I spent a decent part of this week playing the beta for Nexus Amina, the newest game from Mihoyo. If you haven’t heard of Mihoyo before, they’re mostly known for making a god-scrillion dollars off Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero.
That’s a real number. Don’t look it up.
Nexus Amina is a monster collector autochess game, with a reasonably sized open world city to explore, quests, and a lot of autochess battles. Since this was a beta, I don’t think there’s much purpose in talking about the game as a whole yet. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of content, just that it was in a state that I’d call unpolished for Mihoyo.
I love my clockwork turtle.
Instead I want to talk about the two parts of the game that stood out to me: the quests and the combat.
Quests
If I was smart, I would have taken some screenshots of the quests, but I did not. Anyway, the thing that makes them interesting is that compared to most mobile game quests, they actually have a ridiculous number of branching paths.
I’m not actually sure if this is a good thing, but it’s definitely interesting. It was a bit of a shock to have to pay attention to what was happening at all.
Now, the reason I don’t want to pass judgement on if this was good or bad is mostly because while the branching paths are present, the current quests are in a rough state, and I often found myself more frustrated than anything else. One notable moment was a quest where I had “solved” the mystery, but there was no option to resolve it based on the info I’d discovered.
I’ve seen what Mihoyo’s polish looks like from their other games, and I can’t see them releasing a game that feels the way this currently does.
Combat
Anyway, let’s talk about the combat!
Nexus Amina is an autochess, more in the vein of Dota 2 Autochess/Underlords and Team Fight Tactics than Storybook Brawl or Super Auto Pets.
This means that it’s mostly about placing units on a board, and then having them slug it out. Unlike most other autochess games, however, its primary game mode is not an escalating PvP experience, and I don’t believe there currently is a PvP mode at all.
This turns it into a bit more of a puzzle game than anything else, where you can redeploy and shuffle units around after a loss with no penalty in most modes.
Generally speaking it’s fun enough, but I do have one big “observation” about the nature of the game. I found it very hard to develop an intuition about how unit aggro worked, and this had some interesting effects on how I played.
See, in other Autochess games I’ve played, I’ve been familiar with the units that are being used. This meant I had an intuitive sense of how units would move around the board, and choose targets, and when units would be defeated. But because I didn’t have that in Nexus Amina, I found I couldn’t really do much in terms of positioning based strategies, and instead just focused on synergies, and building up super units.
It’s an interesting little problem.
Anyway, that’s all from me for the moment. More actual games in the next few weeks, and hopefully an announcement of a cool project?
Chico is fine. This is damning with faint praise, but those who have been reading for a while will know that I candamnawholelotharder than that. It’s just that while playing, I never really found myself delighted or despairing, even if I did get a bit frustrated at times.
Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is a sort of top-down light puzzle game. It’s also quite a short game. There are 4 worlds and a final world, with each world consisting of two levels and a boss. There’s also some post-game content that I just wasn’t interested in playing.
The primary mechanic is Chico’s giant walnut, which can be bounced into switches to turn them on. It also… hmm. Switches aren’t the only thing the walnut is good for, but it’s the only one I can think of right now. Many of the levels involve finding a way to bring the walnut with you.
The level design is serviceable. It’s using that “introduce, expand, mastery” pattern that anyone who has ever tried to make a decent level in Mario Maker is familiar with. There’s a fair number of level gimmicks, most of which are mildly interesting, and one that completely sucks. At the same time, they also didn’t stick around long enough for me to hate them, except a desert world with graphics that made me feel a bit nauseous.
The bosses are the highlights of the levels, both visually and mechanically, and they present more of a challenge. It’s a shame, then, that they can also feel a bit janky at times. Sometimes they effectively incorporating a the level’s core mechanic, and sometimes (looking at you, giant turtle) they make me want to get out as quickly as possible.
Overall
I was at a classical music concert recently, and listening I found myself sort of bored. Not because the music was bad or uninteresting, but because I sort of associate classical music with the background on NPR, or filler. I have sort of similar feelings about Chico and the Magic Orchards.
It’s perfectly serviceable as a video game, the sort of thing that would earn you an B+ if you turned it in as a class project. It has a solid understanding of how to introduce mechanics, develop and push them. But it just lacks the spark it needs to take off like rocket, or even to turn it into a dumpster-fire. There’s nothing bad enough about it to really make it worth complaining about, but there’s nothing good enough about it either.
In that sense, it’s a bit unfair. One of the worst games I’ve played this year was Age of Darkness, and I still think about it, because of how badly it failed with every part of its core mechanics. But I am thinking about it! Chico did pretty much everything right, but outside of the desert mirage mechanic which made me feel physically ill, never really required me to think about it.
