Category: Simulation

Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t commit to any of its single mechanics adequately to be an excellent game. The only area where it makes any real innovation is in combining the various gameplay loops that it consists of. But perhaps as a result of that synthesis, none of those loops felt very deep. As such, I didn’t personally enjoy it, and I don’t recommend it.

Let’s back up for a moment, so I can catch my breath from outrunning the screaming mobs. The game is getting a lot of good press and attention right now, and I suspect my opinion is going to be somewhat unpopular. Still, before you crucify me, let me explain myself.

Cult of the Lamb presents itself as a combination of a management sim and action roguelike. You play as the Lamb, resurrected from a sacrificial death by an elder god-like figure, The One Who Waits. Upon being returned to life, you are entrusted with two goals. To build a cult in his name, and to slay the four bishops who trapped him.

I’ll cover the slaying first. The action roguelike portion of the game follows the somewhat standard roguelite formula. Upon beginning a run (or crusade, as the game likes to call them), you’re dropped into a level and given a starting weapon and a curse. There are four or so base weapon types, each with varying speed and attacks.

The dagger is the fastest, but with low damage, while the hammer is the slowest, actually having a sort of windup before it swings. The sword and the axe sit in the middle. There are more variants applied to each of the base weapon types, but they don’t really change how the weapons play, just how much damage they do. Curses are just spells. You spend fervor to use them and they have some sort of damaging effect. You get fervor by killing and hitting enemies.

The system is pretty light on builds, so runs don’t feel that different. You can’t force weapon spawns to show up, and despite the variants, each variant feels the same as the base. For example, the poison dagger and the godly dagger don’t feel different to use, even if the second has much more damage.

Anyway, back to crusade mechanics. The goal of a run is to reach the end of the zone, which looks something like the map below. Along the way you’ll gather various resources and crafting ingredients.

While this might look a little intimidating at first, there are usually only 2-3 combat areas in a run. The rest are actually resource nodes, shops, or other small events.

Upon reaching the final area of a zone, one of two things will happen. One, you’ll face off against a mini-boss for a bit more loot and a recruitable. Or two, if you’ve already defeated the zone 3 times, you’ll face off against the zone’s boss: one of the four Bishops of the Old Faith.

I played the game on medium difficultly, and I’d say that none of the fights are particularly challenging. Only one boss fight in the game took me multiple attempts.

If you win the fight, you’ll get some bonus resources, and if you lose, you’ll lose some of what you’ve collected. Either way you’ll be sent back to your cult after. This is the management sim portion of the game. You can construct buildings with resources you’ve gathered. But you make the the most important building during the game’s intro: the shrine. The shrine is used to gather devotion.

Devotion serves the role that something like “Science points” would in another game. It’s used to unlock additional buildings and structures from your primary tech tree. The other resources you have to keep an eye on are the food and faith meters. While individual cultists have their own stats, these meters provide a sort of aggregate overview of the status of your cult. Keep your cultists fed, or they’ll start to starve, and get unhappy. Keep them loyal, or they’ll… I actually don’t know what happens to be honest. I never had any loyalty problems.

This might have been because the only time someone wasn’t loyal, I sacrificed them to be ritually devoured by tentacles.

Speaking of, rituals! Another building you unlock early on is the Church, where you can perform rituals and announce doctrines for your followers to obey. In theory, it’s kind of a neat idea. In practice, I never once ran out of the resource needed to perform rituals, so I pretty much just performed them whenever they were off cooldown. For some rituals the cooldown was several in-game days long.

The timing system itself is probably worth noting. Time passes the same regardless of if you’re at your cult, or on a crusade. And cultists can’t make their own food. So it’s somewhat necessary to either set things up so that they won’t starve while you’re away, or to try to minimize the time spent on your crusades.

This is as good a moment as any to talk about the cultists themselves.

While each individual cultist does have some of their own traits, they don’t offer much variety. I only ever saw cultists with a maximum of three traits, and most of them have fairly minimal gameplay impacts; things like “15% faster/slower gathering speed.”

