Category: Multiplayer

Baldur’s Gate 3 at 4 Players

It feels a little pointless for me to write about a game that has already been devoured by the game journalism/influencer cycle that is modern games media So to actually add some value here, most of this writeup is going to be from the perspective of how the game plays with 4 human players, and some of the oddities with that.

The best way I would describe Balder’s Gate 3 is that it’s a digital version of Dungeons and Dragons, run by a strict but infinitely patient Dungeon Master. Yes, you can win all these combat encounters by just shoving people off cliffs. Yes, you can attack random people around you. Yes, you can let yourself be dominated by the purple mindfuck octopus. It eats your brain, you die. Better load a save.

This is where Baldur’s Gate is at its best in some ways. The engine handles all the stupid fiddly bits around combat, rolling dice, keeping track of HP, movement, spell slots, inventory, items, weight, etc.

Brief aside: Baldur’s Gate also gets to do one thing that tabletop D&D doesn’t: forcing players to learn systems via failure. Unlike a standard D&D game, where TPK’s mean everyone rolls up a new sheet, BG3 can wipe the party, ask “Now, what did we learn from that?” and have you run it back. And when it comes to learning D&D’s esoteric bullshit, I think this is quite a strong way to do it.

Act 1: You meet in an out of control spaceship.

So first, some background. I’m not a massive RPG person, so the only way I had any real interest in BG3 was playing the game with friends. I also didn’t want to spend $60 only for everyone to drop out.

Before buying, I got the three friends I planned to play it with to promise that we would play the game every weekend at some point on Saturday until we finished it. The hardest boss (scheduling) already defeated, the adventure kicked off.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is split into 3 parts, or Acts as the game calls them, with limited ability to go back once you proceed from one to next. To my mind, Act 1 is the strongest, with Acts 2 and 3 being a bit weaker for reasons we’ll get to. But at 4 players, Act 1 worked quite well.

We spent a lot of time messing about in Act 1 and it had some of the most satisfying moments of the game for me. The highlight, though, was the Underdark, and some of the roleplaying choices it offered. Baldur’s Gate tends to play more with the tropes of “Good vs. Convenient” rather than “Good vs. Evil.” This is to say, you can get what you want by letting people suffer, or can stick your neck out for them, and have someone else try to chop it off.

I think the strength of Baldur’s Gate’s writing was the clearest to me when I found myself wanting to really have my character (a paladin) stick to his ideals even when it was incredibly inconvenient. On the whole, though, Act 1 as a group of 4 didn’t really have as many of the pain points that would start to crop up later, starting in…

Act 2: The woods are dark and deep and trying to eat us.

Act 2 is where problems started to crop up. If Act 1 is traditional D&D fantasy (after the opening), Act 2 ratchets it up a bit, bringing you into the Shadow-Cursed Lands. They’re lands that are cursed by shadows. And these shadows try to eat you. One cool mechanic is that they won’t eat you if you’re carrying a torch. Which is fine except if you’re a party of 4, everyone is going to be carrying torch. This means no one has a weapon out when you get ambushed.

It’s also where we started seeing bugs. Here are some notable ones. We got soft-locked at our camp, and had to lose an hour or two of progress. The host player’s computer crashed each time he talked to an specific NPC for a romance-chain cutscene. Once, one of our characters was permanently locked up jail, even while not jail, and required that special type of esoteric bullshit to fix.

Act 2 was also where the meta-gaming got ratcheted up, at least a bit. Of the 4 of us in our party, two hadn’t played the game before, and two had. There were a few encounters that we did not do in what I’d call the “full spirit” of the game. For example: when I go to talk to strangers, I do not usually immediately barricade the entire room with pallets in case, say, I’m attacked by flying ghouls mid conversation.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I don’t harbor any ill will towards my friends for this. I knew they’d played before, and it’s hard to just play a game knowing everything that happens, and not spoil anything. On the other hand, it kind of a bummer. I think sometimes failing to protect an important NPC and living with consequences of that is fair.

