would suggest playing through Dusk Episode 2, Map 6, titled the Erebus Reactor with This Town by Niall Horan playing in the background. The result was an emotional state where I found myself constantly torn between trying to not get blown up, shot, or fall into lava while wondering what I was even doing with my life, and if I’m going to die alone.
Anyway, if you like horror themed shooters, Dusk seemed to do a good job. If you don’t, and for some reason have emotionally committed yourself to finishing the whole thing anyway, adjustments to soundtrack may aid you.
This of course, won’t change the general vibe. Whether it’s a cursed farm, the worlds worst industrial park, or a research facility co-designed by Escher and Geiger, these are not pleasant places to be.
Despite that, it did feel like the level design massively improved between acts. Dusk has 3 episodes, with about 10 maps each, and secret levels. I did not play any of the secret levels.
Episode 1 was fun but a bit bland, episode 2 had a lot more variety in layout and design, and episode 3 has some downright nutty bits, with E3M7 probably reaching the pinacle of weirdo level design, being based around flipping gravity.
And while they may not be pleasent, I found them fairly fun. Okay, except for some of the claustraphobic underground sections, but I enjoyed the larger maps.
I also feel obligated to talk about the weapons. This is classic shooter, so you can carry all of them at once, there’s no reloading, and the only real cap on using them is ammo. My personal favorites were the super shotgun, duel pistols, and a explosive bolt thrower called the riveter. The most interesting one is probably the spectral crossbow which pierces multiple enemies, and shoots through walls, but it never really clicked for me. Generally, I just used whatever felt best in the moment, and only really felt ammo starved in boss fights.
I really only have two complaints about Dusk. The first is bosses. I did not find any of them particularly fun. It’s hard to put my finger on why that’s the case, but mechanically I found most of them pretty dull. The second is an enemy type called the wendigo.
Wendigos look like this.
You might be looking at this, and going “That doesn’t seem particularly bad” and you’d be correct. But there are two things I can’t show in a still image.
Wendigo’s (or maybe just a map trigger) make the lighting dim when they activate, and make a screech like a parrot being squeezed to death.
Wendigos are often placed in dark enclosed spaces in the first two acts.
Wendigos are invisible until you shoot them for the first time.
The end result is an enemy that can organically jumpscare you every time it shows up in a level.
I hate them. Fortunately they’re at least kind of rare, so my terror was generally short lived.
I got Dusk on sale for just about $7. I had $7 worth of fun with it.
Right now it’s $20 on Steam, but you can probably just wait for another sale. It’s not my favorite game I’ve played so far this year, but it also isn’t my favorite genre, so I don’t think that’s on Dusk.
I thought the game was the most fun when it managed to blend it’s evocative tone with maps that were enjoyable to traverse, and least fun when it shoved me into coal mines filled with Wendigos.
I first saw Sir, We Have an Orc Problem in a random review I clicked on browsing BlueSky last night. I can’t find that review anymore. However, that review plus seeing another friend playing it on Steam was enough make me buy a copy.
I am easily influenced.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem, which I’ll now be abbreviating to SWHOP to, to the determent of my SEO, is an incremental tower defense game. It’s $9, and it’s fairly short. It took me about six and a half hours to beat the whole thing, and do a bit of achievement hunting.
The loop is simple. Pick a map. Place towers. Start the map. Watch as orcs die. Did you kill them all before you ran out of lives? Great, you unlocked the next map. Did you fail to kill them all? Spend the currency you got to boost your towers.
This is the biggest difference between SWHOP and most other tower defense games I’ve played. There’s no in-round building, or economic management element. Instead, all of your available towers and their power is gated by an incremental game style tree.
There are three resources you use on the incremental tree, blue, red, and pink crystal. Red is used for unlocking new towers, and you earn it by beating new levels. Pink is generally used for unlocking large single upgrades for towers, and earned by beating levels without letting any mobs get through. Blue Crystal is used for everything else. Blue has 3-ish sources. First, lump sum bonuses for beating a level. Second, you can earn crystal by killing orcs. And third, there are unlocks that grant crystal at the end of finishing a level, based on the levels difficulty.
This brings me to my big “problem” with SWHOP. It has the systems and functionality for an incredible tower defense game, but the part of the tower defense gameplay loop that is satisfying is completely subsumed by the incremental game elements.
There are a few things that collide to make this true, so I’m going to try to pull them apart, and point out how they interlock to cause this problem.
First, it straight up isn’t possible to beat the game without using the incremental game upgrades. You can’t. Without those systems, you cannot place towers, and you’re expected to lose the first level at least a few times before you get enough upgrades to beat it.
Second, because this is the first lesson you learn as a player, its the easiest mindset to adopt going forward, and until the very last level of the game, you’ll be rewarded for it. While you could micromanage your tower placements, it’s easier to just buy more towers and bullet penetration until you can brute force your way through a level. It also makes it very hard to gauge why you’re failing a level. Was it poor tower placement? Or was it just because you’re not at the power level needed yet?
