Journey to Incrementalia

Journey to Incrementalia is single player idle game, placing it in a genre that I have some thoughts about.

But I beat it in six hours! I spent most of that time actively playing!

And I was only tempted to break out AutoHotKey and start writing macros once or twice!

All of which makes me wonder if it counts as an idle game/clicker game at all.

Journey to Incrementalia

The premise is simple enough. You are a necromancer. You have been brought back from the dead to reach Incrementalia, a mystical land of… something. And you’re going to do this by raising the dead, and hurling spells at anything that moves.

It starts out as a pretty standard idle game. Ponder the orb to generate mana, spend mana to summon skeletons, and watch skeletons break down the wall.

But it quickly breaks away from normal idle game scaling because of its resource system.

Resources and mechanics

Journey to Incrementalia has 3 primary resources: mana, souls, and skill points.

Mana is pretty standard. You click on your orb, you get mana. You spend mana on a small smattering of permanent stat upgrades, summoning units, and buying souls.

The other two are much more interesting.

Skill points are used to get access to spells, and to buff those spells. For example, one of the earliest spells in the game is the Goblin. Putting 1 point into it lets you hire goblins, and additional points buff the amount of poison goblins apply when they attack.

That said, the number of goblins (and other units) are still limited by souls. There’s a bunch of ways to get souls, but even at the very end of the game, I only had around ~2000 or so.

So this is the part where things get good, and change from most other idle games I’ve played. It’s free to respec skills, and change builds. But since the player is still limited by the number of units they can field, it’s necessary to think about army composition.

This turns the game into an optimization problem instead of just clicky-clicky number go up.

As I reached higher and higher walls, I found myself respeccing constantly. Maybe I’d just unlocked a new spell to buff skeletons. Maybe it was a unit that let me apply poison more effectively. Maybe I just had enough mana generation to sling unending waves of fireballs, ignoring units completely.

My personal favorite combo was one where I constantly sacrificed skeletons, causing them spawns ghosts that slammed into the wall, applying poison stacks. These skeletons would then be re-summoned automatically, and the process would repeat. It was a sort of necromantic carpet bombing, and I enjoyed it immensely.

This was the best part of Journey to Incrementalia. Looking at the skill tree and trying to do napkin math in my head to get the biggest numbers possible, or realizing that I’d overlooked a spell or upgrade, was a lot of fun. So was spotting overlooked combos.

Some Criticism

Journey to Incrementalia is very fun when you have a bunch of skills to play with. When you don’t, it’s much less enjoyable, and this included much of the early game. Pretty much everything to the 25th wall wasn’t as good.

The game also isn’t particularly replayable. Different selections on side-quests didn’t result in different rewards or quest text, something I found disappointing.

Finally, the game is still somewhat buggy. I didn’t hit any major issues, but I did find a bug where I could summon infinite volcanoes, which slowed my PC to a crawl. I’ve also seen posts from some folks whose game has just straight up bricked. Some of these have already been fixed, but these would have been dealbreakers if I’d encountered them.

Overall

Journey to Incrementalia was most fun when I browsing the skill tree, and doing napkin math. It was at its least fun when I had done that math, and was just sort of waiting for my strategy to play out.

I’m actually fine with the game’s length, even if I wish it came online a bit faster. There’s also a few spoiler-y late game mechanics that I wish it did a bit a bit more with.

Perhaps if it did do more with its narratives or builds, I’d feel more strongly about recommending it. As it is though, I don’t hate it or love it, and I’ll leave that decision to folks with $5 and an afternoon or two to burn to answer that question.

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is most beautiful game I’ve played this year. Visually, it’s an absolute love letter to art and the physical creation of art.

I wish I could say something as nice about the gameplay or story.

I have to admit, I feel like I got beaten to the punch on this review. By Kotaku of all places. By some dude named Moises Tavera.

It really does look this good in-game.

This game is stunning. It’s rare that I suggest playing a game for the visuals. In fact, I think I’ll let that stand as my general recommendation when it comes to The Plucky Squire.

But take away those visuals, and you’re left with an easy and incredibly linear game. And it’s a shame, because The Plucky Squire has so much potential in its mechanics. But it never really offers the player any freedom to use them.

