Category: Video Games

Q-Up

Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

Before I go any farther, I want to note that do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the players time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the games discord seem to be having a good time.

A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

Q-Side

The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

Oh The Stuff You Can Get

Q-Up has four main resources, Q, Experience, Gold, and Gems. Lets start with Q.

After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

This amount however, will be adjusted by your characters skills and items, which is as good a place to talk about experience and gold.

Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock, a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the games eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

Narrative

From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr.Toads wild ride real fast.

The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to Novice rank.

Then things get odd.

I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligence’s attempt to restart the universe.

It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligence’s. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that they may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things then I was in any of the “whacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

Putting on the Introspective Critic hat for a moment

Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in it’s aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random whacky hijinks”, but is instead Whose On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

Hat is off, back to final thoughts

I like 90% of Q-Up. I like it’s mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more then the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

Q-Up was $9. I think I got my moneys worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

Have some gems.

Also.

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.

Q-UP Demo

Okay. We’re back. I may have lost it a little talking about Unfair Flips earlier in the week, but now it’s time to talk about Q-Up, another game about flipping coins.

I really liked the Q-Up Demo. I actually played until I couldn’t anymore, because the demo stopped me. I thought it was great.

You may notice a slight tonal shift here between Unfair Flips and Q-Up, despite the fact that they’re both pseudo-incremental games about coin flips. This is because Q-Up is doing everything that Unfair Flips wasn’t.

I’ve mentioned before that I somewhat dislike idle/incremental games because if I’m not careful, they eat my time like a blackhole. I also don’t necessarily have any fun with them. To quote myself:

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

Unfortunately for me, Q-Up has it’s hooks in me already, which means escape options are limited. Perhaps this writeup will be one of them.

There’s a lot of different layers to Q-Up, and I don’t think I’m even going to identify all of them, let alone write about them. The game is framed as a competitive e-Sport, with all the trappings of such, including ranks, stats, an in-game shop, skins, and a fake TOS that has to be agreed to on launching the game.

The team bit isn’t a joke by the way. You can in fact play the coin flip with your friends, and make synergistic builds. It’s incredible.

The E-Sport in question of course, is just a coin flip. But what a coin flip it is! Complete with matchmaking, exciting animations, and being put on either the Q or Up side. (Fun note: while playing with a friend, he audibly groaned when we got into a game, and were Up side, as he “prefers being Q side”. In a game that’s a literal coin flip.)

Of course, the faux esport/live service game feels like it’s just the tip of the iceberg in a sense. There’s also an in-game mail client where as you play, you end up somewhat accidentally agreeing to “work” for the fictional company making the game in question. I don’t think I can spoil too much from the demo, but even what I saw there seemed to get really weird quite fast, with a weird sci-fi narrative around corporate sabotage.

Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the gameplay! Because yes, there is gameplay. It’s not just a coin-flipper. Instead, fairly early on, you unlock a node based skill grid, different for each of the available characters. This grid is a set of triggers and chaining activation, and by moving nodes around, you can build sets of synergies to make it so that even when you lose, you still win!

I’d say something about my build, but I actually just realized looking at it that it’s a tad bit awful.

Look, it makes more sense if you play the demo, maybe just do that.

Oh, and there are items! To be honest, they’re probably the most standard part of the game, being constructed in such a way that you can build item sets and collections in order to grant yourself additional bonuses. What’s less standard is the incredible weird item shop upgrades, which at one point gave me gems instead of costing them?

Ah yes, the ability to roll for a 5-Star character with a zero percent chance of getting them. And the customer of the year is a whale. It’s all so perfect.

Q-Up, like Unfair Flips, is a game about coin flips. But unlike Unfair Flips, it’s not really about flipping coins. Instead, it seems to be a weird satire on live service games at every level, from the design, the development, and the weird nature of E-Sports.

And it absolutely nails the tone. Probably my favorite part so far was this message, with that absolutely perfect “Exec typing things into ChatGPT to summarize them” energy.

It’s just an incredibly fun and weird experience. I only stopped because I hit the level cap on the available characters.

In short: the Q-Up Demo is great, I hope the full game is just as weird, and has even more twists. I’m going to go see if I can get a code to cover it before it comes out, but I highly doubt that will work, in which case I’ll just have to buy it when it does release.

Landlord Quest

I’ve described a few games on this blog as “love letters to X.” The Plucky Squire, for its joy in the physicality of art. Holocure to all of Hololive. It’s a fairly common idiom I haven’t thought much about until I played Landlord Quest: the first game that I think might be best described as a hate letter.

I don’t mean Landlord Quest is bad. I just mean that if you took a love letter, and kept the passion, but inverted the feelings, this is what you would get. If love letters are sent with roses and chocolate, hate letters are probably sent with a mailbomb.

Landlord Quest is a short adventure game. And when I say short, I mean short. I feel fairly confident I saw the entirety of the game in about 42 minutes, and that was three separate playthroughs. I’ve never actually played an adventure game before, so it may have taken me longer than people who are actually familiar with the genre.

Because it’s so short, I don’t really have much to say on it that isn’t a spoiler for the experience. The art is good. I didn’t have to look up anything, which I’ve been told is some sort of gold standard for adventure games, but there’s also one a single room, and a finite number of things to “Look at.”

This is it. This is the experience.