And gauging that power level is hard, because enemy health scales between levels. On level 1, Orcs have a maximum of 6.4 health. On level 12, they can have 625. Upgrades are necessary.
The end result is a loop that feels like it encourages you to turn off your brain a bit. My response to losing during a level wasn’t “Let me re-evaulate my placement”, it was “Lets just run it back so I can save up enough to get more penetration on my cannons.” It’s the zen of the incremental game instead of the planning of tower defense.
This strategy falls apart on the last level, which I’ll be honest, I had to go and look up a guide for, because after spending what felt like an hour on this one level, I was getting a bit grumpy. SWHOP doesn’t have infinite scaling, so once I’d bought all the upgrades, I was booted back into playing an actual tower defense, while having absorbed zero lessons about the nature of the game over the last 5 hours.
And it’s a shame because SWHOP does have what feels like a competent set of tower defense bones. Orcs move and flow in satisfying waves, towers feel physical in a fun way. Deploying towers and setting their line of fire is fun. And while I find the actual map designs a bit unsatisfying, their scale in parts of the end game is incredibly enjoyable. This doesn’t feel like an incremental game with another system bolted onto it, it feels like a tower defense game that got consumed by the nature of it’s upgrade system.
Side Note: I will say though, I don’t get the line of fire system in this game. The short version is that you can set up a cone, and all tower shots will be within that cone. The problem is that it’s always better to just keep your shots concentrated on a single choke point then to spray and pray, even with towers like the flamethrower.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem gave me the mental feeling of scrolling on TikTok for five to six hours. It’s not really a bad feeling? But it’s not really a pleasant one either. This morning when I woke up, I’d actually forgotten that I’d played this game, despite having spent 6 hours on it yesterday.
If you know that you enjoy incremental games, and need one to play, this might be for you. Personally, the most value I’ve gotten out of this one is that it’s kicked me out of my funk of not getting any writeups finished.
Note: Normally I would link to things/people I see, but most of these folks don’t seem to have a website, so instead I’m just gonna put the full title of the performer/store/thing in italic quotes near the paragraph about them.
I went to a Renaissance Faire for the first time recently! It was pretty neat, and for once, I’m writing about an event before it’s completed, so if anything I write today sounds neat, you can get tickets here, and drive yourself down the Acton Fairgrounds in Acton, Maine.
First though, some photo!
Yeah, uh. That’s the only photo I took. Sorry.
Listen, the idea of cheese divination is one of those things I heard, and it just kinda took over my brain for a bit. Now, I did sit down to chat with the women running the both, who is a cheesemonger by trade, and learn about the history of Tyromancy, but I didn’t get a reading done. I just don’t like getting my fortune told for reasons that are neither here nor there to this blog post.
Still, this is the sorta idea I will absolutely steal for a game at some point in the future.
(Tyromancy by Rachel)
Another great thing I saw, but also don’t have photos of was a performer named Sylvan Farelight, doing slight of hand. Specifically, he was running shell and pea games on a small table. There’s something about slight of hand that I find really impressive, so that was another highlight for me.
(Sylvan Farelight)
I then spent some time just wandering around the fairgrounds. I’ll be honest, while I can appreciate the effort that goes into a lot of this stuff, some of it isn’t for me.
That said, I did see two gamified experiences I was very curious about. One I did get a chance to try, and one I did not.
The one I did try was Treasure Hunt. This was a bit of a cross-faire escape room with various puzzles to solve to collect parts of various clues to solve a larger meta-puzzle.
I will observe that while I did struggle with understanding these puzzles a bit, my friends did not, and it legitimately might have just been the result of not drinking quite enough water that day, and wearing almost all black, and doing a lot of walking and-
Look. It might have been dehydration rather then puzzle design.
The second one was Adventures from the Wizards Tower! This was slightly larger system that seemed to work a bit like a combo of a stamp rally and DND. I can’t comment on the game experience at all since I didn’t play, but the presentation was incredible, and the folks running it were kind enough to talk to me a fair amount about the system, and how it works.
One of the interesting things I do remember asking them was how they solved the meta-progression problem, since this is a game that runs across multiple Renn Faires. They explained that since they’re primarily PVE, everyone can contribute to any given challenge, even if for some challenges, some folks are going to be doing more then others, and also that sharing gear was something that had organically sprung up in the community.
Finally, I bought a bunch of 3D printed mini’s that I haven’t started painting yet from The Workshop of Many, and hiked back to my car.
I do want to make 2-ish quick sidenotes on this one. First, the models I purchased were sculpts from Becca_3D. And second, the general “realistic Pokemon” aesthetic I believe is at least inspired a little bit by the work of RJ Palmer. Just a quick “credit where it’s due” thing here.
Overall, this was a fun time, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had 1. brought a proper costume, and 2. it had not been a 4 hour round trip by car. But yeah, if I was closer I’d probably go again, and if you want to go, the last weekend it’s open this summer is coming right up.
