Gametrodon

Category: Player Number

  • Angeline Era

    Welcome to the first post of the year. Let’s talk about Angeline Era.

    I was going to say that Angeline Era describes itself as a 3D action platformer, but technically it doesn’t do that. In this thread here, the developers describe it as a “Light-Story Action-Adventure VLASRPGEG.” They also note that it has bumpslash combat, which should not be confused with a bump-combat game.

    Yes, that is a lot of text. No, I don’t quite understand it either. In fact, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about Angeline Era, so it’s probably best to do some groundwork. Let’s lay out the things I do understand, the things I don’t understand, and a mistake I made very early on while playing.

    First of all: the mistake.

    I chose to play Angeline Era on Inferno difficultly. I did this for a few reasons. When I play a game, I want to have the “intended” experience—as close as possible to what the designer wants me to experience. I usually assume the harder difficulty is, the more the game will force me to truly engage with systems, choices, and designs. My second reason is that I’m used to weird indie games being too easy, and too short, so I figured clicking up the difficulty a bit (while still being below the highest) would be fine.

    And on this second reason, I was wrong. I was incredibly wrong. Greek hero levels of hubris here.

    I think comparisons to From Software games are overblown when discussing or writing about games, but I cannot think of another game that has gives me the same sort of emotional response that I had to many sections of Angeline Era as Bloodborne. When I describe sections of Angeline Era as exhausting or draining, it’s probably because of my choice to play on Inferno.

    Enough caveats, let’s talk about the game for a bit.

    Gameplay and Narrative

    Angeline Era starts out fairly simple. It stays that way for about 30 seconds.

    It’s 1950-something, you play as Tets Kinoshta, and you’ve been called by angels to come to the country of Era for… some reason. On the way there, your ship is attacked by the fae, and about 30 seconds into the game, it’s time for the first boss: a set of laser-shooting fish. You defeat them, a few things happen, and a little while later you’re introduced to the angel Arkas, who tells you that they were the one who called you to Era.

    The reason?

    So you can collect the Bicornes: the only way to get into the damaged angel spaceship, repair it, and allow the angels to return to their true form as beings that can shimmer throughout the universe.

    If you find yourself overwhelmed at this point: don’t worry. I felt the same way, and after 20 more hours of gameplay, I can confidently say that I am still confused. More on that later.

    Regardless, it’s shortly after this that the game opens up for what will be the majority of the experience. The loop goes something like this:

    1. Explore the overworld, looking for weird or unusual spots.

    2. When you find one, go over and search it.

    3. If it is a secret, play a little dungeon crawl minigame sort of thing. Beat that to unlock a level.

    4. Depending on the type of level, play through it and collect a Scale at the end.

    5. Finally, beating levels unlocks and adds path to the overworld. (Note the bridge and gap in the trees!)

    Rinse and repeat!

    Or, if you’re me, do the following. (Click to expand)

    Find the level. Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Try a third game. Get a bit farther, and get killed by something that seems impossible to beat. Quit the level, and look for other levels. Find one. Discover it’s somehow worse. Jump back to the first level. Lose until the moment something finally clicks. Get further than you have before. Die to an enemy doing something you weren’t paying attention to. Rage quit for the day. Come back the next day and beat it in 20 minutes.

    The majority of my time in Era, though, was spent on combat. So let’s talk about the combat system.

    Many of Angeline Era’s mechanics work pretty similar to other games with top-down 3d combat. Tets can be moved around with a control stick and perform a double jump to get over enemies or cross gaps. What makes Angeline Era different is how it handles attacks, because there is no attack button. Instead, whenever Tets bumps into an enemy with his sword, he’ll automatically slash at them.

    This is the core of Angeline Era’s combat, the bumpslash if you will. It does a few very important things, but the first one is that as the player, you cannot actually control when Tets attacks. If you get pushed into a corner by enemies, you’ll lash out whether you want to or not. And you might not want to, because each time Tets makes an attack, there’s a decent amount of knockback in the other direction. Knockback that might send you into a pit, spikes, or get you stuck in a corner.