In addition, Act 2 also involved one of the major problems with the game at 4 players: NPC party member quest chains. Many of these chains require having the NPC present in the party for the chain. But your party is capped at 4 characters, which meant that we had to kick out a human player and have them sit on the side while everyone else escorted whoever it was to wherever they had to go.

It’s a huge frustration, and makes it very difficult to want to do these quests, as it meant not actually playing with my friends. You know, the people I’m there to play the game with. But more on that in…

Act 3: We’re outta time, and only got 4000 minutes to save the world.

Act 1 is pushing the shopping cart down the hill. Act 2 is the wheels getting a little wobbly. Act 3 is the bit where the wheels fly the fuck off, and the whole thing flips head over heels.

That’s not to say Act 3 is bad. Baldur’s Gate, as it is realized in the game, is one of the best designed cities I’ve ever seen in a video game. They manage to make every inch of it both relevant and interesting, but without feeling like it was designed just for the player. It’s fascinating design that I can observe, but not parse in any way that I would be capable of mimicking.

And because it’s so jam packed, there is a ton to do. That said, it does feel less fleshed out on occasion than some of the other acts. Finally, this where the “Add the party member to the party” comes back with a vengeance. There were at least four party quests we didn’t touch because it would have meant someone had to stop playing.

That’s not to say there wasn’t enough to do. Despite having party members who had played the game multiple times, we found a new-to-them side quest that elaborates on some pretty critical lore for one of the primary characters. I cannot stress enough how content packed this game is.

I do have one story I want to share though. Throughout the game, we had kept an NPC alive, and done various side quests around him. Many of these were a pain, but it was really fun to see him change as we helped him, and grow.

Then in act 3 one of my friends murdered him for armor. It felt really bad. It was made even worse by the fact that we didn’t need this chest armor, and this person got it only because they wanted to respec into a brand new build for the 5th or so time.

This was probably the biggest moment that broke the fantasy for me, and it’s unfortunate that this happened right before the…

Finale: wake up and choose violence.

The finale to Baldur’s Gate is a comparatively short affair compared to the rest of the game. It is an impactful and cinematic story moment and set of fights that doesn’t quite overstay its welcome.

It is also unfortunately where the game just shits the bed technically. Performance is incredibly bad. Some of the enemies really don’t quite look like they belong. We saw at least 3 fairly major bugs occur, including enemies not spawning, one member of the party having all of their items unequipped while still equipping them, and watching a magical spear that returns after being thrown… not doing that, and just vanishing.

It’s unfortunate, because instead of a blaze of glory, BG3 goes out with the equivalent of an oil fire. Instead of a sense of dramatic triumph, the primary emotion I have when I think back on this part of the game is frustration. I’d rather fight mind flayers than pathing and the framerate.

But when the dust settles, it’s time to take stock of the casualties, and the story.

Hey, remember when I mentioned issues with the NPC party member quests?

Epilogue: So long and thanks for all the flesh.

So. Because we hadn’t done many of the NPC quests, the “post” final fight sequence of cutscenes was one of the most depressing end-game sequences I’ve ever seen. Because we left almost every character to suffer.

This included watching Wyll, who only hours ago had promised marry my 7 foot dragonborn paladin, rushing off to the Hells with Karlach. So yes. After 76 hours, BG3 ended with my character getting cucked by Karlach. Yes, I am salty. Can you tell?

It’s unfortunate, but the result is that Baldur’s Gate 3 ended on kind of a low note for me.

Baldur’s Gate undeniably deserves its game of the year award. But it’s not a perfect game by any means. It’s a masterpiece as a result of its scope and depth, but not its polish.

And to be frank: it doesn’t quite work at 4 players.

The Finals – First Impressions

Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?

Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.

And this is where I’d put my in-game screenshots, if I’d taken any before the beta went down.

Gameplay

The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.

Gamemodes

Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.

In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.

Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.

What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?

Traversal

The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.

Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.

One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.

The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.

Loadouts

Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.

I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.

Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.

Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.

Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.

Overall Thoughts

The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?

Not really.

I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.

Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.

Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.

It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.

Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.

Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated

I liked playing Clank Legacy. After playing through the full campaign of 10 games, if you asked me to bring out my copy and play a game, I’d say “Sure.” If you pulled out a fresh copy, and asked me to play, I’d probably pass.

Let’s talk about why that is.

The full title of Clank Legacy is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. I’ll just be calling this game Clank Legacy for the writeup. The subtitle does give us the game’s primary source of flavor and story: the Penny Arcade D&D Actual play. It’s an interesting enough story, but the entertainment value is carried by the humor and tone rather then the narrative arc.

It’s also an incredibly self-referential title.

Ah, yes. The Clank Legacy is Legacy Clank.

Clank Mechanics

Clank is a deckbuilder with a board movement component. The goal is to get the most victory points, but unlike Tanto Cuore or Dominion, the biggest source of those points is from moving around the board and grabbing artifacts, gold, and items instead of buying VP cards from the buy row.

In most senses it’s a fairly standard deckbuilder. Each turn you draw five cards and play them. When your deck runs out of cards, the discard pile becomes your deck.

As I mentioned, the game starts to diverge from standard deckbuilders when it comes to the goal. The end goal is to get from the starting zone, grab an artifact, and get back to the starting zone without dying. There’s more it than that, but it’s a decent general overview.

Cards generally give one of three resources: Movement, Skill Points, or Combat. Movement is used to move around, Skill Points are used to buy cards from the game’s version of the card market, and Combat is used to defeat monsters in the game’s version of the market.

The next big place where clank differentiates itself from many other deckbuilders is that you must play every card in your hand each turn. And this is a bad thing because decks start with two copies of Stumble, a card that generates Clank’s eponymous mechanic: clank.

From left to right: Skill, Movement, Clank, and Fight.

Clank is a semi-random damage mechanic. Whenever you generate Clank, you put a wooden cube of your color into the Clank pool. Whenever a new card is added to the market, if it has a Dragon Attack symbol on it, all the Clank goes into the Clank bag, and then a number of cubes are drawn out. If your cubes get drawn out, you take them as damage. If you take all of your life as damage, you get knocked out, and may score zero points.

There’s another primary way for attacks to happen, though. Once a player does make it back to the starting zone, they score some extra victory points, and each time they would take a turn, they instead perform a dragon attack against all other players.

There’s a key interaction that I want to highlight here, because we’re going to come back to it later:

  1. Clank has a buy row of random cards, and those are refilled after each turn when a player buys cards with Skill, or defeats monsters with Combat. There aren’t any other ways to interact with the row.
  2. Clank’s primary mechanic to force players to end the game is that some of the cards trigger dragon attacks when they flip up into the buy row.

Just keep this in mind. It’s going to be important in a bit.

Legacy Mechanics

Time for the other half of the title! Legacy. This is a Legacy board game, and as such, it involves all the classic Legacy mechanics. Permanent powerups, permanently changing board state, and using the game’s campaign structure to perform mechanical scaffolding, slowly doling mechanics and ramping up complexity over the campaign.

And because it’s a board game instead of a video game, it involves Legacy components and behaviors. Half a dozen sticker sheets, a bunch of envelopes with hidden contents, tearing up cards, removing tokens, and eating cardboard. That last one might just be me.

There are a lot of envelopes. Like, a huge number of them.

On the the whole, I found it a bit cumbersome. Not bad, just unwieldy. It also requires some additional components that aren’t included, notably a permanent marker of some sort. And maybe an x-acto knife to cut stickers in half for the parts of the game where you’re supposed to place them on creases on the board, and they don’t stay stuck.

I like the Legacy components. Now admittedly the game’s lookup book for events, the Book of Secrets, fell apart at the binding almost immediately. But I’ve had actual books do that to me, so I’m willing to ignore it.

Yes, I painted the minis. Yes, I was much more proud of them before I looked this closely at this high resolution picture. No, the Dwarf isn’t done yet even though I’ve already finished the campaign.