The end result is that I never really felt incentivized to get attached to anyone, or to assign any specific cultist a specific task. The benefits to doing so were pretty much non-existent.

It doesn’t help that there are a bunch of other mechanics that discourage you from getting attached. Cultists can die of old age, which encourages constantly acquiring new members. But cultist death makes it feel bad to use gifts or invest any significant effort into leveling up a single member. There’s also a portion of the game where several of your cultists will be randomly selected to turn against you, and you’re forced to kill them. You can also unlock the ability to sacrifice members for various reasons, including to resurrect yourself after dying in the roguelike portion of the game, but I never used that feature.

This is the biggest argument for me on why Cult of the Lamb isn’t like Animal Crossing. Cultists aren’t friends or helpful NPC’s. They’re a resource to be used in your quest to slay the bishops. At their best, they’re pretty much slaves to your every whim. At their worst, you can sacrifice them to a pit of tentacles for emergency meat.

Since I’ve covered most of the game’s mechanics, let me try to wrap it all up into one neat package. The action roguelite section of the game doesn’t have the build diversity of other games like Binding of Issac or Atomicrops, or the mechanical challenge. At the same time, the cult management portion of the game doesn’t offer the mechanical depth of other sim games, like Cultivation Simulator or Dwarf Fortress.

At the same time it doesn’t have the comfy factor of something like Animal Crossing, since many of the mechanics apply pressure to your cult. It feels like a waste to construct various decorations and buildings when the same resource could be used to create another outhouse.

I’ve talked a lot shit, so before I wrap this up, I want to say some nice things. Cult of the Lamb has absolutely incredible art style, that it executes to near perfection. And while the plot twist is pretty easy to see coming, there were a few moments in the game that did creep me out. It’s not enough to change my opinion on the game. In 12 hours of gameplay, I can’t tell you the name of a single cultist or about a really cool run, but I do remember a small set of dialogue from an NPC that twisted the knife on how fucked up the game’s universe is.

So, yeah. I don’t personally recommend Cult of the Lamb. This isn’t because it’s a bad game. But what I personally tend to prize in games is either new weird mechanics/risks, or really fun moment to moment gameplay and systems. Cult of the Lamb doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, it’s a synthesis of existing mechanics, and watered down versions of their systems.

Cult of the Lamb is $25 for all platforms.

Disgaea 6 – Spoiler Free Pre-Review Preview Views

Ed Notes: Few quick notes at the bottom, but here’s the TLDR:
We got a pre-release code for this game.
This article is spoiler free.
This article is NOT a Disgaea 6 deep dive.
Oh, and all of this is based on the Switch release.

Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny comes out tomorrow (well the English release does), and I think it’s pretty fucking great.

From a purely abstract sense, it also has one of the most interesting twists on the series’ mechanics that I’ve seen before.

See, one thing I’ve heard said a lot about Disgaea is that “The Game Doesn’t Really Start Till You Reach Endgame.” But I’d disagree with that statement. I’d say it’s more that Disgaea games don’t usually give you access or incentivize using the series’ unique mechanics until endgame.

Elements like reincarnating characters to boost their base stats, entering the Item World to level up items, and abusing the cheat shop for grinding don’t usually come into play before you beat the story. This is a bit of a shame, since they’re some of the more unique and interesting systems in the series. Usually, you don’t need or want to do any of these to beat the game’s main story.

Disgaea 6 doesn’t do that, and instead opts to bring these systems in and make you want to use them far, far earlier than previously.

So, before I spend several paragraphs gushing over the rest of the game, I do want to quickly talk about the elephant (and some accompanying mice) in the room. The game’s performance isn’t great. Disgaea 6 was originally released for PS4, and it’s also the first game in the series with 3D graphics. The end result is, regardless of what I set the graphics quality to, it looked like garbage when using my Switch as a handheld. Strangely enough, the low quality is entirely constrained to the tactics map and overworld. Menus, combat animations, and cutscenes all run good.

