Category: Player Number

Deceive Inc

Deceive Inc is out. This game’s been on my watch list for a while, mostly based off playing the demo a while back. I’ve managed to rack up 30 hours so far, and I’m ready to give my thoughts. I do like Deceive Inc, and I recommend it. BUT.

In what feels very appropriate, I don’t think Deceive Inc is actually the stealth game it might first appear to be. Or, at least, it’s not quite a stealth game at its core. So let’s talk about that.

Deceive Inc’s Deception

Deceive Inc falls into a lot of genres. It’s a multiplayer stealth action game with battle royale and hero shooter elements.

However, it’s the shooter part that I really want to focus on. The shooting is the most important game mechanic underpinning everything else in Deceive Inc. It’s not what you’ll be spending most of your time doing, necessarily, but it is required for victory. Which brings me to my one big point: if you do not like first person shooters, you will not like Deceive Inc.

If you do enjoy first person shooters, though, you will find this one of the most interesting and unique takes on the battle royale genre that’s been done so far.

More on that later. For now, let’s talk about the general flow of a game of Deceive Inc. Players take the role of spies infiltrating one of several expansive maps, attempting to escape with a briefcase, while avoiding being killed by NPC guards and other players.

I won’t be talking about the AI guards much from here on out. They serve the same purpose as AI in Hunt: Showdown. They’re not actually much of a threat except that drawing their attention them will alert other players to your presence.

Note: Between when I started writing this, and it getting put up on the blog, Deceive Inc has added a new class of NPC called the Elite Guard who are noticeably more lethal. Still not a threat on their own, but absolutely can become a problem in larger firefights.

Fortunately, avoiding the NPC guards is incredibly easy. Deceive Inc has a disguise system called cover. Cover lets a player copy the appearance of any character they can see and stand next to. As long as you have cover that matches the appropriate area, guards will never shoot you.

Author Note: The actual functionality for cover is incredibly interesting. The character other players see doesn’t actually mimic your movement 100%. Instead, it just faces the direction you last moved. This means that you can look around wildly without giving yourself away as a human player. You can also walk backwards to watch behind you, while giving the impression you’re looking in the direction you’re moving.

Cover is broken when you shoot or get shot enough, or if you’re seen for too long in a forbidden area. For example, a staff member cover won’t last long in a guard area.

The primary threat to success is other players, and the actions they take. I have a whole side writeup about the meta strategies currently in vogue.

What Deceive Inc Does Well

Deceive Inc absolutely nails the 70’s spy aesthetic. Every map and character feels like they just stepped out of a portal from the James Bond or Austin Powers movies. There’s a fun but not overwhelming retro-tech theme, and the sound effects and music fit incredibly well. (Casino map when Sweat Bandits?)

My personal favorite, Larcin.

The gunplay is solid, if a bit unusual compared to many other shooters. Time to kill is fairly high, and takes some getting used to. So do some of the behaviors around aiming. Each character also only has a single gun. But in the long run, the biggest difference from most shooters are the activated abilities.

Deceive Inc also has one of the best respawn mechanics that I’ve ever seen in a battle royale. There’s no respawn or bleed out. Instead, downed teammates can always be revived as long as they don’t leave the game. The catch is that each respawn brings them back with lower and lower max health. This rewards quick pickoffs and disengaging, but it’s still always possible to stage a comeback.

The spy and sneaking mechanics are fun and flavorful. Unfortunately, for reasons I wrote about in another post, really trying to blend in and be stealthy isn’t quite the best way to play the game. Even so, the sneaking absolutely sell the fantasy of being the high tech secret agent. The devs have indicated that they’re trying to make the game be a bit more punishing of run and gun, and have released patches to encourage that, so we’ll see how it goes in the long run.

Friction Points and Annoyances

In-game, I have very few annoyances with Deceive Inc. That said, I would really like to be able to see kill replays, and would love to see damage breakdowns upon death. Even after playing for 25 hours, I still often don’t understand how I was spotted out and killed. This makes learning really hard.

In addition, there are a bunch of small things in Deceive Inc that aren’t explained super well. These include various status effects, debuffs, and how specific weapons work. The information is present in the game, but it’s just not super easily exposed. The most recent update added a glossary which I like, but it could still do a bit more.