    The other big part of combat is your gun. Due to the low poly nature of the game, I can’t quite tell what type of gun it is. Maybe it’s a magic gun! It does refill its bullets each time you hit something. Maybe it’s a cursed gun. It can only ever shoot towards the top of the screen. This is actually less annoying than you might think.

    I did find in my play-through that I didn’t use the gun much until I got an upgrade that let me use it as a short range shotgun, allowing the next connected round every five seconds or so to be used as an AOE blast.

    Of course, combat only matters in combination with enemies. And while Angeline Era has what feels like a low number of enemy models, it doesn’t have a particularly low number of enemy types. Multiple enemies in the game share the same character model, but behave differently. Here’s two examples.

    The black fae beatledog is one of the game’s most basic enemies. When you kill it, it explodes damaging you and other enemies nearby. However, its actual behavior is pretty variable. Off the top of my head, I think I’ve seen it used as a patrolling enemy, an enemy that rushes at the player, and an enemy that actively tries to run away from the player.

    A better example might be the weird purple cat mosquito fae. Sometimes they’re turrets, sitting in one location, spinning in a circle and shooting at you whenever you cross their line of vision. Other times they actively move around, avoiding the player while firing.

    Most enemies are like this, with a set of different behaviors that add more variety then you might expect.

    Many of the levels in Angeline Era are combat levels, consisting of a set of rooms populated with enemies, and you need to defeat a certain number of them or a certain group of them to advance to the next room.

    In harder levels, I found myself trying to solve the levels like a puzzle more than fight through them.

    Is there a grace period where enemies aren’t moving as I enter? Try to find one enemy to a clip of ammo into and quickly kill.

    Are there spikes, and a slightly elevated location? Rush over, jump up high, and let the randomly rolling enemies kill themselves on the hazards.

    Is there cheese? Is there a trick? What’s the minimum number of enemies I actually need to beat to progress?

    As I got further and further, I found myself increasingly exhausted by the process of exploring the island of Era.

    Intermission – Art and Cultural Context

    I’m of the opinion that for me to understand art, I need to exist at least in part in the culture that created it. Let me give a few examples of situations where that hasn’t been the case for me:

    Let’s start with Amazing Cultivation Simulator. This game expects you to have a strong understanding of the tropes and nature of a Wuxia-based setting in order to parse it whatsoever. As it turned out, there were a fair number of folks I knew who actually were familiar with this stuff, either because they came from a cultural background with these stories, or just really liked 10,000 chapter web novels. As I wasn’t, I had to consult with these people to understand why I kept getting my guys killed with bad Feng Shui.

    Another, slightly more abstract example can be found in Sanda, a manga series by Beastars author Paru Itagaki. On its face, this is a series about a kid who can turn into a super buff version of Santa Claus. Under that, though, I think it might actually be a series about queer awakenings, the way that youth is overvalued by adults, the population crisis in Japan, and trying to hold on to past days. Do I understand any of those messages? Absolutely not, because I don’t have an ounce of the context really needed to parse them on any meaningful level. I’m aware that Japan has a rapidly declining population, but trying to comment on it as someone who has no real understanding of the culture would be an act of grand hubris.

    Finally, there was Land of the Lustrous. Even if I told you the premise, it wouldn’t be useful because the actual themes and mechanics of the series instead seem to be playing around with the nature of various Buddhist beliefs. At least I think so! Again, I don’t entirely know what I’m looking at.

    Now, you might have noticed that in all of this I’ve been careful to avoid the words “weird” or “alien” as descriptors of these works. And that’s because I’m not convinced that they are. Even if they are weird, I don’t think I’m positioned to apply the label. Looking in at another culture, at its traditions and at its stories, we—the outsiders—are the aliens. Just because something doesn’t connect with us doesn’t make it inhumanly alien; just a part of humanity we haven’t experienced, and something that might be a casual part of everyday life for someone. They’re bad labels. I’m happy to call something like Homestuck, or Undertale, or Athenian Rhapsody weird because I know where they’re coming from, and from that place they are unusual!