If graphics are potentially a deal breaker for you, I heavily suggest you download the demo from the eShop, and give that a whirl. I’ve heard tell that there may be performance improvements, and I plan to reach out to NIS to ask, but I don’t expect an answer anytime soon. So yeah, consider playing the demo first. (Your save also transfers over to the full game, so no reason not to.)

Elephant gone, time to talk about mice. This is the first game in the series with 3D graphics for characters instead of sprites. They are fine. I would not say that I love them. The special attack combat animations are much shorter and less complex than in previous games. I liked how over the top they were in previous games, but that might have just been me. Whatever, mice dealt with.

Okay, so let’s go back to talking about why this game is great. Like I mentioned above, Disgaea 6 incentivizes using all of the game’s ridiculous systems.

Reincarnation, the process of resetting a character back to level 1, in exchange for making their base stats and stat growth higher is a central part of the game’s story, and you’re actively encouraged to use it from the moment you start.

Auto-battle and Demonic Intelligence turn grinding from a slog into a task to be automated and perfected, making early game grinding feasible.

The Item World loop has been updated so that once an instance of an item has been boosted, that boost applies to any versions of the item bought at the shop. Now, instead of leveling dozens of boots, you level one, then buy half a dozen copies, with the end result being it’s much easier to get cool equipment across all your characters.

The Story Is Good. Not gonna say anything else on that one just yet, but yeah. It’s fun. (Although I didn’t like the English voice acting personally)

There are a lot of interesting risks and design choices with Disgaea 6. I don’t necessarily love all of them, but the game does a lot to allow earlier access to many of its series-defining mechanics, and I think that’s to its credit.

Disgaea 6 comes out tomorrow, and if you like tactics games, I cannot recommend it enough. If you’re already a fan of the series, I’d say you should get a day one copy. If you’ve been interested in playing, but always thought it felt a little overwhelming, Disgaea 6 is the most new player friendly entry into the series.

See you in the Netherworld, dood!

Editor’s Notes Ultimate Plus Complete Edition

  1. We reached out to NIS America and requested a pre-release code for Disgaea 6, which we received. Was it because of our blatant pandering? No idea, honestly they sent us the code like immediately after we requested it, we hadn’t even really kicked our “Pretty Please NIS, let us play it” campaign into high gear.
  2. This article is spoiler free, for reasons. Please don’t assume that this policy will apply to things here in the future about Disgaea 6, but we’ll try to give it a month after release (so anytime after July, it’s open season) before we start discussing spoilery… stuff.
  3. This article is what it sounds like: It’s a general set of thoughts on the game, why you might want to pick it up when it comes out tomorrow, etc. It’s not an exhaustive deep dive on any level, to any system in the game.

Disgaea Franchise Week – Kickoff

Here we go dood!

This post inaugurates what I’m calling Disgaea week. Some of you may be wondering why we’re doing this. Is it blatant pandering? Is it because America NIS approved my press credentials? Is it because I love Disgaea and really want them to send me a review copy of Disgaea 6?

The answer has two parts. 1. How dare you question my journalistic integrity, and 2. Yes.

Yes to all of the above.

On the flip side, it also gives a good opportunity to talk about some of the things that are similar between the games, without having to rehash them each time I write about the series.

So lets talk about Disgaea. If I had to summarize the game series in one sentence, I would say: “Disgaea is a tactics game about unleashing your inner mechanics munchkin.” Of course, this ignore the great art, the really solid writing, and skips over all the actual mechanics. But I only had one sentence, so we’ll get to that in a bit.

If you’re not familiar with the series, the Disgaea games don’t necessarily have any continuity between them. Instead, it’s a franchise more in the form of something like Final Fantasy, where each game is a separate cast of characters and goals, but certain elements remain the same, such as the primary combat mechanics, character classes, and Prinnies. Prinnies are the souls of the damned, doomed to pay for their sins in the afterlife by being sewn into a penguin shaped costume and used as the servants/cannon fodder/meat shields/target practice dummies for everyone else in the netherworld.