Chico and the Magic Orchards DX was $4.99, which feels about right. It costs a fair amount less than the sandwich I had yesterday, and I’d say the two equally contributed to my day.
Correction: An earlier version of this writeup confused Malenia, Blade of Miquella, Goddess of Rot with Melania, First Lady, Wife of Trump. This has been fixed. Melania Trump is not an Elden Ring boss, or a boss in any other FromSoftware game.
When I do writeups on games, I try to “beat” the game. This might mean seeing the credits roll. It might mean playing all that an early access game has to offer.
In this case, though, it means “playing enough of the game that I don’t really want to play anymore,” at just about 11 hours. Is this a fair overview of Nightreign?
Yes. Yes, it is, because I paid $40 for this shit.
If I’d been given a review copy, I might try harder. I gave them my money and I had a mostly bad time, and I have no intention of choking down another 20 hours to get kills on every remaining Nightlord.
I beat Elden Ring without looking anything up. I don’t need to prove shit to myself when it comes to FromSoft games at this point. I know I can do it.
I just don’t want to.
Anyway, Elden Ring: Nightreign. This is a remarkably simple game to explain. You and up to two other players are dropped into a procedurally populated Elden Ring-style map. You then get to run around picking up loot, killing enemies and bosses for souls and loot, leveling up, and then fighting a big boss. All this takes place while the Fortnite ring closes in, eventually forcing you into a confrontation with a larger mini-boss. The cycle repeats, and then you fight a Nightlord—a mega boss. If you beat the Nightlord, you win the run.
There’s like eight of these guys or something. I bet there’s a secret one once you kill them all. Again, I don’t really care. I’ve actually found the ones I’ve done so far to be unfun fights, frankly.
The game has plenty more mechanics and systems. I don’t think they’re worth talking about. There’s only one real question you need to answer to ask yourself to determine if you will like Nightreign. Here it is:
Do you want to try to play Elden Ring very fast?
If the answer is yes, you will probably like Nightreign. If the answer is no, you will not.
Why Nightreign Doesn’t Work For Me
Of the two FromSoftware games I’ve played prior to this one, I quite liked them. I’m talking about Bloodborne and Elden Ring.
The thing is, Nightreign doesn’t do any of things that made me like those games. Let’s go through them, shall we?
The world does not inspire.
Nightreign just re-uses the visual language of Elden Ring, even when it isn’t literally re-using the assets. Its procedural placement and focus on speed of execution means that there is never a chance for reflection and observation. Don’t bother looking at these ruins or castle. Don’t bother looking at details. Just rush the boss because we are on a timer.
Worst salty runbacks ever.
FromSoftware likes to make bosses that are very difficult to beat when you don’t know their movesets. In their single player RPG’s, this is offset by getting dozens of chances in a row to fight them over and over again.
I’m of the opinion there’s a single core design element that makes FromSoftware games work: if a million monkeys on typewriters will create the work of Shakespeare, me—a single monkey on a controller—can defeat Malenia.
Forward progress is inevitable.
That is not the case here. If you wipe on a Nightlord, you need to do another 40 minute run in order to fight them again.
Weapons
When I play FromSoftware games, I tend to find a single weapon or two I like, and use it for as much of the run as feasibly possible. But that’s not how Roguelikes work.
However, since Nightreign is using the Elden Ring combat “model,” it’s basically asking you to relearn new sets and types of weapons every run, and to be adaptable. The thing is, I don’t find most of the weapons fun. And on its own, Elden Ring never had many weapons I found aspirational anyway.
Just give me back my trick weapons from Bloodborne.
Progression is boring
When I say this, I’m not talking about the type of progression you’re probably thinking of. For me, a large portion of the motivating factor in playing FromSoftware games, especially when I hit a wall, is a combination of spite and curiosity. I want to beat the current challenge, and I want to see what sort of things come next. One of my primary memories of Elden Ring is a continual shock and awe at the size of the world, and its variety and scale.
Nightreign never delivers on any of this. I skipped the cutscenes because I want to play with my friends; it’s unclear to me if there’s any real meaning to the Nightlords; the world itself is procedural placement, making everything feel samey; and asset re-use means I’ve seen almost all of these enemies and settings.
Clunky-ass grindingly slow combat is the bit of FromSoftware games that I put up with in order to get weird lore, intense exploration, alien enemies, and visually impressive moments. It’s not the part I find fun.
Bonus Round of Gripes
This is Monster Hunter/Nintendo levels of shit multiplayer system design. In other FromSoftware games, the weird shit around invasions, goofy PVP, and all that garbage is tolerable, because those are primarily single player games. But this is an exclusively multiplayer game. So why is there no voice chat? No text chat? Literally why is there no reasonable way to communicate in a game that demands communication?