Out of the actual gameplay, I have one big complaint, and a few minor ones. The biggest complaint is the matchmaking.

The matchmaking is bad.

I recognize that a small player base leads to tradeoffs in order to keep queue time down. That said, getting matched into someone who has played 15 times as much as me feels bad. Getting matched into a whole team of players with that much time played felt even worse. The lack of death breakdowns and kill replays means it’s not possible to even learn from this kind of absolute butchery.

Also, I don’t love that in a game I already paid $20 for, there’s a battle pass on release. Blah blah, server expenses, blah blah, live service. But look. I already gave you $20. C’mon.

Conclusions

Do I recommend Deceive Inc? As long as you enjoy first person shooting mechanics, yes.

Everyone I’ve played this game with so far has enjoyed it, and played more with me, which is ridiculously high bar all things considered. It definitely has pain points, and bunch of unique mechanics that can make it a bit difficult to learn, but I’ve never played anything quite like it.

Guns in Deceive Inc

Author’s Note: This was part of my writeup on Deceive Inc. Partway through, I realized that a 7 paragraph diatribe about gun balance and the current meta might not be the most relevant for deciding if you want to buy Deceive Inc. That said, I still think this post does make an accurate observation about why Deceive Inc plays the way it does.

Deceive Inc sells itself as a stealth game, but after playing a few rounds, it becomes clear that isn’t entirely true. The dominant strategy used by very high level (300, the level cap) players is much more based around fast movement, while ignoring the stealth aspects of the game to a certain extent.

I think this happens because the guns fairly high time-to-kill. Across the characters I’ve played, and had my friends play, here’s a short list with some approximate damage values:

WeaponBody ShotHeadshot
Sniper Rifle3575 (Charged)
Shotgun4550 (ADS)
Pistol10-1520

For reference, a player starts out at 100 health, and some in game upgrades can push them up to 115 health at max.

But the important part here is that there is no way to one-shot kill a full health player. Which I think I think makes sense when you game out a bunch of other factors:

Since Deceive Inc is a battle royale, there is no respawning. You have to play carefully offensively, and defensively. Players want to blend in, and they want to be paranoid of anyone who sticks out. In addition, it’s a fairly small player count battle royale, withonly up to 12-16 players in a match.

So if weapons could one-shot, be it a shotgun at close range, or a sniper headshot, the dominant strategy I think becomes something like “Engage anyone suspicious, and try to one tap them.” If the player is correct, and did spot a disguised human, they instantly win the combat, can disengage, and have permanently removed a threat from the game with very little risk to themself.

If they’re wrong, they’ve made themself a target for anyone else nearby to get one-tapped, and also wasted ammo. But because of the risk of being spotted, I still think the right choice is to blast first, ask questions later. And this encourages a super passive playstyle of taking the minimal number of risks at all points in time, to avoid being found and nuked down.

But weapons don’t one shot. So even if you spot someone else out first, and engage them first with a surprise shot, it’s still very possible for the player who is stronger with the gunplay mechanics to turn and kill you.

This is why I can only recommend Deceive Inc to people who like first person shooters. Playing well against other humans requires winning gunfights. And winning gunfights requires strong FPS skill mechanics. Even though most of the game is spent engaging with the stealth mechanics and trying to avoid trouble, without gunplay skills, you just can’t win.

Limbus Company

Limbus Company is very weird, and just a bit nuts.

Authors Note: I’ve played more Limbus Company since this writeup, and I’ve realized a few things I said were incorrect. You can read those corrections here. I’m leaving this writeup as is though, in order to preserve my initial understanding and perspective.

It would make sense that after 10 hours of Limbus Company, I would have a strong feeling on whether or not to recommend it. Thing is, I really don’t.

Limbus Company is fascinating. It’s unlike any other RPG I’ve played, and it’s tonally different than any other F2P game I’ve played. But its F2P mechanics, poor tutorials, and awful information display make it a very tough sell.

Side Note: I saw someone mention that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand this game. I asked my friend who worked at NASA to try it, and they completely bounced off it.

Limbus Company is a game from Project Moon, a Korean indie game studio. Project Moon’s other games include Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina.