I’m expandable, dood!

The mechanics of the games often consist of a few fairly nested systems, but the general core gameplay is pretty simple. You’re given a gridded map, a deploy point to move units out onto the map from, and a bunch of enemies you need to defeat to clear the map. The complexity of these maps ranges based on the game, and how you’re expected to beat the map. Some maps are effectively puzzles, requiring moving boxes/blocks around, or destroying various patterns. Some are just standard “Brawl your way across” fights. And some are a combination of the two, or exist to teach you to understand specific mechanics.

Of course, this is just for the standard levels included throughout the campaign. You can also go to the “item world,” which is a series of randomly generated challenge floors. Clearing each floor levels up the item that you’re currently inside, and you can also collect “Innocents” which are people that can be moved between your items, and equipped to your items. So, you can level up your items that you equip to your characters and also equip characters to your items that you equip and where are you going please come back.

And it’s this sort of systemic and mechanical orgy that defines what a Disgaea game is for me. Disgaea games are games where you can level up everything, and once you hit the level cap, you can reincarnate and do it again. They’re games that let you graft and move skills and Evilities (think passive Pokemon-style abilities) from character to character. They’re games where your skills gain experience separate from your character, where you can tweak every inch, and relevel a character over and over until the number on their stat bar is larger than the GDP of the entire planet.

Oh, and you can also go to the chara world, which is different depending on the game, but lets you adjust additional bonuses, and okay, I promise, I’ll stop talking about the systems for now.

Outside of this smorgasbord of interesting interactions, the other biggest thing I’d say the games have going for them are that they’re actually well-written and have voice acting that doesn’t make me cut the cables going to my headphones.

Most of the characters involved, especially the protagonists, are deeply flawed individuals in a variety of interesting ways. My personal favorite would have to be Valvatorez, the main character of Disgaea 4, who is a powerless vampire who could instantly become extremely powerful if he wished, except for the fact that he absolutely refuses to break his promises.

In either case, the key take away from this article is as follows:

  1. I really like Disgaea
  2. Disgaea is a tactics game about being a complete munchkin.
  3. NIS America please send me a review copy of Disgaea 6.
  4. This entire week is going to be me pandering to try to get that to happen.

So buckle up mother fuckers, because this entire week is about to a roller coaster ride of exploding penguins, exceedingly strange mechanics, vampires that don’t suck blood, and the other weirdness that makes up the Netherworld(s)!

Lets go Dood!

Amazing Cultivation Simulator

I’ve really been struggling with how to review Amazing Cultivation Simulator. I usually open these reviews with a “I Liked It” or “I didn’t like it.” But while Amazing Cultivation Simulator is firmly in the “I liked it” group, every time I try to get screenshots or play more to refresh my memory, I boot the game, look at the menu screen, and then close it again. Not inherently because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it feels like too much effort.

Okay, so enough yammering. Amazing Cultivation Simulator starts out as a settlement management game. In this sense, it’s not unlike something like Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, or Odd Realm. Unlike Dwarf Fortress and Odd Realm, you can only build on the X/Y Axis, so everything you make will be at most one story tall. This won’t be a big issue in the early game, but it can be become a problem for some reasons later on.

I’m not even showing the menu for making structures and its UI in this screenshot.

The thing that makes Amazing Cultivation Simulator different than any of those management sims is that while it has the typical, “Get food, get water, how did that guy break his leg trying to cook dinner?” sorts of problems and moments, the game is… well, it’s a cultivation simulator. This is a game where you will repeatedly burn down your kitchen and give people permanent disfiguring burns because your kitchen has bad Feng Shui. It’s a game where you will make someone’s dick fall off because you had them learn the wrong magic technique. For those of you who haven’t heard the term before (like me before playing this game), let’s talk about what “Cultivation” is, briefly.

No really. I’m not joking about the dick thing.