Emotes do not, in fact, count.
Also, only eight characters feels kinda weak. Meta progression is boring.
Boss design is cool, but I would have liked more cool Overworld enemies. As it is, it felt like I’d already seen every mini-boss.
Overall
I don’t like Nightreign. It doesn’t mean you won’t, but I feel like all of FromSoftware’s other games offer a fundamentally more interesting and expansive experience while using the same core systems.
The joy I get from FromSoftware games is that of exploring crumbling destitute alien worlds, where nothing can ever quite be understood. Nightreign does not offer that. It offers a fast paced frenetic roguelike experience bolted to Elden Ring’s combat system.
If you crave more FromSoft, and your favorite part is weapons, challenge runs, experimenting, or pushing your own limits within those already punishing systems, you might love it.
I like Skin Deep. I like it more than Quadrilateral Cowboy, the previous title by BLENDO Games. I wouldn’t have mainlined thirteen hours of it over two days the day it released if I didn’t like it. If you like weird indie stuff, and find yourself interested by an immersive sim where you save cats from space pirates, give it a look.
I’m front loading this so that when I spend several paragraphs complaining about the game in just a bit, no one gets the wrong idea here. I’ll say it again: I like Skin Deep. I recommend Skin Deep.
Give me more of this sort of thing please.
I just also happen to have some problems with the game.
Skin Deep is an immersive sim stealth sort of game. You are Nina, an insurance agent. The deal is simple: you get cryogenically frozen on long haul space trips. If the ship gets attacked by space pirates, you get unfrozen, at which point your job is to rescue the crew.
The defrosting is how each of the game’s 13 levels (each their own individual spaceship) starts, with you transforming from popsicle to human and stepping out of your pod. From there, it’s pretty much up to you how you want to approach things. The only thing you have to do is save all the captured crew mates by unlocking them from their little cages with purple key cards.
Since this an immersive sim, it would be a bit tricky to cover every interaction available, so I’m going to quickly go over a few key ones.
Every level takes place on a space ship, with both an interior and exterior. The exterior is accessed a variety of ways, and as Nina has a third lung, moving around in a zero-g and zero-oxygen environments poses no problems for her.
Every ship also has a set of four systems available. These are: vents, windows, airlocks, and trash chutes. They function as a traversal tools with added benefits. Vents let you sneak around and hide, windows can be broken to suck enemies into outer space, airlocks let you leave the ship the normal way, and trash chutes let you leave non-normally, at the cost of becoming smelly.
These systems often start off locked. You can unlock them by finding and interacting with their respective fuseboxes to turn them back on. Later on, the systems become locked down even further by enemies.
Speaking of which: let’s talk about enemies. There are five types of enemies: 3 types of space pirate, a turret, and a floating knife fish robot. The space pirates make up the bulk of the challenge, with the turret and swordfish being mostly incidental.
The catch is that the space pirates are all wearing Skull Savers(TM) which, upon death, will transport their head to a revival platform, and regenerate their body. Unless—of course—you grab their head before that happens, and stuff it into your inventory.
Which is as good a time as any to talk about Nina a bit more. You have five inventory slots, so every head you’re carrying takes the space of one useful item. So the best way to deal with pirates in the long term is to chuck their heads into the sweet void of space.
Given that we’re five paragraphs in, hopefully I’ve explained enough that the next set of complaints is going to make sense.
Complaints
The very first level of Skin Deep opens with mini-tutorial that shows you the following message.
And it’s not wrong, but I want to contest it a little bit. It’s true that damaged enemies will find their way to health stations, and request repairs for broken control panels… but that’s all I ever saw them do. As far as immersive sims go, the game felt somewhat underwhelming. Enemies react to sound and smell, but won’t notice missing items, or change up their patrol patterns even after you’ve freed prisoners they’re supposed to be protecting.
This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does prevent the game from ever feeling particularly alive, if that makes sense. It also leads to my bigger problem.
Different Day, Same Ship
By the end of Skin Deep, I found myself frustrated because I was using the same general strategy on every single ship. It went something like this: sneak around unlocking all the doors. Next up, find and unlock all the subsystems. After that, take over control of the ship cameras. Only then would I finally switch over to taking out enemies, or experimenting with whatever that ship’s gimmick was.
And the result was that every level felt samey. Not because they are! But even when each level had its own special gimmick, I tended to never use the gimmick until after I had already dealt with everything else. This leads to my big complaint.
For an immersive sim, I never felt incentivized to change up my primary plan, and adjust for the situation I was in, or to try to improvise. I did the same thing over and over again, because when I died (and I died a lot!) I would lose 10 minutes of progress, and have to start again. And it is very easy to die when enough things start to go wrong.