The Path of Exile 2 beta is out. I got a demo a few months ago, but now that I’ve fully played through it, I have even more thoughts. I’m going breaking down my thoughts on it into two writeups, one on the campaign, and one the endgame. Technically, they are the same game, but mechanically they are very different experiences.
Now, before I get into that, there’s some brief background that is necessary. Path of Exile 2 is a sequel to my 2nd most played game of all time, Path of Exile. (about 3000+ hours?) My thoughts are going to be at least somewhat in comparison to it’s predecessor.
As a brief filter, I offer the following phrases: “juicing maps” “6L” “Farming blood adqueducts for a Tab”
If you know what any of these mean, just click here to skip ahead. If you don’t, you are likely to find the following background information helpful.
ARPG’s in Brief
Path of Exile 2, hereby abreviated to PoE 2, is a isometric ARPG from Grinding Gear Games.
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, character customization and itemization. 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 a baseball bat.
Trash mobs are fairly brainless and just rush the player, while bosses tend to be more correographed experiences, closer to something from a Bullet Hell, or Hades.
The first Path of Exile differentiated itself from other ARPG’s by making everything into game an item, and making those items tradable. Skills are items, (skill gems) which got socketed into other items you wore, and those sockets had colors determining which gems could be socketed.
The ability to refund skills points was an item. To enter endgame areas, specific items were needed. Same to fight endgame bosses. To buy items from vendors, it was necessary to have more items to trade them.
It’s other big differentiator was a skill tree so massive that one of my favorite things to do is pop it out as a joke, just to mess with people, who did not believe it was real.
Finally, there was the gem system. Gems could be supported by other gems. Take a fireball, link it to a multiple projectile gem, and now it shoots three fireballs. Link it to a piercing projectiles gem, and now they penetrate. Link it to a faster cast speed, make a few more tweaks, and now your character is a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Changes between PoE and Poe 2
PoE 2 makes a lot of changes to the above underlying systems, most of which serve to make the campaign much less punishing for inexperienced players. Gold exists as a flat currency to use with vendor NPC’s. This makes getting leveling gear a much easier process.
Gold can also be used to refund skill points. This is possibly the biggest change between the two games, because in PoE, a badly built skill tree would softlock a character. This would make it impossible to get the items needed to respec, and pretty much force the player to make a new character.
Sockets on items and their associated colors are also gone. Skill gems are socketed into a general skill gem menu. The types of support gems that can be used are limited by primary stats. There are even more small tweaks to make suggestions to players on what gems to use, and to prevent them from making choices that simply don’t work.
The skill tree is still massive. There’s now a dodge roll. Movement is a much more flowy thing then it previously was.
The general changes though result in much easier on-boarding experience with the games initial systems, instead of purely being thrown into the deep end, like the player was with the first Path of Exile.
Does all of this mean the game is easier?
Well, yes and no.
The Campaign
Generally I like the campaign. There are some incredibly sloggy bits, notably a single map in Act 2 that just goes on forever, and three or four of the Act 3 areas really tested my patience for just wanting to see the next few things.
That said, outside of these, I really didn’t have many complaints. The bosses feel far more diverse and interesting then their PoE 1 counterparts, and also much harder. The final boss of Act 1 in particular killed me about 10-20 times before I finally defeated it. It’s worth noting that I actually killed it right as it killed me, but that still counts, so on I went.
They’re also just much more fun as a general visual spectacle. My personal favorite is probably Crowbell, a giant crow-man thing that tries to beat the player to death with a bell. The fight isn’t particularly hard, but does have a fun transitions, with Crowbell running around, powering up, wrenching a bell off it’s stand, then using it as a bludgeon.
The trash mobs… well, they’re ARPG trash mobs. The nicest thing I can say about them is that they did in fact contribute to my /deaths count.
Finally, there’s the story elements. I generally quite liked these, even if the current content kinda ends on bit of a cliffhanger. I’m also the only person I know who cared about the lore of PoE, so maybe take that with a grain of salt. There are some callbacks to PoE, but I don’t think missing them will have any impact on your enjoyment.
I will say that I personally experienced a moment of glee getting to fight a character whose only ever been hinted at in flavor text from PoE, but another friend of mine who played the game before me didn’t even realize he was a recurring character, and thought he was someone new.
If you’re playing through the campaign without a build guide, or information about the game, I’d estimate it’ll take about 12-20 hours to play through? There’s a good chunk of game here. That said, the campaign does not currently conclude the story, as that’s planned for the games full release, so if you’re playing the game just for the campaign, I’d hold off.
Overall Thoughts
I like PoE 2. I have problems with the game, but they’re not present during the campaign. It changes a lot of esoteric bullshit that was required to play, made the boss fights more interesting, and is just generally more friendly, if not easier.
Some parts are a bit of slog.
That said, I think the main reason to currently play the campaign is to get to endgame. The campaign is not a finished game yet, with a complete story, and the beta is currently $30.
If the full campaign maintains it’s current level of quality for the remaining acts on full release, Path of Exile 2 will be worth playing purely as a standalone ARPG just for that. But for players who aren’t in a rush, or want a new ARPG, I would say to wait.