Story

The Plucky Squire is the story of Jot. Jot lives in a storybook world where he stops the schemes of the evil wizard Humgrump, with help from his two friends and the wise wizard Moonbeard. It’s implied that this has happened many times before, but this time, Humgrump blasts Jot with magic that kicks him out the story. For most of the game, you’ll be jumping in and out between the between the book and the “real world” of a child’s work desk.

This meta aspect of “Story within a story” isn’t really examined too much ( except for it possibly causing a time paradox). Again, this is fine. It’s a minor element, and it doesn’t bother me.

What does annoy me is how simple the story is. Ostensibly it’s a tale about creativity and imagination, but it really only pays lip service to that concept. Jot is a writer, and his sword is a pen nib. Okay, that’s cool, but where is that mechanically?

There was a lot of space to foreshadow the game’s one big surprise (the villain was once an artist too!), but the developers chose not to do any forehsadowing. In addition, the “one big twist” isn’t relevant to the story.

Side Note: I don’t think that the Plucky Squire was trying to make Humgrump relatable. But I found him kinda relatable after the game reveals that he used to just be a bad poet. I’m an amateur artist who is quite bad at art, and struggles to enjoy it. I’m cognizant of my own lack of improvement. I put most of my energy into the job that pays me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from The Plucky Squire’s story. If I don’t improve my art, I’ll become an evil wizard?

There’s also a real disconnect between the game’s written message—that of a love letter to creativity and imagination—and how linear the actual gameplay is.

Gameplay

Ostensibly, The Plucky Squire is a puzzle platformer. Let’s start with the platforming. This game’s primary conceit is the ability to jump between a 2d top-down book, and a 3d “real world.” Both worlds control pretty much the same, outside of the third dimension. There’s also a very small number of side scrolling sections. There’s combat, but it’s so laughably easy that it mostly just serves to break up the puzzles

But the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles.

The puzzles are incredibly dull.

The Plucky Squire introduces a large number of mechanics that could have been used as part of a larger scale system of puzzles. And then it just… doesn’t use them. While you’re given a variety of abilities, they really just function as keys.

For example: the game gives you the ability to stop objects in the scene. But you only use it in a few specific areas to stop specific objects. The game gives you the ability to tilt the book. But tilting only pushes around one or two things, and it pushes them on hard coded rails.

This path unlocks with the stop time key. This other path unlocks with the bomb key. Another path unlocks with the tilt key.

Okay, this mini-game was actually decent.

The mini-games don’t really help. They’re amusing, but they’re also short, and it’s hard to see how Punch Out, or Puzzle Bobble really sell the themes of the characters you’re playing as.

And the stealth sections with the bugs just kind of suck. They are the only part of the game where I struggled at all, and it’s mostly due to weird patterns, and strange pathing and sight lines.

But speaking of bugs…

Bugs

The game is buggy. It’s less buggy now that it’s been 3 weeks since release. But a non-zero portion of my playtime was spent trying to fix a soft lock in the final chapter of the game where my characters got stuck looking at a bench. Sure, it got fixed, but it got fixed by another Steam user, not the devs.

There was also apparently a fairly big bug that would permanently lock up the game if you used two mechanics in a non-intended way. Again, this goes back to the whole “abilities act as keys to specific doors” thing.

I am pretty lenient on bugs and glitches most of the time, but there was point where it looked like I had wasted 6 hours of my life.

I was pretty grumpy.

In Retrospect

Okay, so looking back, I finished The Plucky Squire about 3 weeks ago. Then I got involved in some other stuff, and never finished this write up. This last weekend, and I did a game jam, and I got a pretty solid reminder of the fact that 1. Making games is hard and 2. Getting players to do what you want is hard.

With that lens, I don’t think the Plucky Squire set out to be patronizing to its players. I do think though that the game was likely rushed in development.

There are a bunch of small hints that point to rushed development. For me, the biggest hint is how Jot’s friends just don’t have character arcs. They’re foisted into the game, given a fear, given one screen of character development an hour later to get rid of said fear, and a mini-game section in the final boss.

