Dusk is a boomer shooter that came out in 2017, and then finally got released in 2018. Or maybe it’s an arena shooter, because there’s some verticality? Or maybe a twitch shooter, which is how it describes itself at one point.
Look, games in the vein of Doom have had 30 years of evolution. If you’re the sort of person whose played through myHouse.wad, you don’t need me to tell you shit about this genre. Honestly, leave this review now.
On the other hand, if you’ve never played a Doom game, or like me, you’ve only played stuff like Wrath and Strafe, this is the writeup for you.
I do want to quickly talk about the music in Dusk, quickly because I don’t really have anything to say about it. See, Dusk is going for a horror vibe, and no matter how much weaponry I ended up with, I found somewhere through the first act that game was scaring me.
So I opened YouTube, pulled up a mashup of Ready to Die/Party Party Party from Hellsing Abridged, and used that on repeat for a bit as my background music.
This is the energy I endeavored to bring to my play through. I don’t think it was the tone the developers were aiming for.
This gradually transitioned into a combo of AJR, Panic At the Disco, and other random songs YouTube thought I wanted to listen to.
If you’ve ever wondered what the inverse of Zen is, I would suggest playing through Dusk Episode 2, Map 6, titled the Erebus Reactor with This Town by Niall Horan playing in the background. The result was an emotional state where I found myself constantly torn between trying to not get blown up, shot, or fall into lava while wondering what I was even doing with my life, and if I’m going to die alone.
Anyway, if you like horror themed shooters, Dusk seemed to do a good job. If you don’t, and for some reason have emotionally committed yourself to finishing the whole thing anyway, adjustments to soundtrack may aid you.
This of course, won’t change the general vibe. Whether it’s a cursed farm, the worlds worst industrial park, or a research facility co-designed by Escher and Geiger, these are not pleasant places to be.
Despite that, it did feel like the level design massively improved between acts. Dusk has 3 episodes, with about 10 maps each, and secret levels. I did not play any of the secret levels.
Episode 1 was fun but a bit bland, episode 2 had a lot more variety in layout and design, and episode 3 has some downright nutty bits, with E3M7 probably reaching the pinacle of weirdo level design, being based around flipping gravity.
And while they may not be pleasent, I found them fairly fun. Okay, except for some of the claustraphobic underground sections, but I enjoyed the larger maps.
I also feel obligated to talk about the weapons. This is classic shooter, so you can carry all of them at once, there’s no reloading, and the only real cap on using them is ammo. My personal favorites were the super shotgun, duel pistols, and a explosive bolt thrower called the riveter. The most interesting one is probably the spectral crossbow which pierces multiple enemies, and shoots through walls, but it never really clicked for me. Generally, I just used whatever felt best in the moment, and only really felt ammo starved in boss fights.
I really only have two complaints about Dusk. The first is bosses. I did not find any of them particularly fun. It’s hard to put my finger on why that’s the case, but mechanically I found most of them pretty dull. The second is an enemy type called the wendigo.
Wendigos look like this.
You might be looking at this, and going “That doesn’t seem particularly bad” and you’d be correct. But there are two things I can’t show in a still image.
Wendigo’s (or maybe just a map trigger) make the lighting dim when they activate, and make a screech like a parrot being squeezed to death.
Wendigos are often placed in dark enclosed spaces in the first two acts.
Wendigos are invisible until you shoot them for the first time.
The end result is an enemy that can organically jumpscare you every time it shows up in a level.
I hate them. Fortunately they’re at least kind of rare, so my terror was generally short lived.
I got Dusk on sale for just about $7. I had $7 worth of fun with it.
Right now it’s $20 on Steam, but you can probably just wait for another sale. It’s not my favorite game I’ve played so far this year, but it also isn’t my favorite genre, so I don’t think that’s on Dusk.
I thought the game was the most fun when it managed to blend it’s evocative tone with maps that were enjoyable to traverse, and least fun when it shoved me into coal mines filled with Wendigos.
I first saw Sir, We Have an Orc Problem in a random review I clicked on browsing BlueSky last night. I can’t find that review anymore. However, that review plus seeing another friend playing it on Steam was enough make me buy a copy.