The last level is probably the peak example of this. Without spoilers, its “gimmick” is that it’s a lot larger than any other ship in the game. It also removes a few of the fallbacks or safeties that are available in other levels. The end result is that it’s much more punishing if you fail.
I don’t know if it’s a Blendo “thing” to make their final levels skill testing like this. I remember Quadrilateral Cowboy doing something similar, but in that game, it was only the final level where you finally got access to all the toys at once.
But Skin Deep didn’t give me more tools or toys to work with. Instead it was just more of a slog.
Bonus Round
So now let’s go over a few other things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. First up, the writing is quite good, and narrative is quite weird. There’s one very clever soft touch done for building character relationships that I quite enjoyed. The setting is interesting, but mostly serves as a backdrop for the gameplay and the rest of the story about a specific set of characters.
Also, there are bonus objectives for each level. I have to wonder if having them show up at the start, instead of after you’ve completed the level, would have made me want to try to use the level gimmicks more?
The controls are also a bit wonky at times, and I threw multiple guns when I meant to be firing them. As a general note: yes, this is less effective than shooting with them.
Overall
I enjoyed Skin Deep, but I wish I enjoyed it more. I still like it enough to recommend. It was $20, and I mainlined the whole thing over two days.
But I wish I felt like it delivered on the promise of the immersive sim more than it actually did. Or at least forced me out of my comfort zone with the strategies and planning, instead of letting there be an “ideal” strategy to beat most levels.
Still, if you want something interesting and weird, give it a shot. You might even enjoy it more than me.
I’m going to save both of us some time here. Did you like Return of the Obra Dinn? Did you like it a lot?
Yes? Great. Click this link and you will have an enjoyable several hours, and it will not cost you a penny.
Okay, time to deal with the rest of you.
Somehow it’s become “Free Web Based Indie Games That Are Novel Takes On Existing Systems” month. It doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, but just like Dragonsweeper, Type Help is a FWBIGTANTOES.
I did not intend for that acronym to include BIG TAN TOES. Now that I am looking at it, it’s making me increasingly uncomfortable, so let’s move on.
Type Help is a mystery puzzle game played via a command line, all about deducing information. Specifically, it’s about deducing the names of a series of transcribed audio files, all which follow a specific naming convention.
Since it’s a puzzle game, and part of the puzzle is figuring out what the puzzle is, from here on out there will be heavy spoilers. Consider it your last chance to experience it on your own.
Here There Be Spoilers
Type Help is a murder mystery. As mentioned above, your primary goal is to deduce the names of various text files, all audio transcriptions of a house in which 12 strangers were found dead, with no clues as to who they were, or how they got there. Even more mysteriously, the individual working the case in question also died.
So the main gameplay is guessing the names of files. After you’re given a few starting points, it becomes clear that the title of each file follows a simple naming convention, like this:
02-EN-1-6-7-10
The first number indicates time in the sequence, the second set of letters indicates a location, and the remaining sequence of numbers indicates who of the 12 strangers were present in the scene. For example, early scenes will often end with characters saying things like “Person #1, please come with me to the Billiards Room” and so you can deduce that a file might exist named something like 03-BI-1-8. Typing that in will unlock the file.
Of course, it’s obviously not all that simple. Sometimes someone else will have already been in the billiards room, so you’ll need to deduce who that was. Sometimes people don’t leave a room they’re in. Ultimately, it’s a big puzzle of “Who was where, when?”
My Thoughts On It
I have roughly the same problems with Type Help that I had with Return of the Obra Dinn, but a different set of praise. I consider Type Help a far more compelling mystery—and more interesting sets of character dynamics—than Obra Dinn.
Unfortunately, just like Return of the Obra Dinn, once general gist of the mystery became clear, I didn’t find it particularly compelling to puzzle out a lot more of the busy work, and get the “true ending.” In both games, I got about 60-70% of the way through, and hit a wall where I was no longer having any fun.
Some people really enjoy color coding elaborate spreadsheets.
I am not one of them.
For Return of the Obra Dinn, I put the work in to finish it out. For Type Help, I just looked at the spoilers in the comment section, and frankly, I think I made the right choice. The initial puzzles, worldbuilding, and unfolding mystery were interesting. But it would have taken me an additional 5+ hours to find the finale and “big reveal,” and I bet it wouldn’t have felt worth it.
I did enjoy a large portion of Type Help. I think it’s good. But it’s like a cake that’s just a bit too large, with frosting a bit too rich. Maybe it’s somewhat dry in parts, preventing me from finishing the whole thing.