All three games share the same world and story. I mention this because I will be talking about Limbus Company’s story, and that means general spoilers for the other two games. Sort of.

It’s a bit hard to explain. Much like the rest of Limbus Company!

Story and Art

Limbus Company has a strong visual style. I’ve always really liked 2D images in 3D environments as a design choice, and it’s done very well here. The story is unusual, and tonally a bit wonky.

The 13 incredibly poorly adjusted and mildly sympathetic whackjobs the player has to lead.

For reference, the game opens with the player character cutting off their own head and replacing it with a clock. The individual story arcs run the gamut from “Haha, weird,” to “What the ever loving fuck.”

Notable moments in the first category include a casino run by people in Mariachi outfits who fight with maracas.

Notable moments in the second category include a sympathetic NPC being gutted and worn like a flesh-suit. By a giant apple.

Anyway, game mechanics. Let’s talk about game mechanics.

How Limbus Company Works (I Think)

I want to know who plays this shit on a phone.

I’m going to try to explain how Limbus Company works. If you don’t care, you skip this bit. The extra knowledge is useful for deciding if you’d like the game, but not necessary for me to explain my problems with the game, which I’ll get to in a bit.

Limbus Company is a combat game. The player controls a group of characters (sinners) in fights against enemies and abnormalities. On a given turn, the player chooses from two available cards and builds a chain of cards across the characters they control.

Cards have: Power, Coins, Damage, Attacks, Damage Type, Sin Type, and Count. Power determines who wins Clashes, but only after Clashes are resolved by flipping the Coins. There’s a secondary value that determines the increase to power based on the number of coin flips that land heads during a clash or one-sided attack phase.

Damage is the amount of damage inflicted. I think. Honestly not sure. Attacks are the number of attacks to be inflicted on the use of a card, or that will be used for resolution of Clash during a Clash. However, it’s important to note that Sanity has an impact on Coin flip resolution, increasing or decreasing the rate at which you flip heads. This makes the Coin Flip not actually a coin flip.

Damage Type is the type of damage inflicted. There are three types, which are modified by enemy resistance, but also change if the enemy is staggered or panic based on their sanity. Abnormalities though, don’t have sanity, and cannot be panicked.

Sin type determines resonance and absolute resonance. In addition, resolving an attack of a given sin type grants Sin that can be used to activate Ego.

Count determines how many copies of a card are in a sinners deck.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, good. Because I’ve played 10 hours of this game, and I don’t get it.

Anyway, combat! Combat is against either abnormalities or everyone else. In fights against abnormalities, individual abnormalities and body parts of the abnormality can be targeted, but in general fights, characters pick targets on their own.

Game Modes

Limbus Company has multiple game modes. I’ve only unlocked a few of them, but most are just “do combat, get different resources.” However, there is one mode that’s very different, and that’s the game’s mirror dungeons.

Yes, it’s a simulation run. I’m not wasting energy to get a screenshot.

Mirror Dungeons are semi-randomly generated path of various encounters, similar to a “run” in Slay the Spire or Inscryption. The characters are reset to start at level 10, and after winning a fight, there’s a reward of either a random item in the vein of Slay the Spires artifacts, or the ability to level one of the current party members up.

Personally though, I’ve found that Mirror Dungeons got stale fairly quickly. Because there’s no reward for experimenting, and Limbus Company is F2P, I usually just ran more or less the same team, and picked safe options.

Story mode has something similar. While 90% of the story is a set of single linear combat encounters, the mission of each story chapter is a large non-randomized dungeon. These have been some of the more interesting parts of the game for me so far, and feel more like playing an actual video game than a free to play game with a gacha system.

The Collision of Money and Mechanics

There are two large pain points I have with Limbus Company. The first is that the game did not spend enough time and detail explaining the aforementioned combat systems, and doesn’t display in-game information in an easily accessible way. The tutorial is brief, and while not unhelpful, is overwhelming. I had another friend download and try the game to confirm that it wasn’t just me being stupid, and they had a similar level of drowning in information.

While bad onboarding and scaffolding can be a problem with games, it’s not one that necessarily turns me off. As perusing this blog for any length of time will make quite clear, I am willing to play games with janky or unexplained systems. I will play games that are horribly broken. I will play games that are in a language I can’t speak or read.

