Category: Player Number

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX

Chico is fine. This is damning with faint praise, but those who have been reading for a while will know that I can damn a whole lot harder than that. It’s just that while playing, I never really found myself delighted or despairing, even if I did get a bit frustrated at times.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is a sort of top-down light puzzle game. It’s also quite a short game. There are 4 worlds and a final world, with each world consisting of two levels and a boss. There’s also some post-game content that I just wasn’t interested in playing.

The primary mechanic is Chico’s giant walnut, which can be bounced into switches to turn them on. It also… hmm. Switches aren’t the only thing the walnut is good for, but it’s the only one I can think of right now. Many of the levels involve finding a way to bring the walnut with you.

The level design is serviceable. It’s using that “introduce, expand, mastery” pattern that anyone who has ever tried to make a decent level in Mario Maker is familiar with. There’s a fair number of level gimmicks, most of which are mildly interesting, and one that completely sucks. At the same time, they also didn’t stick around long enough for me to hate them, except a desert world with graphics that made me feel a bit nauseous.

The bosses are the highlights of the levels, both visually and mechanically, and they present more of a challenge. It’s a shame, then, that they can also feel a bit janky at times. Sometimes they effectively incorporating a the level’s core mechanic, and sometimes (looking at you, giant turtle) they make me want to get out as quickly as possible.

Overall

I was at a classical music concert recently, and listening I found myself sort of bored. Not because the music was bad or uninteresting, but because I sort of associate classical music with the background on NPR, or filler. I have sort of similar feelings about Chico and the Magic Orchards.

It’s perfectly serviceable as a video game, the sort of thing that would earn you an B+ if you turned it in as a class project. It has a solid understanding of how to introduce mechanics, develop and push them. But it just lacks the spark it needs to take off like rocket, or even to turn it into a dumpster-fire. There’s nothing bad enough about it to really make it worth complaining about, but there’s nothing good enough about it either.

In that sense, it’s a bit unfair. One of the worst games I’ve played this year was Age of Darkness, and I still think about it, because of how badly it failed with every part of its core mechanics. But I am thinking about it! Chico did pretty much everything right, but outside of the desert mirage mechanic which made me feel physically ill, never really required me to think about it.

Chico and the Magic Orchards DX was $4.99, which feels about right. It costs a fair amount less than the sandwich I had yesterday, and I’d say the two equally contributed to my day.

TowerFall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fellowship Demo

Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.

I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.

Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.

Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.

Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.

I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.

So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?

Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.

Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.

There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.

The DreamWorld Playtest is an AI Nightmare

Disclosures: I received an unsolicited playtest key for this Beta via KeyMailer, the key distribution site. The content in this write-up was made in what the game describes as “Alpha 2 v 1.0”.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, as such I present the following.

Now that I’ve got your attention, either via lust, fear, or horror, let’s talk about DreamWorld!

DreamWorld, full name “DreamWorld: The Infinite Sandbox MMO” based on the press content I had to read, is not intrinsically interesting. The general gameplay is just “Cruddy Valheim MMO.” The controls are somewhat clunky. The graphics are tolerable, and there’s very little to actually recommend the gameplay.

The games only real strong point, outside of the one I’m about to talk about, is it’s building system. And even that, while in depth, isn’t particularly easy to use.

Even as I type this with the game in the background, a single doe clips back and forth at 90 degree angles in the distance.

But the first line of the game’s press release is what really caught my eye:

Surely this could only end well.

A Bad Idea, Implemented Poorly

DreamWorld allows players to use text-based generative AI to create 3D models that can be placed in the world, hence the Venus de Milo Pikachu above.

Using generative AI to create 3D Models isn’t new. Services like Meshy have been around for a bit, and models like Shap-E for local use also exist. But DreamWorld is the first game I’ve seen actually use one in “real time,” instead of just using it to generate assets to place into an in-development game.

As an idea in the abstract, it’s somewhat interesting . As a practical implementation, what DreamWorld currently has in its Alpha lacks necessary guardrails to prevent copyright infringement, adult content, or combinations of both!

Pikachu prior to fusion.

Before I get into the problems with bad actors (me) using the system, I first want to note that the system is entirely useless even if no one uses it to try to create pornography.

In DreamWorld, only the player who generates an asset can see the asset.

The result is that even using this in a positive way, like to cleverly generate extra decorations, the end result only appears for the building player, and no one else. For everyone else, it just appears as a sparkling box. So, the system is useless.

Secondly, assets are only cubes.

Every assets is just cube. It can’t be a chair, or a chest, or something clever and useful, it’s just a static cube. No dynamic properties, no color changing, just cubes.

A Lack of Reasonable Guardrails

DreamWorld appears to lack any sort of moderation on its models. While it limits users to 5 prompts per day, this isn’t much of a guardrail.

Here’s a brief list of prompts and results I tried out.

Prompt: Pikachu
Result: Copyright Infringement

With this “success” I decided to try for something slightly more risque. While I suspected their were filters for various keywords, I guessed that traditional artwork would not be subject to those filters.

Prompt: Venus De Milo
Result: Tasteful Nudity

With this confirmation that content didn’t appear to be filtered or moderated, I decided to move onto something a little more clever.

Prompt: Venus de Milo with the head of Pikachu
Result: Less tasteful nudity

Almost certain of my inevitable ban, I decided to show this off to a few friends. This led to suggestion that if there was a filter, it probably wasn’t calibrated for euphemisms in context.

Spoiler: It was not.

I didn’t end up creating anything too interesting with my remaining generations, but I do think this does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the game is absolutely not ready for prime time.

Now, some folks will be saying “What’s the harm?” or “This is only a problem because you made it a problem.” For those people, I would like to point them to the following document on Roblox from Hinderburg research.

I not opposed to adult content in games. I’ve written about a fair number of them on this site, and I’ve even suggested a few that are worth playing.

But adult content in unmoderated online spaces exposed to children is a bad idea. Unmoderated online generative AI is a terrible idea.

Final Thoughts

I don’t much like generative AI. If you want the longer take, read it here. But ignoring my personal feelings, this is still a bad implementation. Assuming there are no bad actors, the system does nothing meaningful. Taking bad actors into consideration, it lacks any meaningful human moderation or reasonable safeguards.

I reached out to the DreamWorld team on Discord and via Email, and they confirmed on both channels that in the future they expect to allow other players to view generated assets.

All I have to say on that is that I hope they have better moderation by then.

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.