    Okay, so what does any of this have to do with Angeline Era?

    Well, I might be an idiot.

    I have spent an large amount of my playtime through Angeline Era wondering if I’m just an idiot, for a variety of reasons. Some are gameplay-related. There were at least two bosses I just completely failed to understand how to fight.

    In one case, I was stuck flailing until a friend made an observation that let me beat it. In another, I spent at least two hours failing miserably until I finally pieced together how I was actually supposed to defeat it.

    There are also the levels that just felt far too long to beat.

    Most of all though, there’s been the narrative.

    Angeline Era’s narrative feels like it’s managed through a series of “short story” style experiences. You, as Tets, are not the primary mover and shaker in these experiences. Instead, you arrive late in the story, after things have drawn towards a conclusion. The process of obtaining each Bicorne is the process of stepping through one of these short stories; a narrative about characters who are not you, and often not even hugely interested in you.

    These stories on the whole are pretty grim. I’ve included a brief smattering below, but please be aware these are spoilers.

    Click here for story arc spoilers

    -A girl kidnapped by the fae at birth and swapped with a changeling returns to her human mother, but grows jealous of her changeling sister and begins robbing people. The townsfolk blame her changeling sister who is run out of town, while you proceed to fight and kill her, followed by murdering the fae family who had raised her as a sort of weird pet, and that she had locked in the basement.
    -A “not-quite-dream” sequence involving what might just be a plan to control the entire human race via mind control juice! Or maybe it’s a hallucinogenic vision.
    -A woman marries an angel who got involved with her only for her property. The angel digs too greedily and too deep, finds some sort of ancient being, is sacrificed to it by his wife, who then continues to feed other people into its maw.
    -An angel scientist, upset by the fact that angels can’t reproduce, creates an unholy abomination clone of an angel that stands two stories tall in a mockery of the concept of life.

    Oh, and while we’re at it, lets get the big one out of the way.

    MAJOR STORY SPOILERS

    Angels aren’t angels! They’re a sort of semi-parasitic alien, one possibly controlled by their crashed space-ship in a sort of hive mind that parasitized Tets, and seems to have been at the start of trying to take over the world when their ship got blasted into oblivion. It didn’t crash, it was blown up by someone they were trying to mind control!

    Now, what I’ll say about all of these things is that they don’t quite feel connected. Everything I’ve put in the text boxes above took me 24-ish hours of playtime to get through. They’re like a set of vignettes, each discomforting in its own right, but none of them felt like they were contributing to a greater narrative more than they were contributing to a tone. The same is true of all the characters, NPCs, and other interactions.

    Angeline Era has made me feel deeply out of place both with its gameplay and narrative, and sometimes, in the ways they overlap. Mechanically, the game’s bosses kicked my ass so badly and so many times in a row, in a way that I haven’t been on the receiving end of except for games like Silksong.

    See this red gauge under the health bar? It fills up as you attack enemies. I’ve played 26 hours of this game, and I have no idea what it does or means. I’ve even made new save files and replayed through the game’s opening section to see if I missed a tutorial, or a section where it is introduced, but if I did, I still haven’t found it.

    There are parts of Angeline Era that are fantastic. Certain sections of the game are incredibly fun. At one point the game turns into a sort of mining/exploration mini-game. There’s one song I’ve played on repeat while writing this.

    But there’s also a sense of extreme exhaustion. Of bosses that feel borderline unfair, and in one case, slightly bugged. Of exploration that’s draining instead of exciting.

    Most games feel like escape rooms. Angeline Era feels like hiking up a mountain to a run-down car park, or a closed ski resort during the summer. The gaming trope of every investigation you do being rewarded with a treasure, or secrets, or lore simply isn’t there. Sometimes a coke can in a parking lot doesn’t tell of a mystery of the universe, it just tells of someone who doesn’t throw out their trash.