But learning a game’s systems by experiencing them requires me to actually be able to play the game. Limbus Company is F2P play, which means it has an energy point system. As with every energy point system ever, it boils down to the following core loop:

  1. Spend Energy to enter levels
  2. Get more Energy over time, or by spending real money.
  3. There is no three.

I mentioned in my Arknights writeup a while back how much I liked that the game had a parallel energy system that gave free tries at clearing levels without any rewards.

A system like that is exactly what I want in Limbus Company. Something that lets me play the game, experiment with builds and try to figure out the incredibly obtuse systems that make up combat without “wasting” my energy on fights I can’t clear.

Right now, I felt discouraged from actually experimenting with the game’s mechanics, unless I hit a wall and had no other way forward.

Conclusion

Limbus Company has a compelling, if occasionally frustrating, story and solid art. The mechanics are interesting, and I wish I understood them better, or that they were easier to learn by playing.

If you’re looking for a F2P game, you could certainly do worse then Limbus Company. But enjoying it requires a high level of patience and tolerance for what initially feels like esoteric bullshit.

Limbus Company can be played for free on Steam, and also on phones. I suggest you avoid playing it on your phone unless you have an electron tunneling microscope so that you can actually read the text.

Redfall

Redfall is the newest game from Arkane Studios, best known for Prey and Dishonored. It’s their attempt at making a horde shooter/looter shooter, and I have thoughts about it.

Lmao got em.

They are “This is terrible,” and, “Why does this exist?” If you told me Redfall came out 10 years ago, I would have believed you.

The first bad sign is the gunplay. It is not great. The aiming is tight, but the feedback from shooting and recoil is awful. Every enemy feels like a bullet sponge. Only two weapons feel right: the shotgun and sniper rifle. And both of those require headshots. While sloppy guns might be okay in other types of games, this is a horde shooter… it relies on its gunplay.

In addition, there’s apparently no party scaling. So regardless of if you want to play in “single player” where you can’t pause, or with an actual team, it’s the same experience. In fact, you can never pause the game, so I hope nothing ever happens while you’re playing that might interrupt you, or you’ll die.

The graphics are okay, and have a cartoony aesthetic, but the movement animations are all the same. Each special type of vampire feels pretty much the same.

For example there’s one called Angler. Much like L4D’s Smoker, they have a grapple to reel you in with. But as far as I can tell, you they don’t have an obvious tell or signal. The ability is on a 20 second cooldown, and you need to just dodge it based on the timing, and circle strafe.

Redfall could be redeemed by its story, but even after just seeing the opening, I have low hopes. The opening is incredibly stupid. The game opens with two vampires alive in front of the player character. The player has no guns or anything, and can only watch as the vampires turn another unlucky human into a buffet. Suddenly, one of the vampires notices you’re alive, and turns to deal with you.

Then the most predictable thing to happen in the history the earth, happens. The thing that happens every day, and will happen every day for 7 million years after I die occurs: the sun the comes up.

Which makes the vampires run away. Not die or anything. Just… run away. Because I guess they didn’t have sunscreen on. On the boat that we’re on. Because the game starts on a boat.

Once you get off the boat, and go out to face your first enemy, things don’t get better. I chose to go full sneaky commando, because I selected the hardest difficultly I have available. I was prepped to deal with these bloodsuckin motherfuckin vampires, but the first enemy I ran into was actually a cultist.

Here’s the thing though: apparently the children of the children of the night are deaf, because they can’t tell if someone straight ass sprints at them at full speed from behind. For some reason the game doesn’t have an assassination animation or anything; you just thwack them in the back of the head and they fall down dead.

There are some signs that this was made by Arkane, of course. There are a bunch of interactable objects, common in the immersive sim genre, but unlike actual immersive sims (and any game from last 10 years) you can’t actually do interesting things with them. For example, there are more oil spills in the environments than the gulf of Mexico, but you can’t throw gas canisters at enemies, you can only shoot the canisters when enemies walk by.

