Category: Roguelite

Titanium Court

I am not good at portioning things. I read books in a single sitting, sometimes two if they are especially long. I’ve eaten an entire box of oreos over a single day, and back when I had peanut butter in the house, eating the whole thing with a spoon was not an uncommon occurrence. The same is generally true of games. When I pick up a new game, especially a roguelike, I find myself playing for hours at a time.

I’ve had Titanium Court for just under 2 weeks, and in that time I’ve played 10 hours or so of it. This is a shockingly low amount of playtime for something I like this much.

Listing the labels that apply to this game is an exercise in pointlessness. They’re all there. It’s easy enough to put them out. But without actual instructions, it’s like listing the ingredients for a cake completely on their own. It’s mostly pointless.

I could tell you it’s a roguelike match-3 puzzle strategic tactics game, but I might as well tell you lemon, egg, butter, flour, sugar, oven. It might tell you why you that its time to opt out if you really hate roguelikes or match 3 games, or are allergic to lemons, but it won’t do much else.

Anyway, welcome to Titanium Court.

Gameplay

It’s a little tricky to know where exactly to start with Titanium Court, but war is probably as good a place as any. Every day, the court will go to war, and you must lead it. War consists of multiple encounters, and each encounter has two phases, high tide and low tide.

High tide is the match 3 phase. In this phase, you manipulate the battlefield by swapping around tiles. Matching tiles removes them from the battlefield and grants the appropriate resource. Match water for water, match wheat for food, match hills for rocks, and forests for wood.

Each move removes a small amount of your bar, with multi-matches refilling it. When the bar empties, it’s time for low tide.

Low tide is the prep phase for the tactical strategy portion. In this phase, you can produce units and cast spells from the unit cards in your slots. You have five slots for units and spell, and they can be cast as many times as you have resources. Most spells are semi-instant, but producing units is not. Instead, each unit goes a bit further down the time tracker on the left.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a strategy game if it was just your units showing up. Enemy castles that are left on the board in Low Tide will produce units. Some attack your castle, some just sit around, and some don’t do much of anything.

Oh. Hmm. The word Enemy is in pink text over there. How very odd. Probably nothing to worry about.

Narrative

I find it tricky to talk about the narrative of Titanium Court for two reasons. First, I haven’t finished the game, and even if I did finish the game, I am somewhat suspect that I really understand what is going on with Magic, and the Enemy, and everything else. Second, I think it’s a fairly big spoiler to reveal what I do think I know, but might not. Third, the games tone is something I think is best experienced rather then revealed.

That said, I can offer a sort of litmus test, a bit of a sampler if you will, of whether or not you will enjoy the writing in the game. At one point, I was offered the option to skip a boss fight in exchange for watching a three minute musical number about Atlantic Salmon. During another, a funeral procession was held for a football that I routinely failed to protect.

The game has also had a few moments I’ve found quite surprisingly unsettling, and an antagonist I’ve grown to genuinely dislike, despite the the high amount of space between the player character and myself.

Overall

I quite like Titanium Court. I think it’s going to be one of those sleeper hits that doesn’t quite get enough attention until someone bigger then me picks it up, and it turns into a cult classic. It’s clever, well written, and manages to be genuinely unnerving at times, despite it’s apparent simplicity.

That said, I’ve also found it weirdly draining, and that it requires my full focus. It’s not particularly snacky, or bite sized, or other nice words we use to compare things to food that is easily consumed. It’s more like ice cream. Try to consume it too fast, stuff too much it, and get a headache.

Still, I recommend it.

If you’re still on the fence, may I suggest watching the trailer here?

It also has a demo on Steam you can give a try.

May 30, 2026
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.

October 27, 2025

He Is Coming

There are two types of games that will make me break out a spreadsheet. The first is the sort where there’s so much information, and I’m so invested in the game that I need external storage space. My brain has a lot of things in it, and only so much of it can be ciphers and codes.

The second is a game where I have become so frustrated by continual failure and by design choices that I either do not understand, do not agree with, or some combination of both that I intend to dissect the game to the best of my ability.

He Is Coming is one of the second.

Long time readers may have picked up that my write-ups are a bit formulaic. In part one, I introduce my feelings about a game (done that!). In part 2, I give a general overview of a game, mention its genre, and set up for the rest of the write-up. That’s where we are now, but I actually disagree with He Is Coming on what type of game it is.

He Is Coming calls itself a roguelite RPG auto battler. I take issue with two of those three labels, but as for why, let’s talk about how the game works.

At the start of a new run, the player spawns into a gridded map that they can explore. The map has a fog of war effect, so exploring reveals more of the map.

There are a few special types of things on the map, but the main two are opening chests, and fighting monsters.