“Cultivation” is a term used to describe a type of novels and stories, generally referred to as “Wuxia” stories. I think of “Wuxia” as a setting kind of like “high fantasy” is a setting. If I say something is high fantasy, there are some assumptions you can make about it. Elves will live a long time, and live in forests. Orcs will be violent and brutish. Humans will be a mix in between. In short, Cultivation is a set of story elements/general world building tropes that are consistent between a lot of the stories written in this genre.

An example of the trading menu. There are quite a few different items, and I have no idea how to even get like half of them. For anyone wondering what a “Fortuitous Treasure” rod is, here’s a hint: it’s related to that magic art that makes your dick fall off if you have one.

The rules for Cultivation worlds are completely different from traditional western high fantasy. As part of writing this review, I asked a friend to recommend a web novel that followed general Cultivation themes, and read 50+ chapters of it. I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t love it (sorry buddy). But it was incrediblely useful for understanding the sort of world Amazing Cultivation Simulator is trying to simulate. So let’s talk about these general rules.

  1. People in the world have the ability to train, practice, and meditate to get what effectively amounts to magic powers. These powers are varied, but generally function kind of like spells in the 5E Player’s Handbook. They often require Qi (mana) to use, have specific names and effects, etc.
  2. Different schools of Cultivation have sects that form around the people practicing and studying them. Sects have power structures with practitioners who are strong at the top, and weak at the bottom. The sects also tend to give different abilities / access to different magic spells.
  3. Cultivating and gathering Qi requires sitting really still for a while, so that you can have more mana.
  4. Dragonball Z levels of power scaling. Low tier cultivators get the shit kicked out of them by magic animals that just happen to have magic powers. Mid tier cultivators can paralyze your entire body with like 2 punches. High tier cultivators can just obliterate cities.
  5. Powering up to higher tiers requires you to either have a breakthrough or pass a tribulation. A breakthrough happens when you successfully surpass your own limits, but you will fail a lot while trying to do it. A tribulation is something like literally being repeatedly attacked by lightning clouds or whatever, while you try to survive.
  6. There are also magic artifacts. They range from “neat,” to “secret pocket dimension” levels of bullshit. There are also magic pills and drugs. You need these to get to higher ranks of power, and they follow the same levels of bullshit, except they’re even harder to make. You make these pills and artifacts out of dead monsters, and really old plants.

Okay, so now that we have that all out of the way, let’s get down to talking about video games again.

If we try to assess Amazing Cultivation Simulator in the light of the Cultivation genre, how does it do? My answer would be, “Pretty well.” The game has pill crafting, artifact crafting, ascension to divinity, formations of power structures. There are multiple schools of Cultivation, each with their own unique abilities and quirks.

I want to stress that the game is constructed like a simulator, not like a casual sim game. It shares more in common with Dwarf Fortress than it does with the Sims, in terms of asking you to both learn a billion things, and a cheerful willingness to punch you in the mouth if you don’t.

For example, lets take a look at a what amounts to the stat screen for a single character.

Well that’s not too ba-
Oh.
Oh dear.
Last one.
Psych. Also for reference, that small stats drop down on the side? It scrolls.

Oh, this isn’t even considering the skill menu, for actually selecting passive and active skills for your dudes. Cause that shit looks like this:

There are like 20 of these skill trees, and some can’t even be used together. There is an entirely separate school of Cultivation called Body Cultivation that uses an entirely different interface with options to select individual bones that you want to modify.

Okay, so I played the game for 65 hours. Why am I putting so much into stressing this stuff? Well, because game is incredibly system-dense. And while I suspect this usually wouldn’t be a problem for many of my readers, there’s a situation where your ability to learn things in game breaks down.

And that would be the localization and translation.

Sometimes the translations work well. Sometimes they do not.

This is probably my biggest issue with Amazing Cultivation Simulator that I consider to be an actual problem (as opposed to a “I don’t like how things work” sort of complaint. Don’t worry, we’ll get to those later).

The game has an incredibly dense set of systems for almost everything, from the materials you make your house out of, to the items you craft, to crafting legendary artifacts and drawing talismans.