And looking through this lens of rushed development, it makes a lot more sense as to why a set of potentially fascinating mechanics involving clever interactions are dumbed down to a set of linear puzzles.

I could be wrong on this, but the scale of the art in the game to me screams “over ambition” more than it does “dumbed down for kids.” You don’t make something this beautiful but mechanically and thematically hollow on purpose. You make it because you ran out of time.

Conclusion

The Plucky Squire is a 10/10 for art, and a 6/10 for story and gameplay. What does that make it over all? I don’t know. It’s too visually impressive to be a seven, but it’s frankly not invigorating enough in either mechanics or narrative to elevate it to an eight.

Maybe the truth is that numbers are a bad way to assess art. That said, this piece of art cost me $30 bucks. If it had been $20 or $15, I might be more lenient.

As it is, I’d advise anyone curious about the game to wait for a sale and pick it up when it’s a bit cheaper. It’s worth seeing. It’s just not worth playing.

Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a short game. Just under 3 hours. I could have played it while watching Return of the King, and still have 20 minutes left before the credits. On the other hand, each hobbit foot probably took 9 people to make, and that’s the number of bodies left in my wake by the time the game ended. James Bond has a license to kill, but I don’t.

Pictured here: Something I did not do a single time in the game.

It may just be that I don’t make a very good noir PI. As I made my way through Gunpoints levels, I found myself wondering what the game would look like if someone else was playing. Would they elegantly rewire switches? Carefully trick guards into opening doors for them? Swiftly and effectively smash down windows, and call elevators?

Or perhaps they’d still just play like me: a crab in a trench coat. Scuttling about and turning off the lights, and almost brute forcing their way through the level.

While Gunpoint is ostensibly a sort of stealth platformer, the Crosswire device is its standout mechanic.

You can make the lights turn off when a guard pulls the trigger on their gun, or call the elevator with a motion detector. Or you can just make the security camera open the door for you instead of setting off the alarms.

However, levels only start with the ability to rewire objects on the red frequency. For any other color/shape of wire, you need to get to and attach a hacking device to a breaker. In later levels, reaching this is a large portion of the puzzle.

It’s also a good place to talk about the flaws of Gunpoint. None of these are big, but they all feel like things that would have gotten some more consideration if the game released today.

For the Crosswire, the flaw is that two of the primary colors are red and green, which feel like it would be quite easy to screw up if you were color blind. And while symbology for what can be linked together, the symbols only appear when an object is moused over.

The narrative and the mechanics are often in conflict. The biggest example would be how much fun it is to jump on guards and beat them up. There’s a fun audio cue, a button prompt, and then at the end of the game, I get told how many people I killed and injured.

It just feels bad.

None of these are dealbreakers. Just small annoyances. And perhaps Gunpoint would have overstayed it’s welcome if it had been longer. Still, I do wish there was a bit more too it.

Another Night In A City That Goes To Bed On Time

Gunpoint is fine. Eleven years ago it was probably an incredible indie experience, but these days, the bar is higher, and frankly, in that time Tom Francis has made better games like Tactical Breach Wizards. It’s not my worst use of $10 this year, but it’s not my best either.

As a final brief note, I want to mention something. Once you beat the final level of Gunpoint, you get the door-kickers. These are a pair of boots that allow you to just run full tilt and kick down doors. They are incredibly fun, completely break level structure, and I really have to wonder why it wasn’t possible to give them to me before I beat the game.

Like, yeah, they’re busted, but it would have been such a great finale.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.

Tactical Breach Wizards

I accidentally locked myself in my bedroom this morning, a problem I dealt with by climbing out of a window. This is an actual thing that happened, because I am an idiot.

It does however, provide a useful segue. After managing to get back into the parts of my apartment that aren’t where I sleep, I sat down to play more Tactical Breach Wizards, a game where problems can also be solved via windows.

Most of the time that solution is to shove someone through them.

Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics/puzzle game by Suspicious Developments. If you’ve ever played a tactics game before, you’ve seen at least the bones of what’s on offer here: Given a small set of elite units, you’re forced to fight your way through a series of mooks in a linear campaign, played in turns on a grid map.