(Side note: I’m glossing over the map, and the day/night cycle, and few other things, because they’re not very relevant to my main pain point with the game. I will say that the map is almost entirely an input only sort of thing. E.g. items you pick up almost never affect it.)

Monster battles are auto-battles. There isn’t too much to say here, as the combat is straight forward, and takes place automatically with zero player input. There are four combat stats: health, attack, armor, and speed. Both players and monsters have these stats. Attack is how much damage you deal per strike, health is much damage you can take, armor is a temporary health bar that refills after battles, and speed is who gets to go first.

When you defeat a monster, you get one gold.

There is a bit more complexity to this and how it interacts with items, but I’m not going to touch on it for now, because it’s not as relevant as items.

Chests are the standard 3-pick-1 roguelite item acquisition thing. They tend to spawn next to a single monster, but you don’t need to defeat that monster to open a chest.

The Problem

While I haven’t covered all the game’s features or mechanics yet, I’ve laid out enough to generally describe the “problem” I have with He Is Coming, and it has to do with the bosses at the end of the run.

A run in He Is Coming lasts 3 days. At the end of each day, you fight a mini-boss. At the end of day 3, you fight the zone boss. These zone bosses are always the same boss, and have much, much higher health pools and more difficult gimmicks than the mid-bosses.

Let’s start with Leshen and the Woodland Abomination as an example.

These are the two forms of the final boss of zone 1. He has far more health than any of the mini-bosses, and he hits much, much, harder then any of them. The end result is that the only way to beat him is to aggressively go over the top, and somehow have a higher armor+life total and higher attack than he does.

Here’s a (incomplete) list of weapons available in the Forest Zone. For the purposes of this discussion, just look at the Effective Attack column.

Forest Weapons	Base Attack	Effective Attack	Notes
Boom Stick	2	4
Brittlebark	4	3
Elderwood	1	2
Featherweight	2	3
Heart Drinker	1	2
Hidden Dagger	2	3	Weird One
Ironstone Greatsword	4	5
Razorthorn	1	4	Weird One
Redwood Rod	2	3
Spearshield	1	2
Sword of Hero	3	6	Set Item
Woodcutter	1	2	No really, you cannot build around this.
Battle Axe	2	3	Lesh has no armor
Bejeweled	1	12	Bad idea
Bloodmoon Dagger	2	8	Must get wounded for cap
Bloodmoon Sickle	5	6	Take 1 each turn

And here is the problem: The vast majority of these weapons are under 7 attack in a best case scenario. To win this fight, it’s almost entirely necessary to go over the top. Most of the pool simply cannot do that, starting much, much lower than required.

In short, most of these items are strategic traps.

Roguelites as a genre tend to be about working with you have, trying to make the best decision at any given point in time.

But the end bosses in He Is Coming break that design philosophy. They are so powerful that they close out entire sets of items and strategy designs, as those strategies simply cannot beat them. So instead of making the “best” choice, or trying different builds, I found it necessary to aggressively pre-plan and force a build to defeat them.

Here’s another example of this: the second zone boss, Swampland Hydra.

As you can see, I have died to this guy a LOT.

This writeup is already pretty long, so I won’t mince words here: I died a lot to the Hydra, before finally discovering a weapon that lets you remove status effects on yourself.

This led me to create a build that uses a status effect called Purity that heals and buffs on removal, and the aforementioned weapon to remove Purity and finally get a kill on this boss. Without using this strategy, the Hydra it builds up too many stacks of different types, and it simply felt impossible to win.

I cannot envision another build to do this. I’m sure it exists. But I’d have to look at every item in the pool, consider how to acquire them, pre-plan the build, and finally execute on it.

I don’t want to do that. I find roguelites fun when I can salvage a run from dumpster, or use knowledge to play around bad luck. But the bosses in He Is Coming just feel over tuned to the point that playing that way can never actually win.

One Other Possibility

I am open to the idea that I am just an idiot. That I have missed a critical portion of this game, or a core mechanic, or something that breaks this whole thing wide open. I know for a fact that I misunderstood how poison worked for almost 5 hours of playtime, leading to an incredibly frustrating loss.

But if I am, I don’t think I’m the only one.

Only about 40% of players have beat the first zone, with 8% beating the second. If I’m just stupid, I’m missing something, so are the vast majority of players.

I made the spreadsheet and those tables and the rest of this garbage because I wanted to see if I was missing something. I wanted to discover if I was misunderstanding a mechanic that would become clear if I just had a slightly bigger brain. A bit more external storage.

I don’t think I am.

Okay, but despite all of this, I actually really like the systems in He Is Coming

So, I’ve spent a lot of time so far discussing how He Is Coming forces a specific style of strategic play in order achieve victory, and how I don’t like that. Which is a bit unfortunate, because it means I’m not talking about the game’s interesting systems, or clever items.