    But fundamentally, I can’t tell if this is the experience I’m supposed to be having, or if I took that coke can, spun it around three times, and tossed it into a river, a mystical genie would come out.

    I can’t tell if Angeline Era is at times intentionally abrasive, strange and unusual, or if I’m just fucking idiot who can’t observe or uncover its secrets, or understand its mechanics.

    And this brings me to my big confession.

    The Big Reveal

    When I wrote most of this, I had not beaten the game. I thought I was about to! I had collected all the Bicornes. There was a big boss fight.

    Then! A grand twist! A big reveal! A second boss fight, in a way that felt like it was the final moment of the game, like it would all end here. This one was a bit more exhausting but I beat it.

    And then the game just sort of kept going. A third boss fight, one that didn’t quite make sense to me in context, and still doesn’t make sense to me now. Also, it took longer than the first two.

    Some even more confusing plot developments.

    Then there was a weird and incredibly unfun minigame.

    Then another unfun mini-game.

    Then a third awful mini-game. It legitimately might be intentional that this part sucks so much. It would be a really clever bit of telling a story through mechanics. Still, it sucks.

    Anyway, after finally working up the energy to play through it, I did beat the rest of the game. And I’m now ready to give some final thoughts.

    Final thoughts

    From a gameplay standpoint, I mostly like Angeline Era. There are quite a few things I’m sure I missed in my play-through, but the bumpslash combat feels good, and the individual levels work well. I can’t say the same for all of the exploration. There are plenty of points I found it purely frustrating, and there are some sections in the end game where it really feels like the game just stopped thinking about the experience it was providing.

    From a story standpoint though. From a story standpoint, by the end of everything, the game feels like a fever dream.

    FINAL STORY SPOILERS AND THOUGHTS

    I don’t get the story. I don’t think I like the story. In fact, I might straight up loathe it.

    I use the phrase fever dream because it feels like a selection of set pieces that are completely unconnected from each other, especially in the finale.

    Everything feels uncomfortably rushed. Characters are examined and developed far more in the last 3 hours than the first 25, and their characterization just feels off. While I was exploring Era, I didn’t get a great sense of who Tets was a character, but in the finale sections of the game, we get TOLD that he’s a recovering veteran of World War 2 who might have become an alcoholic, ignored his father, and chased after his own beliefs. This is followed by him being in an abusive relationship (as the victim) with a magical Fae, followed by one of his Fae children being killed as his abusive wife is kidnapped by her brother for… reasons. Maybe they were explained and I didn’t understand them?

    Again. Fever dream.

    The nature of video games and stories is that you have a lot more time and different tools to tell stories with, and I feel like the plot beats that Angeline Era is trying deliver on could have worked for me. Tets doesn’t control or act like a deadbeat son with PTSD using religion as a shield to avoid addressing his trauma throughout the game, so finding out that’s what he’s supposed to be is a bit of a moment of whiplash.

    And I don’t think you can ignore any of that! Angeline Era kept me involved because of its narrative, and seeing how it concluded… I feel bummed. I want to like this game more than I do. I want to recommend it to other people.

    Angeline Era is an unusual game unlike many other things I’ve played. If you like hard games, and are good at them, maybe give it a shot. If you want to understand a world I couldn’t, find secrets I didn’t, and experience something deeply different from a lot of other video games, it might be for you.

    But I don’t think it was for me.


  • Battlefield 6 is fine, but too expensive.

    As we approach the end of the year, I’m pretty tired. I have a bunch of cool writeups I should finish up (Blue Prince! Omegathon!), and a few posts like my writeup of Horses that could go up, but I’m somewhat hesitant to actually post, because they’re both A) slightly soul scouring and B) I think Horses purely as a video game is pretty banal, and not some sort of incredible and transformative piece of interactive media. Wheels of Aurelia was more innovative in its mechanics and narrative.