Did I mistakenly turn my incredibly valuable demon hide into an umbrella? Yes. But is it a great umbrella? Also yes.

But the combination of translations that don’t always hit the mark, genre-specific vocabulary, and systems that just aren’t really localized (looking at you, combat formations) means that the game can become very frustrating to play at points. I suspect that some of this would be mitigated if I was already familiar with the rules of the genre, but I’m not. I had to talk to a friend familiar with the genre, read a sixty-five-ish page guide, and read the aforementioned webnovel to even understand some of what was going on.

I don’t want to be overly down on the game. I think it’s successful at a lot of what it’s trying to be. And compared to many other entries in this genre it does great; I never lost characters to incredibly stupid pathing, and there were no game-breaking bugs that shredded my save file. There’s a lot going for it. But the fact that past a given point you basically have to join a Discord server (or at least follow a guide) takes away some of the joy of discovery for me. Now, to be fair, I could just die and make a new save file, and perhaps that’s how you’re supposed to play the game. Losing is fun, after all. But it feels bad to lose 40 hours of progress because one of the folks in your sect turned into a giant snake after being struck with lightning bolts.

Again, this is a thing that happens.

Okay, so now with all of this done, I want to spend some time complaining about a few specific systems, before I praise the game a bit more, and hopefully wrap up this incredibly fucking long review. It’s a bit rambling, so if you want, you can stop reading here.

No really, you can stop.

Oh, you’re still here? Okay, so let’s get into it.

I’m not sure the concept of Cultivation lends itself well to a video game in certain aspects, specifically in the type of story that it tries to map to games.

Typically speaking, I think a lot of European stories go a certain way. Smarter people then I have written more things about this, but the point I want to quickly make is that generally speaking, in many games, stories, etc, ANYONE, at least in theory, with enough grit and determination can aspire to reach incredible heights.

Cultivation worlds though, do not follow this rule. And Amazing Cultivation Simulator especially does not follow this rule. If you are not a “heaven blessed talent” or just incredibly lucky person, you will not make it very far. Without having what amounts to way higher than average stats, you simply do not have the potential to become a god. You may not reach Golden Core. You may not have the ability to even cultivate enough power to beat up magic animals.

This leads to a situation where you can stagnate and fail if one of two things happen. First of all, if you don’t go out of your way to roll starting characters with insane stats, or if you just get unlucky, and never have anyone with the potential to be godlike show up. While there are ways to increase base stats, they’re all locked behind various tiers of cultivation which you may not be able to reach, so the whole thing becomes a catch-22.

And this would be fine; it would turn into a game of building a stable sect, and then just running the numbers until you get one of these folks, if it wasn’t for one more thing: the reputation system.

See, you’re not the only group cultivating in this world. There are at least half a dozen other schools, a whole world map with side quests, and whole system for visiting other sects.

Last screenshot of UI, I promise.

Aside from all these incredible features however, there is also a bit of a snag in the reputation system. There is a value called reputation, and the higher your reputation, the tougher the enemies you’ll be attacked by in random events will be. The game is fairly clear about this.

What it’s not clear about is what actions will raise your reputation. Reputation has good/evil/neutral alignment, but all that really matters is score. Are you generous and helpful? Prepare to get attacked by murderous cultivators. Do you turn the souls of visitors to your cult sect into magic gems made out of human emotions, and then reanimate their corpses to sweep the floor? Prepare to get attacked by folks who think that maybe human lives are more important then making a really cool new hat.

The combination of these two systems, reputation and general cultivation, means that if you want to avoid being curbstomped, you are going to have to spend a lot of time waiting around, not attracting any attention, and hoping somebody with godly potential shows up asking to join.

Okay, so that finishes my gripe. Just for the record, let’s summarize what I think of the game very quickly, one last time.

Amazing Cultivation Simulator works as a simulator, or a sort of colony management game. The key difference is it’s management of a group of individuals in a world that has some very weird genre-specific rules. Most of the systems are fairly in-depth and interesting, but the game itself feels hamstrung by questionable localization, and tutorials that don’t always teach enough.