I guess the one interesting thing I could talk about is that despite the game loathing the Doug character, from his bro-glasses and faux-cybertruck, I’m not sure I do.

There’s a few incredibly brief moments of him ruminating on his relationship with his father. They’re short, and I think the intent is mostly to show that Doug is a useless nepo baby. I’m sure they work if you’re the sort of person who had parents that cared about you and your interests. I imagine if I was that sort of person, I’d be able to look at Doug and laugh, visualizing a chain of shit heads stretching back years eternal.

Unfortunately for the designer, I haven’t spoken to my father in close to 10 years, so the attempt to paint him a shit brat who coasts on his father’s coattails fell flat. Instead, it made me a bit sad for him. Someone cared about him once.

Anyway, I think the credits for Landlord Quest do a better job of speaking to the game’s purpose than I could.

Landlord Quest is a short, and either horrifying or cathartic experience based on how you feel about landlords. It’s six bucks on Steam. It’s very well made for what it is, and it made me feel something.

I’m just not sure how I feel about those feelings yet.

Unfair Flips

Unfair Flips is the first game to really aggravate me in quite a while. As as result, this write-up features a lot more profanity than I would usually include. But my ability to form coherent thoughts without resorting to the f-bomb has been so reduced that I can’t express how frustrated I am any other way.

I was really trying to write a fair article about Unfair Flips, a incremental game by HEATHER FLOWERS. I really was.

I played the whole damn thing, even if I set up an autoclicker about an hour in. (Gods bless you, creators of AutoHotKey.) Then someone called me an idiot for being disappointed for buying a game where nothing happens, and having nothing happen, and I just sorta lost it.

Either that or the can of Bang Energy I just chugged is kicking in. Could be both!

Point is, fuck reasonable critique. Everyone now gets 1000 words about the worst game I’ve played this year.

Maybe I’m just out of the god damn loop here, but I feel like the child in the story of the emperor that has no clothes. When I google Unfair Flips, I see endless praise. People are posting articles about how interesting it is. It’s rated very positive on Steam, with 276 reviews.

This is despite the game saying nothing, doing nothing, making no points. That might come across as the raving of a madman, so let me elaborate and clear up any uncertainty about if I’m lost my mind.

There are, loosely put, two genres I could put Unfair Flips into. These are either as a rage game, or an idle/incremental game. I’m going to compare it to incremental games for the purpose of discussion, but notably, Unfair Flips doesn’t actually let you idle unless you set up a macro to play it.

As an incremental game, Unfair Flips is boring. The cost of upgrades is such that the “correct” choice at any point is to buy the cheapest upgrade available, instead of making any decisions or selecting strategic options.

An image of the game Unfair Flips, with the games four upgrades displayed, near the start of a game.
These are the only upgrades available.

This doesn’t immediately doom a game, but as a game, it’s less interesting than EVERY other entry in the genre I’ve played. This includes IdleOn, Journey to Incrementalia, Universal Paperclips, and probably others.

It also fails in the other place it could redeem itself: making any statement about probability, chance, determination, and such. This is more the space of rage games, like the narrator in Getting Over It. There is nothing to say after all. Unlike Deep Dip, it doesn’t challenge the player to be a master of mechanics. It makes no statement, requires no skill.

So why did I play it? Well, because I saw people posting about it. Because I saw people going “My new game is out, please play it.” And I like taking chances on weird things, on strange shit.

I don’t extend this generosity to everything in my life. If I go to a bake sale, and someone is selling burnt scones, I don’t fucking pony up to shove a clearly torched pastry into my mouth. There’s nothing to learn there.

But bad games often have redeeming ideas! Mechanics, settings, perceptions! Weird ass art can give us a unique perspective on the state of what others see, it can inspire us to view the world in a different lens, it can be part of a process of improvement.

But this isn’t that. There is nothing here. There is no statement, no idea, no perception, even a wrong or bad one. It is empty.

The emperor is wearing no clothes, and people are lining up to compliment his fashion sense.

Hell, while we’re here, it’s also not well made. It has no settings, and you can only mute or unmute audio. I had to set custom unity flags to get the god damn thing to launch in a way I could play it, something I associate with developers who are either newer (or have not considered that computers other then their own exist).

Normally this is something I give the benefit of the doubt here, but the lack of anything redeeming—any single thing—just makes it feel like the folks who made Unfair Flips just didn’t give a shit.

The only reasonable thing I can think of to explain Unfair Flips is that this was created as part of an experience in end to end development. Something to learn the process of taking a concept, building it, publishing it to Steam, and marketing it. In which case, it almost makes sense.

It’s not about the finished product, it’s about the process.

If that’s true, then yes, it has a reason to exist: it’s part of the journey of its creators as artists, a process as purpose.

Still doesn’t explain why everyone is acting like this is good! Like it was an enjoyable experience! Like other people should experience it!

It’s not, it isn’t, and no one should play this game, unless you want to lose 2 dollars, two hours, and be irrationally angry for no reason.

Failure is part of creation. But that doesn’t make it praiseworthy.

Also, the dev has several other games up on Steam, both of which look interesting, so I can’t really believe it’s about process either.

If you gave this game a positive review because you honest to god like it, sure. Fine. I don’t understand it, but that’s the nature of art.

But if you’re doing it ironically, as part of a bit, as part of some sort of performative thing, go fuck yourself.