Category: Singleplayer

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.

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.

Cassette Beasts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I never actually played the multiplayer, since it wasn’t out during my play through.

Cassette Beasts is a monster collector RPG. After arriving on a mysterious island, you learn you’re trapped there. You also learn that the island is populated by monsters that can be captured in Cassette Tapes, and used to battle each other. There’s also a set of Gym Leaders Team Captains across the island, each of whom specializes in a different elemental type of monster. You get your own tape deck, and learn to use it to transform into the aforementioned monsters.

Then a hole opens up in the ground, and you fight a dying eldritch god in a subway station.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way. This happens just about 20-30 minutes into the game, but it’s the moment that Cassette Beasts sort of cues you into, that no, you do not in fact know what’s going on, and this isn’t a Pokemon clone.

Quick Notes

Two quick notes about Cassette Beasts.

First, I streamed my entire play-through of the game. If you’re curious about my experience, just watch that. (Especially if you think I’m being unfair about some of the bugs.)

Second, there’s a really good write-up by one of the developers of Cassette Beasts that you can read here. It contains spoilers, but it’s a really well written retrospective on the design choices they made, and why they made them, and I’m going to be referencing it a bit.

Cassette Beasts has two main game play states: overworld exploration/puzzle solving, and turn based combat.

Overworld

The overworld is pretty straight forward, and generally doesn’t have too many twists outside of the aforementioned eldritch god zones. You wander around, and over time you get a few traversal upgrades. You get a slowly descending hover, the ability to turn into a spiky ball to climb walls, and a dash to push through obstacles.

Outside of the weird zones, the Cassette Beasts overworld is by far the weaker of the two modes. It’s not the most inspiring thing to explore, and while it has cool moments, it also can be a bit buggy. There was a part where I just repeatedly clipped through the floor, which was bad, but not as bad as when the game just continually crashed.

Again, fun moments. But it’s mostly there to carry the meat and potatoes of the game, the turn-based combat:

Combat

Most combat in Cassette Beasts is 2v2, with some situations that change that. But in general, it’s your two monsters versus two opposing monsters. This is also where it starts to make significant shifts from Pokemon.

Here’s an example: thematically, you’re not actually capturing monsters, you’re just recording them to use their forms later. Since it’s a transformation, it breaks if you take enough damage. At which point any extra damage (either from multi-hit attacks, or other enemies) goes directly onto the player character. If it was Pokemon, it would be like saying that your trainer has a health bar. This means you can actually get knocked out mid battle, even while you still have monsters left to fight with.

Attacks use a fairly simple energy system, where each attack has a cost. At the start of each turn, each character gets a set amount of energy. As such, using big attacks means having to save up energy for a bit, or finding another way to generate it. But it does mean you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks out for free each turn.

There are a lot of other really interesting systems here, including the way type match-ups work (pretty much nothing like Pokémon), and the fact that all moves are effectively items that can be equipped and unequipped from your monsters. But the short version is that the combat is good, and I often found myself trying to break it, or experimenting with various setups, which is what I want in a game like this.

Fascinating and Frustrating

I like Cassette Beasts, but I also found it kind of difficult to play at times. The game is incredibly open-ended in letting you progress its story and quests, but that comes at the cost of occasionally feeling directionless.

There was one bit where I spent at least an hour and a half trying to solve a puzzle that it turned out didn’t really exist. The actual solution was to bring a specific character to that area that I hadn’t met yet.

There was another time late game where I pretty much just ended up grinding, because it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to beat a boss at my current power level.

At the same time, I pushed through those moments, because I wanted to see how the story would resolve. The boss designs were cool, and while the world is a bit barren, it’s still exciting to find the small secrets in it. For a two person project, it’s hard not to be impressed by the game.

It’s a very solid game, and I’d probably spend more time on it if there just weren’t so many other games available to play. As it is, though, it has just a bit too much friction for me to be interested in spending more time on it after beating the main story.