There are a few things I just straight up don’t like about the game, like reputation, and how cultivation works, but those are more system design choices then flaws, if I had to judge. It would be like complaining about how Dwarfs in Dwarf Fortress have to drink to stay happy. It’s deliberate decision about made about how to enforce the rules of the simulated world, even if it isn’t one I like.

I think if you’re big into Wuxia novels, or mildly obtuse colony management sims, this is a game worth checking out. And I feel like I got my money’s worth out the game. It’s just so dense that I’m not sure I’ll return to it unless I have a lot of free time. (And maybe the game gets a few localization patches.)

Didn’t Make The Cut – 12.25.2020

I spent part of this weekend in what I have come to think of as a public service, pruning and hacking my way through through the massive glut of games that is itch.io Racial Justice Bundle. While some might devote this time of year to giving to the needy, feeding the hungry, and other such charitable pursuits, I stayed home and played video games.

Phrased like that, it seems slightly less heroic doesn’t it? Hmm. In any case, here are 3 of the things I played this weekend, and links to the incredibly high quality stream in which I played them. These are all games that didn’t grab me enough for me to really want to continue playing them past around an hour, and I also don’t have enough to say about them to write a full article. So here we gooooo.

Catlateral Damage

In Catlateral Damage, you are a cat, and you must destroy as much stuff as possible within the time limit. You can jump, and you can bat things left and right. And that’s it. That’s the entire game. It’s a cute concept, but it doesn’t feel super well executed. The controls are fairly floaty, and the things you whack around don’t feel like they have much weight to them. Personally, I also really dislike the art. I think these cats are incredibly ugly… and yeah. The game just didn’t feel great, or look good, so I did a single run playthrough and then called it a day for this one. It’s short and chaotic, but I didn’t find it particularly satisfying or fun to play.

From Orbit

If you told me that From Orbit was an early access game, I would believe you. In fact, after writing that sentence, I went and checked to see if it was on Steam, and it is, but it isn’t early access. Where Catlateral Damage has an interesting premise, From Orbit feels like it got to the next stage of making a good game, which was having interesting mechanics. But it kind of falls apart there because then they didn’t really make anymore game. For example, the idea of having your workers being able to shift form based on what you want to use them for is cool! But then it sorta falls apart.

My biggest gripe, though, has to be that you can only have 4 units (5 if you count the spaceship which you can’t actually control), which is strange for a game that bills itself as an RTS. By this standard, playing as Meepo is an RTS.

My other big gripe is that the resources you gather on a given planet are also the resources you use to buy upgrades to improve your dudes, ship, and unlock abilities. So yeah, you could build a auto-miner, if you’re willing to lose 60% of the haul from a planet, or you could just do the whole thing manually. Oh, and the enemies you face are dumb as bricks. (I do like the flashing red outline you get for your units letting you know they’ve pulled agro.)

Everything else I can gripe about with the game is pretty small. The game doesn’t follow standard RTS controls schemes, you can’t queue commands, you can’t make control groups, attempting to select a unit automatically centers the camera on it, even if what you wanted to do was move it where you were looking BEFORE you selected it.

The stream is here, and the itch.io page is here.

Quiet As A Stone

I have a link to the stream of playing Quiet As A Stone here. I say “Playing” but honestly, “interacting with” might be a more accurate summary. My notes for the game have the following:

  • Experimental Photography Simulator
  • Rather Pretty
  • More like playing with actual rocks thana game

Here are some screenshots of Cragthor the Mountain Titan, the only thing I really did in the game before getting bored and quitting it.

Behold his majesty.

I have a few more games I’d like to do writeups for before the end of the year, so keep an eye out for those. One of them might be Depth of Extinction, which is this neat procedural XCOM/FTL style thing.

I’ve linked the names of the games up above, so if one of these looks like your cup of tea, you should go take a look. At the time of writing, I think From Orbit is actually free.