    So while scrounging around for something to talk about, I remembered that I’ve played 100+ hours of Battlefield 6. So let’s talk about that real quick.

    A quick confession.

    I loved Call of Duty. However, just over four or so years ago, I stopped playing Activision-Blizzard games. If I wasn’t clear enough, when Diablo 4 came out I made some statements that will probably prevent me from ever being invited to certain press events. Really, the kick-off for all of this was when Blizzard censored a Hearthstone player protesting for Hong Kong. I really don’t like it when companies bow to authoritarians of any stripes, so I stopped playing their games. No Overwatch. No StarCraft.

    But I missed Call of Duty the most. I loved me my stupid gun shooty game, and I’d fire it up every day after work on my travel laptop. There’s some deep think-pieces on the the soft power image control of the military gun violence fantasy, or the jingoistic nature of the campaigns in these games.

    I don’t think I’m qualified to write that piece and frankly, I’m not very interested in trying to write it. I didn’t even play the campaign in Battlefield 6, because I’ve never understood why you would play the campaign in one of these live service shooters. I’m just gonna talk about the game as it is for me, which is mostly Call of Duty methadone.

    The General Overview

    I was gonna joke that I could just copy my Battlebit review across for this part, but I actually can’t. My general take on Battlefield 6 is that once you’re in a game, the experience is pretty good.

    Guns work well. Movement feels good, and a lot of the weird secondary gadgets are quite useful. Maps are mostly even and pretty well designed.

    There are definitely weak points. The map pool is a bit anemic, and pretty much every game mode reuses the same maps. I wish the engineer class had a second gadget that was actually useful in modes without vehicles.

    But once you’re in a game, it’s a good time. Everything that isn’t the game though?

    It sucks.

    The game is $70, with an in-game cash shop and battlepass. The battlepass has it’s own mini-battlepasses, with timed challenges for maximum FOMO. If there’s a way to make more than 3 loadouts for a class, I haven’t found it in the labyrinthine menus. Getting the game to even launch for the first time is a pain; not a huge pain, but a pain.

    Every update also seems to make the game slightly worse. The most annoying one for me is that helicopters seem to have some sort of animation culling turned on now when they’re far away from me, and given that helicopters are in the sky, they are usually far away from me. It makes it look like a Pokemon game.

    Also, now it’s time for the longer set of complaints

    Battlefield isn’t realistic, or super memorable.

    If there’s anything I’ve learned from reading ACOUP, it’s that I don’t know anything about war. And if there’s anything else I’ve learned, it’s that games will almost always sacrifice fidelity for fun. By default this does not annoy me. When Battlefield 6 added the cash shop, I wasn’t pissed because someone could now play as their fursona, I was pissed because I had already paid $70 fucking dollars for this game.

    That said, for a game about high troop number combat, you would think there would be literally any way to meaningfully communicate with the other 28 people on your team. I’m pretty sure modern war isn’t conducted by taking 32 dudes, giving them thousands of dollars in military hardware, and then pointing at a burnt out mall and saying “Go fuck em up!”

    But wait, you say. “You said 32, then 28.” Those are different numbers. Yes, they are, because you do have voice chat with your squad, but you only have text chat with the rest of your team. I have used the text chat maybe 4 times total in 100+ hours. The only time it had any measurable impact was when one teammate was complaining that a challenge was too hard, that they could not overcome it, to which I suggested that “through jesus christ all things are possible”, which was followed by a series of “amens” from other team members.

    They managed to complete their challenge.

    Side Note: I suspect that the Lord, if real and in the habit of intervening in the mortal world, has better things to do with their time then help someone get three air vehicles kills in one match, but what do I know.

    I also mention this because in 134 hours, it’s the only memorable moment I’ve actually had in the game. There’s no building, so there’s no real opportunity for anything clever or tricky, just destruction. It’s a bit of a bummer.