My favorite set of items are probably the instruments, a set of items with the Symphony keyword, meaning that when one of them triggers, all the others trigger as well. It’s a fun idea, making it a bit of shame that they can’t do anything useful.

The backpack is also very neat.

Items trigger from left to right, and top to bottom, meaning it’s possible to set things up to resolve in clever ways. It’s another neat little system, though one I wish was a bit more meaningful to more builds.

Conclusion

I like most of the systems in He Is Coming, but right now I just can’t recommend it because of how it feels to play. It’s in early access, which means things might change, but it also means that they might not.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played, but I’m left wishing it was something a bit different. In that sense, it actually reminds of Loop Hero, not just because both have the ye-olde CRT style, but because of the gap between the experience I was hoping for, and the experience I got is wider than I would have liked.

He is Coming is $15 on Steam. If you love the idea of a sort of puzzle roguelite, analyzing builds, and manipulating systems, you might love it. As for me, I’ve had my fill for the moment.

July 21, 2025

Strafe could have been great

It’s been a struggle to find something to write about this week. Plucky Squire comes out later today, but I don’t think I can finish it before tomorrow. UFO 50 has a similar problem.

I was trying to finish every game Tom Francis ever made, and make that into a bit. But Morphblade is too short and I’m bad at it, while Heat Signature hasn’t grabbed me the same way Tactical Breach Wizards or Gunpoint did. I still intend to play it.

So instead I’m going to write a bit about Strafe, technically now called Strafe: Gold Edition on Steam.

Strafe wants to be a combination of a roguelite and boomer shooter, I think mostly in the Doom vein. I say “Wants to be” and not “is” because a lot of the meaningful roguelite mechanics are missing. There’s no 3-pick-1 upgrades, or branching paths. Its obvious roguelite features are just some light map randomization and permadeath.

I only have one complaint about Strafe. Unfortunately, it’s a big one, and I’m going to illustrate it with a million different examples.

Here it is: Strafe sucks at letting the player have fun. It has the fun moments, and boomer shooter experience, but it hampers its own gameplay in a bunch of stupid little ways. Lets go through them shall we?

A million little issues.

Let’s start with the guns. Strafe has maybe a dozen different guns. They’re all kind of interesting. They’re all fun to shoot. Cool! These sound like good things.

Except all of them have the most miserable ammo pool I’ve ever seen, and you can’t pick up extra clips for them. The player can shoot them until they run out of ammo, at which point they are useless. (The primary gun excluded)

There might be legitimate reasons to only give the player 8 rounds of rocket launcher ammo, but why do I only get a single clip of bolt pistol rounds? What exactly was the train of thought that went, “Hey, in our game with a dozen different guns, let’s not let the player ever really use more than one in a run”?

Also, it makes me run into the hoarding issue. Because I have limited ammo, I never end up using anything but my primary.

I’m just taking images from their press kit because I can’t be bothered to boot the game again.

Next up: Enemies. Strafe’s “thing”—if you want to call it that—is that the game makes it really easy to bunny hop. You basically jump around, gaining speed, to traverse maps quickly. So most enemies are fine. They either shoot projectiles, or chase the player, and are generally non-obnoxious.

Except there is an entire category of enemies that spit acid onto the floor, or spawn acid spewing orbs. The player loses health when they step on acid, and many of these enemies are semi-immobile and obnoxious to deal with. So the movement design says “Run around fast!” and the enemy design responds “Yeah, so you can step in the acid you stupid idiot.”

Speaking of things that make running around fast suck: dark levels. Why are they here? Did a single playtester ever say “You know what would make this fast paced permadeath FPS even better? Not being able to able to see anything.” Or did that just come to the devs in a fever dream?

Please note the 2 remaining rounds on this gun, after which it will be repurposed as the world’s least efficient club.

Also: Key Hunts. Strafe is heavily inspired by Doom, so of course it has doors that require keys to open. Keys that must be picked up. Do you know what I really don’t enjoy in my fast paced boomer shooters? Walking around a map for 10 minutes having killed all the enemies trying to find a single corpse holding a keycard.

Even the secrets are infected with this weird “Get in your own way”-ness. One minor one is the ability to pick up a Superhot style shotgun, making it so that time only moves when the player moves. It’s an enjoyable, clever Easter egg, that adds a cool level of control to movement. It’s incredibly fun pickup.

And it has 25 rounds, and you cannot switch off it to other weapons, or pick up barrels to throw while using it.

The End Result

Many games are bad because something about them is intrinsically broken. Bad art, bad narrative, bad mechanics. Strafe is bad because every single time it looks like it’s going to let the player have fun, it gets in its own way.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe the developers felt that they had to make the game difficult. Maybe they brought across design principles from Doom without questioning them.