Except in Tactical Breach Wizards, where the enemy has assault rifles, chain guns, grenades, and automated turrets, you have a skull named Gary, a wand with a scope on it, chain lightning, the ability to raise the dead, rewind time, and illegal narcotics.

The end result is that there’s a lot less laying down strategic overwatch, and a lot more trying to figure out how to shove someone into a bullet you will fire in the future to get enough mana to make a body double of yourself to hack a turret.

Image taken several seconds before throwing myself out a window. Just like in real life!

And while the game starts out simple, it builds up to be far more complex. Fortunately, the you also get a much wider variety of tools to use as additional characters join the party, and as you use the perk system to boost those characters.

The characters are quite well rounded, and tend to have both a personal consistent theme, and a synergistic gimmick. As an example, let’s look at Jen.

Pondering the orb.

Jen’s basic ability is a “non-damaging” lightning blast. The non-damaging is in quotes because while the shot does not do damage, being shoved into a wall, exposed electrical cables, or another enemy still hurts! Her primary spell is a bit like a boosted version of the shot: a set of chain lightning that can link multiple enemies together and shove them around. Finally, she has a broom that can be used to jump out any window and then enter via another, and a grenade that knocks everyone back.

In addition to all of this, many of her upgrades focus around giving her additional movement phases. The the end result is a character that can move themselves and others. And while on the surface, Jen doesn’t have any direct damage, the ability to throw yourself out a window, jump to the other side of the map, and throw a grenade that tosses 3 battle priests out of a fancy stained glass window is incredibly effective.

At the same time, her kit is also very synergistic with other characters’ abilities. One party member has an ability that allows him to shoot into the future by picking a space with no enemies in it, and shooting if one enters. Another throws speedballs at enemies that increase their knockback taken. Jen can push enemies into the space locked down by the first, and blast enemies debuffed by the second much further.

And pretty much everyone who ends up in the party is designed this way: highly synergistic while also fulfilling a valuable roll on their own.

The enemy of all law abiding-ish citizens: the traffic cop.

I don’t really have any complaints about Tactical Breach Wizards, but I do have some observations. I found the game quite difficult, probably because I played on hard. But there were still several levels that felt a bit too puzzle-y for my liking. I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards the most when it felt like there were multiple solutions and paths to complete a level, and much less I was trying find the single right solution.

Now, the game absolutely gives you the tools to find those solutions. 99% of enemy actions are deterministic, there’s no penalty to restarting a level. Every single action on a turn can be rewound and replayed. At the end of each turn you can foresee the future, and see how enemies will act. It’s just that I enjoyed the game more when I felt like I was trying to punch my way out of a gunfight, instead of repeatedly restarting because I moved one square to the left incorrectly five minutes ago.

I don’t think it’s spoilers if it’s the start of the second level of the game.

There’s one sort of last big thing about the game I want to call out, but not really discuss: the writing and story. It’s very good. I’ve heard some people compare it to Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett is actually my favorite author, and I’m hesitant to say that that the game as a whole reminds me of Pratchett, or at least Discworld. There are are humorous moments that feel like Pratchett, but the game has a tone much closer to his work that he did with other authors, like All The Long Earth, or Good Omens.

The longer scope means games can do a lot more things than books or movies, and Tactical Breach Wizards jumps around tonally. It’s a buddy cop flick, then it’s an action thriller, and then it’s a war story. There’s a certain level of harshness and melancholy to the later parts of game that feels appropriate. But it’s not a level of harshness I would associate with Pratchett.

The best compliment I can give the writing is this: My investment in the story served to pull me back to the game each time I quit to take a break after finding myself struggling with a level.

More Like Tactical Beach Wizar- wait, they make that joke in the credits.

Overall, I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards. It took me around 14 hours and that was on hard while ignoring many of the bonus objectives and extra modes, so if I’d loved it 100% there would still be more to play. It was $20 well spent.

That said, I’m not super interested in playing more because I’m about to start playing through everything else Suspicious Developments have made, including Heat Signature, Gunpoint, and Morphblade. So let’s find out if they’re just as good as Tactical Breach Wizards absolutely is.