    The lack of communication would bother me less if the classes were less obviously synergistic. The assault’s spawn beacon is the only reasonable way to make extended pushes across the map, but you can’t push with one person. The engineer is the only class that can reasonably deal with vehicles, but without extra rocket rounds refilled by the support, it’s going to do have a very hard time doing that. Recon can paint vehicles with its gadgets, enabling faster lock-on for the engineer, but without that engineer to followup, it’s pretty much useless. Support enables everyone to do their job better, with extra gadget and grenade usage, but can’t do any of those jobs particularly well on its own.

    It’s just aggravating for a game where communication is key to have no communication. Now, if I remember correctly Battlebit did have local voice chat, and the result of that was every game started with a cacophony of racial slurs, Free Bird, and Fortunate Son, but at least it was possible shout “Rez me” at someone.

    Overall

    I personally enjoy Battlefield 6. I don’t really recommend it though. It’s a pain in the ass to get running, it costs too much too much money, it’s lacking quality of life features, and goes hog wild everything that’s bad about modern live service games.

    I don’t even think it’s a bad game. I just think you can get more better games for $70. For that sort of money, you can go buy Titanfall 2 and Blue Prince, and a lot more if you’re willing to wait for a sale.

    Battlefield 6 is that one restaurant in town that’s just a bit too pricey, but no one in your friend group hates. It’s a good place to hang out, chat, catch up, but if anyone could really make a choice, you’d all go somewhere else.

  • Q-Up

    Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

    Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

    If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.

    A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

    Q-Side

    The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

    And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

    But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

    Oh The Stuff You Can Get

    Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.

    After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

    This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.

    Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

    This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

    It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

    It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

    Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

    They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

    Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

    And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

    So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

    Narrative

    From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

    Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

    This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.

    The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

    I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

    After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

    This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

    Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

    This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

    Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.

    Then things get odd.

    I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

    Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

    This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.

    It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

    It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

    It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

    Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment

    Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

    Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

    But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

    It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

    Hat is off, back to final thoughts

    I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

    It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

    Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

    I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

    P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

    Have some gems.

    Also.

  • Ball X Pit

    Ball X Pit is Breakout X Vampire Survivors. There are a lot of things it does that I like, and it executes well on a most of its mechanics. Despite all that, I’m not sure that I want to recommend it, because I don’t really feel like I’m having fun with it. More on that later.

    The Basics

    Ball X Pit is easiest to describe in terms of just listing off all the games it’s cribbing features from. We’ve got the standard roguelike formula of incremental runs, complete with a 3-pick-1 system. The items in question are a set of brick breaker balls with special powers, and some side items. Balls can poison enemies, shock them in an AoE, split into more balls, etc. These get bounced off enemies to deal damage, enemies drop EXP when the die, and the pressure is killing enemies before they meander their way to the bottom of the screen, at which point they punch you in the face.

    Where Ball X Pit innovates is its fusion system, letting you take two balls and combine them. Grab an Earthquake Ball, fuse it with Ghost, and suddenly you have a ball that pierces enemies while hitting them all with a massive AOE. There are also evolutions, combining specific balls to fuse into new, stronger balls, but these are a bit less novel, as both Vampire Survivors and Holocure had similar systems.

    At the end of a run, you’ll be kicked back to the hub screen: a small city builder with a twist that’s actually quite novel. Instead of being your standard Farmville setup, you harvest resources by playing more brick breaker, launching your inhabitants into the village, bouncing off buildings to finish their construction, and across wheat fields to harvest them. These resources can be used to construct new buildings, and generally engage in meta-progression.

    Then you’ll jump back into a run, perhaps with a new set of characters, better equipped for the given challenge. Rinse, repeat. Clear a level with enough different characters, and you’ll unlock another level.

    It’s probably worth spending at least a bit of time talking about characters. At the start of a run, you’ll pick a character to bring into the run. They bring a starting ball, some stats, and some sort of twist modifier (later, you’ll unlock the ability to bring a second to set up interesting synergies!). These are interesting, running the gauntlet from “shooting faster, but less accurately” to the one I’m using while I’m doing this writeup, that auto-plays the game completely on their on own.

