Category: Singleplayer

Slay The Princess

Slay The Princess is a horror visual novel, in the purest sense. It’s well produced, with excellent voice acting, and art that does a very good job of communicating what it wants to. For anyone turned off by the “horror” aspect, this game has maybe one “jumpscare”-esque moment. It also doesn’t rely on any breaking of the 4th wall, like messing with files with on your computer or those sorts of things.

As a result, it almost entirely relies on the strength of its writing, art, and voice acting to tell a story, and a really interesting one. This makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.

As such, I’m left with two choices. I could engage with the work itself, and try to access it. Or I could dance around it, and look at the space it exists in, without engaging with it directly.

This writeup will be the second one. At the end of this writeup, there is a link to a page full of spoilers, because there are some things I want to discuss, but simply cannot without spoiling the game. But that page isn’t here, so if you are afraid of spoilers, you can keep reading (just don’t click on the link. There won’t be anything here that couldn’t be seen by looking at the steam page, or booting up the game.

To some extent, game reviews and criticism aren’t particularly well suited for evaluating games that are almost entirely reliant on narrative. Literary criticism tends to do much better at that. Game reviews are better at evaluating mechanics.

The primary mechanic of Slay The Princess is reading text. As far as mechanics go, is it a fundamentally strong mechanic? Yes. We have an entire medium of work reliant on that mechanic that isn’t games. They’re called books. Slay The Princess also has images, which means we can compare it to comic books, which are also pretty popular. Or we can call them graphic novels if we’re being fancy.

I think it’s a very strong visual novel, and if you enjoy horror, or games focused around narrative discovery like Gone Home, I would recommend it.

That said. If you want spoilers and longer form discussion, here you go. I suggest you only read this if you have no interest in the game, as doing so will destroy parts of the experience.

Slay The Princess is $18 on Steam.

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.

Moonring

I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.

Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.

Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.

Dene

I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.

So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?

In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.

The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.

Mechanics

Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.

There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.

Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.

That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.

And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.

It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.

As soon as it stops crashing.

Conclusion

Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.

Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.

Last Epoch

A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.

Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.

Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.

ARPG’s in Brief

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.

Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.

Skills and Skilltrees

But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.

Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.

The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.

As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.

Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.

Endgame

I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.

Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.

Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.

There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.

Life pro-top: Don’t try to take the screenshot of the early endgame boss during the fight.

Crafting and Items

A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.

There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.

There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.

Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.

Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.

The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.

In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:

Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.

Maybe I should have just written that instead.

Closing Comments

Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.

However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.

Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.

Last Epoch is $35 on Steam.

SIGIL

I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.

That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.

Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.

All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.

First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.

This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.

This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.

Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.

I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.

Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.

My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.

Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?

You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!

SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.

But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.