Some other things that suck:
1. The quippy dialogue. It made me want to root for the vampires.
2. The enemy AI. Maybe it got copied from Fallout 76, and then made worse, somehow. A non-zero portion of the time enemies don’t do anything, and just stand still. The rest of the time enemies wander toward you like geriatric hobos.
3.The questing loop. There seem to be 2-3 options for each mission: i.e. go in guns blazing, sneak in, or sneak in with lockpicks or electric lockpicks via hacking. These are your only options.
4. An open world made out of absolutely nothing between the points of interest. Every other mile has one to two enemies. Apparently everyone thinks you’re a Mormon missionary, because no one will come within six miles of you.

Why make an open world game if it’s all empty? Just give us a mission select. It was good enough for Doom, it can be good enough for you.

Maybe the game would get better if I played another 7 hours. Here’s the thing: I played 7 hours. That’s enough time to watch the entire Lord Rings Trilogy. There are other games that are better, sooner. I’m not continuing to smack myself in the nuts for another full workday to see if it gets fun.

If you want a better horde shooter, go play Back 4 Blood. And I’ll see you on the servers, because I’m the only other person that likes it. But I can’t stomach another minute of Redfall.

If, for some reason, you want to play Redfall, you could buy it with money. Or you could get a game pass subscription, so that after you uninstall, you can go play something good instead.

Catch the Fox

Disclosure: I received a key for free on Lurkit.

Let it never be said that I’m a hack reviewer. Developers, if you give me a key to your game, rest assured I will play the entire thing before I review it. Even if that means I spend 93 minutes of my life on a generic repeatable task in an Unreal 5 demo map.

Don’t conflate that with me saying nice things about your game though. Instead, I’ve decided to title this review “Constructive Criticism.”

For the people reading this review who aren’t the developers of Catch the Fox, here’s a brief overview of the game. The player is placed into a large level populated by shrubberies, foxes, and powerups. The goal is to get close enough to touch the foxes. After touching enough foxes, the next level is unlocked. When you touch a fox, its fur gets redder, and then it moves faster.

Movement

The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues.

The foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when you collide with them, you instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags.

It’s like if every time I stomped a goomba, I had to fill out a death certificate, and inform their next of kin before moving on. In addition, the player’s jump is miserable, capable of clearing a small subset of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas.

Environments and Level Design

Speaking of environmental obstacles, let’s talk about the levels. I have two problems with them. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty, has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer.

Visually appealing? Yes. Mechanically appealing? Absolutely not.

Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of what I’d politely call “environmental chaff.” The game is about touching foxes, not trying to touch foxes and slamming my wooden head into a tree every five inches.

The strongest level had none of these at all. It’s a great big ocean of sand-dunes that form curving pits. This layout actually lets you leap around and gain speed. This level isn’t the most visually diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this is a video game. It’s about the game mechanics, not the visuals.

Performance and Bugs

The game was actually fairly bug free, though I did once encounter invisible foxes that couldn’t be tagged. It was on the spooky level, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that? Still frustrating and annoying though.

Performance is frankly terrible. I’m running on a 1080, on low graphics, windowed, and I got like 30 FPS. Maybe it’s my setup, but given how much my frame rate goes up when I’m looking at the ground, or not looking at trees, I don’t think that’s the case here. For a fast paced game based around movement, that’s not acceptable.

The strongest level in the game. Is it because it’s not cluttered with trash? Quite possibly!

And while we’re on the subject of graphics: motion blur sucks. No one likes motion blur. Maybe smearing makes things look neat, but in a game, I want to actually be able to see stuff.

Conclusion – For the Devs

You’ve made a movement based game where every aspect of the gameplay plays counter to that. Your level design doesn’t play with the surf and speed gain systems you’ve developed. All clutter and environmental garbage appears to tank the frame rate. Your primary mechanic of tagging plays counter to that movement.

I liked the music, and there is a bit of zen feel to the game on levels like Ocean Outpost when I could get a flow going.

Conclusion – For Everyone Else

Catch the Fox is not currently worth buying. The most interesting thing I got out of playing it was doing this writeup, and reflecting on the interplay between level design and traversal mechanics. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit since the terrible game I made for Ludum Dare 53.

If for some reason you read all of this, and still want to buy it, Catch the Fox is $3 on Steam.

PS: All the screenshots in this review are from the Steam page. I’m not hugely interested in playing more of this game in its current state just for image captures.