    That character brings me to my main problems with the game: it’s really compelling, but around hour 5, I found that I wasn’t really having much fun anymore. I’m mostly ripping off a friend here when I say this, but the game feels kinda like looking at TikTok: there’s a point where you’re just a bit zoned out, but still present enough to keep going. After you stop though, you start finding yourself wondering what you just did for the last several hours.

    It’s a shame because all the little things in Ball X Pit are pretty great. I love the low-poly aesthetic, the sound and music are good, and if you don’t like them, they’re easy enough to turn off. Because unlike some things I’ve played over the last few weeks, the game has a proper options menu.

    It just keeps going

    I had a different friend ask why I’d play 20+ hours of this if I’m not having fun, and I think I have two answers. The first is that early on, as the game is unfolding, showing off new systems, new characters, and new ideas, there’s this hope that it’s going to turn into something more than it currently is. I kept hoping that I’d unlock some subsystem that would crack the whole thing open. It’s also during the first few hours that you’re constantly unlocking things, finding new balls, new evolution and fusions with them, and just generally being entertained.

    But this whole process slows down later on. Progression tapers off. There are no more twists, and the enemies, while having variety, don’t really require you to play any differently. The game turns into a chore.

    The second reason I played that much was to make sure that before I did this writeup, I’d really given the game a chance. Seen all it had to offer. And I feel fairly confident of that at this point.

    I haven’t even beaten the last boss myself. Instead, I plugged in that character I mentioned above who plays on their own, and just let them do it. I bet there’s some sort of secret if I beat the final level with all 21 characters, maybe a bonus level, or secret 21st character, but at this point I’m just so bored, and frankly, don’t really want to.

    Ball X Pit is $15. It’s not the worst $15 I’ve spent this week, but it’s not the best either. It’s an absorbing experience with clever ideas, but ultimately a slightly empty one.

  • Landlord Quest

    I’ve described a few games on this blog as “love letters to X.” The Plucky Squire, for its joy in the physicality of art. Holocure to all of Hololive. It’s a fairly common idiom I haven’t thought much about until I played Landlord Quest: the first game that I think might be best described as a hate letter.

    I don’t mean Landlord Quest is bad. I just mean that if you took a love letter, and kept the passion, but inverted the feelings, this is what you would get. If love letters are sent with roses and chocolate, hate letters are probably sent with a mailbomb.

    Landlord Quest is a short adventure game. And when I say short, I mean short. I feel fairly confident I saw the entirety of the game in about 42 minutes, and that was three separate playthroughs. I’ve never actually played an adventure game before, so it may have taken me longer than people who are actually familiar with the genre.

    Because it’s so short, I don’t really have much to say on it that isn’t a spoiler for the experience. The art is good. I didn’t have to look up anything, which I’ve been told is some sort of gold standard for adventure games, but there’s also one a single room, and a finite number of things to “Look at.”

    This is it. This is the experience.

    I guess the one interesting thing I could talk about is that despite the game loathing the Doug character, from his bro-glasses and faux-cybertruck, I’m not sure I do.

    There’s a few incredibly brief moments of him ruminating on his relationship with his father. They’re short, and I think the intent is mostly to show that Doug is a useless nepo baby. I’m sure they work if you’re the sort of person who had parents that cared about you and your interests. I imagine if I was that sort of person, I’d be able to look at Doug and laugh, visualizing a chain of shit heads stretching back years eternal.

    Unfortunately for the designer, I haven’t spoken to my father in close to 10 years, so the attempt to paint him a shit brat who coasts on his father’s coattails fell flat. Instead, it made me a bit sad for him. Someone cared about him once.

    Anyway, I think the credits for Landlord Quest do a better job of speaking to the game’s purpose than I could.

    Landlord Quest is a short, and either horrifying or cathartic experience based on how you feel about landlords. It’s six bucks on Steam. It’s very well made for what it is, and it made me feel something.

    I’m just not sure how I feel about those feelings yet.