I also don’t know that I really care. I don’t recommend Strafe. It’s not just fun enough to be worth playing.

But whatever. At least I got a writeup out of it.

September 18, 2024
Cobalt Core

I finished Cobalt Core months and months ago, and Fritz has been bothering me to review is ever since. So! To buy myself some peace and quiet, let’s talk about this sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

This game was made for me. I love roguelikes, especially roguelike deckbuilders—I’ve 100% completed Hades and Slay the Spire, and I’ve sunk countless hours into trying to do the same in Monster Train (not yet, but one day). I’m a sucker for crew-on-a spaceship games. And Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favorite games ever (published by Brace Yourself Games, the publisher of Cobalt Core).

So on paper, a spaceship deckbuilder roguelike that’s like if FTL, Hades, and Slay the Spire had a baby published by the publisher of Crypt of the Necrodancer would be the perfect game for me… And it is. Cobalt Core is fantastic.

The Mechanics

Okay yeah I guess I have to explain the mechanics.

You have a spaceship. It points to the top of the screen.

There’s an opposing spaceship. It points down towards you. Fight!

You and the opposing spaceship take turns. On your turn you play the hand of cards you drew from your deck, doing things like firing your blasters, activating your drone bays, shielding your ship, or moving your ship left and right. Your ships are aligned in vertical lanes, so that each component of your ship is lined up with a component on the opponent’s ship (or empty space). You’ll move your ship around to try to make sure that your blasters line up with the opponent’s vulnerable cockpit, and that their blasters line up with empty space.

The rest is pretty straightforward deckbuilder roguelike. Try to kill the opposing ship without taking too much damage (ideally none). Spend money to upgrade your ship with “relics” (to borrow the term from Slay The Spire) heal yourself, and add cards to your deck. Choose your route through each system between combat, hard combats, shops, encounters, etc. Each system ends with a miniboss, and you’re trying to beat the final boss.

And there are a reasonable amount of pre-run options. You can choose different ships with different specialties and configurations. Also each card in the game belongs to one of several suits, one for each of the crew members. At the start of the run you choose which 3 crew members you’d like to play with this time, and that determines what cards you can see. Each crew member has their own focal mechanics, like the one who’s good at drones, or the one who has strong attacks that overheat your ship.

The Story

Another place Cobalt Core really shines is its story. For a while, it seemed like roguelikes and story didn’t mix, and most deckbuilder roguelikes didn’t even try to have a story.

(To some extent, I wonder how much “writing story” and “designing card game mechanics” are skill sets that don’t overlap.)

When they tried, the narrative would be very very lightly implied with environmental storytelling. Seriously, why are we slaying this spire? Something something, pact with heaven, so now I’m on a monster train.

Then Hades happened, and suddenly every roguelike is trying to be character- and story-driven. It’s really hard to land that, but Cobalt Core pulls it off. The characters are cute, and I wanted to learn more about them. And perhaps even more challenging: the dialogue is good and funny. I’m not going to write anything more in order to avoid spoilers. Just go play it.

The one iffy story bit is how the story is rolled out. Whenever you win a run, you can unlock the next cutscene from one of the crew members you chose to play with. When you unlock all the cutscenes, there’s a final final boss battle and you can win.

I didn’t mind this, and I was interested to unlock all the custscenes. But the cutscenes got in the way of the “one more run” feeling that can make roguelikes so great. The most clever roguelikes even elide one run into the next so that you just keep trying. And Cobalt Core’s cutscenes do the opposite, interrupting my play experience and providing a point to put down the game. Even though I liked the scenes, I often found myself pausing the game and walking away without watching them.

I don’t really know why Hades is able to offer story in the hub without disrupting that flow. Maybe it’s because each of the dialogue updates you get from characters are so short, and there are always only a few. But I’d have liked to see more of that in Cobalt Core.

The Problem

In my opinion Cobalt Core has one big problem: there just isn’t enough of it. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Absolutely. In fact, go buy it now on Steam or Switch.

But I’m used to roguelikes really letting me test my mettle by giving me tons of difficulty ratchets and interesting achievements to chase. Cobalt Core really doesn’t have these. It has a few ships and 4 or so difficulty increases to unlock, but there’s no incentive to even play on those other ships. I had to invent my own personal goal of winning on highest difficulty with each of the ships, and even that wasn’t too hard.

So in short, go buy this game, play it, and then the studio can invest that money in adding to the game. I don’t even want much; just a list of arbitrary challenges/achievements, and maybe 15 more difficulty ratchets. Add those, and I think Cobalt Core is perfect.

August 15, 2024