The legacy elements themselves are quite fun an interesting. There are a few that are a bit underwhelming, for example one that is effectively just madlibs. But there are some really fun ones around upgrades, events, and expanding the board. They’re quite enjoyable, and very compelling to interact with and chase after.

Keep that bit in mind as well.

The Actual Critique

So, we’re now like eight paragraphs deep about game mechanics. In a moment, we’re going to discuss the game a s a whole. But first one last distraction.

Imagine a world where chess pieces are edible, and quite tasty. It’s not important why. What’s important is that if you choose to play chess, you’re going to be tempted to eat at least a few of those delicious, delicious pieces. So on your turn, you can play the actual game, Chess, or pull one of your own pieces off the board and have it as a snack.

This is a game design problem. Actively consuming your resources to do something that opposes the theoretically primary goal changes things. And if you play with an opponent who agrees that eating is more fun than playing, you might spend part of the game just taking turns munching on pawns instead of going for check. It’s a very different experience.

This is of course, a metaphor for the primary “problem” I have with Clank Legacy.

Stickers > Victory Points

It’s more fun to run around doing quests and unlocking legacy events than it is to to get victory points. Putting out stickers, reading things from a big secret book, and unlocking new cards and quests is really fun! It’s the whole point of Legacy games.

This means that in many of the games I played, the game stalled out. It wasn’t that we weren’t having fun… But we definitely weren’t optimizing for “winning.” We were optimizing for doing as much legacy “stuff” as possible. We would actively tell our opponent what our plans for the next turn were, and what cards needed to stay out. Often, we would give thoughts or advice on the opponent’s plan to try to help them have a better turn.

Clank Legacy is, in theory, a competitive game. But it wasn’t very fun for me to play it like one. Trying to “win” felt like it came at the expense of trying to actually have a good time.

The main issue here, is that when this happens, the game turns into a version of the Cold War, instead of a race. Because the advancement of threat and danger is dependent on the market row, and players buying from the market row, there’s no outside force pressuring the players to run home.

In addition, if one player wants to accelerate the pace of the game, they have buy cards from the market row. And if those cards aren’t good, they’re actively making their deck worse.

Overall

I liked Clank Legacy. I’d play more of my copy, because despite finishing the campaign, there are still interaction points, quests, and other special things we haven’t completed. And it also might be fun to actually go and play a round competitively! I’m not sure. I haven’t played it like that yet.

But if someone asked me for a fresh campaign, I feel like I’ve seen enough already that I wouldn’t be interested in starting from scratch, or replaying through some of the initial games with very simplified mechanics.

Spoiler Warning

You’ve been warned. From here on out, we’re getting into spoilers. You can still stop reading this sentence. Or you can stop at this one. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So you know that whole design problem I mentioned up above? The one where the game can be stalled out with no issues, because the buy row remains stagnant?

One mechanic I haven’t mentioned is the patron. Patrons modify setup and few other game mechanics, generally in a small and (quite frankly) often negligible way.

Except for the last Patron in the campaign, effectively the final boss fight. Instead, it’s the only Patron in the game that actively clears cards out of the row every turn. In addition to that, if it reaches a certain (very badly defined and poorly worded) threshold/trigger, it clears EVERY card out of the row.

It’s the only mechanic that does continually clears cards out of the market row in the whole campaign. And then, because this is a legacy game, you destroy that Patron, never to use it again. So the designers are clearly aware that they could induce the extra time pressure, and prevent the cold war stalling. But they actively choose to do it only once, for a single game.

Super Raft Boat Together

I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.

Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.

Mechanics

The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.

Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.

I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.

Issues

Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?

How close? How much damage? I don’t know.

Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.

It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.

Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.

The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.

It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.

So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.

The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.

This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.

Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.

Pre-Super Kraken
Post-Super Kraken, on the best fight I’ve ever gotten.

Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.

Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.

End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.

It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.

Conclusion

Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.

If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.

Escape Simulator

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.

Stolen from dictionary.com

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.

Karakuri Castle by namo_krub
Laundry Day by namo_krub
Little Emily by cico

Overall

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.

Escape Simulator is $15 on Steam.