I am easily influenced.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem, which I’ll now be abbreviating to SWHOP to, to the determent of my SEO, is an incremental tower defense game. It’s $9, and it’s fairly short. It took me about six and a half hours to beat the whole thing, and do a bit of achievement hunting.
The loop is simple. Pick a map. Place towers. Start the map. Watch as orcs die. Did you kill them all before you ran out of lives? Great, you unlocked the next map. Did you fail to kill them all? Spend the currency you got to boost your towers.
This is the biggest difference between SWHOP and most other tower defense games I’ve played. There’s no in-round building, or economic management element. Instead, all of your available towers and their power is gated by an incremental game style tree.
There are three resources you use on the incremental tree, blue, red, and pink crystal. Red is used for unlocking new towers, and you earn it by beating new levels. Pink is generally used for unlocking large single upgrades for towers, and earned by beating levels without letting any mobs get through. Blue Crystal is used for everything else. Blue has 3-ish sources. First, lump sum bonuses for beating a level. Second, you can earn crystal by killing orcs. And third, there are unlocks that grant crystal at the end of finishing a level, based on the levels difficulty.
This brings me to my big “problem” with SWHOP. It has the systems and functionality for an incredible tower defense game, but the part of the tower defense gameplay loop that is satisfying is completely subsumed by the incremental game elements.
There are a few things that collide to make this true, so I’m going to try to pull them apart, and point out how they interlock to cause this problem.
First, it straight up isn’t possible to beat the game without using the incremental game upgrades. You can’t. Without those systems, you cannot place towers, and you’re expected to lose the first level at least a few times before you get enough upgrades to beat it.
Second, because this is the first lesson you learn as a player, its the easiest mindset to adopt going forward, and until the very last level of the game, you’ll be rewarded for it. While you could micromanage your tower placements, it’s easier to just buy more towers and bullet penetration until you can brute force your way through a level. It also makes it very hard to gauge why you’re failing a level. Was it poor tower placement? Or was it just because you’re not at the power level needed yet?
And gauging that power level is hard, because enemy health scales between levels. On level 1, Orcs have a maximum of 6.4 health. On level 12, they can have 625. Upgrades are necessary.
The end result is a loop that feels like it encourages you to turn off your brain a bit. My response to losing during a level wasn’t “Let me re-evaulate my placement”, it was “Lets just run it back so I can save up enough to get more penetration on my cannons.” It’s the zen of the incremental game instead of the planning of tower defense.
This strategy falls apart on the last level, which I’ll be honest, I had to go and look up a guide for, because after spending what felt like an hour on this one level, I was getting a bit grumpy. SWHOP doesn’t have infinite scaling, so once I’d bought all the upgrades, I was booted back into playing an actual tower defense, while having absorbed zero lessons about the nature of the game over the last 5 hours.
And it’s a shame because SWHOP does have what feels like a competent set of tower defense bones. Orcs move and flow in satisfying waves, towers feel physical in a fun way. Deploying towers and setting their line of fire is fun. And while I find the actual map designs a bit unsatisfying, their scale in parts of the end game is incredibly enjoyable. This doesn’t feel like an incremental game with another system bolted onto it, it feels like a tower defense game that got consumed by the nature of it’s upgrade system.
Side Note: I will say though, I don’t get the line of fire system in this game. The short version is that you can set up a cone, and all tower shots will be within that cone. The problem is that it’s always better to just keep your shots concentrated on a single choke point then to spray and pray, even with towers like the flamethrower.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem gave me the mental feeling of scrolling on TikTok for five to six hours. It’s not really a bad feeling? But it’s not really a pleasant one either. This morning when I woke up, I’d actually forgotten that I’d played this game, despite having spent 6 hours on it yesterday.
If you know that you enjoy incremental games, and need one to play, this might be for you. Personally, the most value I’ve gotten out of this one is that it’s kicked me out of my funk of not getting any writeups finished.
There are a lot of things that go into writing about a game for this blog. Sometimes it’s desperation. When Sunday rolls around and I scrounge through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Sometimes it’s joy. I prefer when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).
Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. This is a post about nostalgia. A frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person than it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.
Just to be as clear as possible:if you do not want to listen to a 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.
Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo-MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo-MMO rather than a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts. But if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, and grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash and what was technically capable in 2009.
This is normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here,. Even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.
In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing most of the time.
Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.
Welcome to 2009
Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time than middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games is growing, and there’s just one problem: I never actually get to play them. My screen time limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.
Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friend’s house. Relatives’ places at Thanksgiving. Home again.
It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.
From this standpoint, then, Adventure Quest Worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.
In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this. And unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.
Glasses off, analysis on.
With the value of hindsight, Adventure Quest Worlds didn’t do much that other, bigger games hadn’t beaten it to punch on. Everquest had been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.
Its defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement, and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these drops were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars: events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!
As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the community’s success or engagement. But as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.
The defining feature, then, of AQW, was that it truly pioneered the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.
Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now
I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully on board. I loved the design notes (a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week) with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.
But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More than anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltaire, Paul and Storm: these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.
If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.
If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this story. At some point in High school, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of Glacier National Park, I remember very little of it.
But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company. And I was just completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happened. I doubt even he remembers.
From 2008-ish to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.
Returning to 2026
I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort. Not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.
Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.
I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite its update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon than Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market. In an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.
The story is, at best, mediocre, and at worst actually bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. Its endgame hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoke a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me. The sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots.
But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.
Back to the Past – 2011
This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.
There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more than a player. The game means more to me than I do to it.
Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine
This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more than anything else), I’d dissect why the game’s player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind for 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.
Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.
It’s been a strong 12 months for games about are coin flips. Unfair Flips was ultimately about taking a coin that always flipped tails and beating on it until it flipped heads. Q-Up was a game about taking a coin that could flip heads or tails, and trying to bend the world so it didn’t matter which happened.
To continue this metaphor, Sol Cesto is a game in which you want a coin to flip heads. You can manipulate reality to try to make it more likely to flips heads. But it’s necessary to plan for what happens when it flips tails 10 times in a row.
After about 12 hours, I’ve found that while I like what Sol Cesto is trying to do, I don’t know that I love how it does it.
Gameplay
The idea is simple. The sun is gone, lost at the bottom of the dungeon, and someone must get it back. That someone is likely to be one of several unfortunate souls—your first choice is the peasant, and you’ll unlock additional characters via meta-progression.
Each character is a bit different, but they generally have a set of starting consumable items, a passive ability, an active ability called a talent, and a stat score for wisdom and strength. It’s these last two that will determine how most interactions go.
You’re dropped onto a dungeon floor, and you have to visit a certain number of rooms to unlock the door to the next floor. Each floor is a 4×4 grid of tiles. Each tile is a room that contains either a monster or a treasure.
Here, then, is the coin flip. You don’t choose which room to visit. Instead you choose a row. The game then randomly drops you into one of the open rooms in that row. If it’s a treasure of some sort, great! Heal yourself, or grab some gold. If it’s a monster, it’s time for combat.
Combat is simple. You will always kill the monster in the room, but as it dies, it will inflict damage to you equal to the difference between it’s stat and your stat. If you have three strength, that means you can take out three-strength and below monsters for free. If you only have a single wisdom, every three-wisdom monster is suddenly a loss of two health. Given that most characters have six or less starting HP, damage starts to add up quickly.
The primary loop of Sol Cesto, then, is simple: look at the screen, and make the best choice to maximize your odds of keeping things going in a favorable way. Run out of health, and you die, being sent back to the surface to begin again.
And again.
Then do it again.
There are, of course, more twists to it, but they are just that: twists. As you get deeper you’ll encounter monsters that buff other monsters, monsters that get bigger as you kill other monsters, dark screens that can only be lit up by killing other monsters. There are consumable items that you can use to tilt choices in your favor. The characters’ unique talents charge up as you clear rooms, and can be used to shift choices; the wizard links two rooms together and the knight can select a column instead of a row. There are teeth to be wrenched from stone statues and jammed into your own jaw, modifying the odds at which you’ll be dropped into certain rooms.
Despite all this, I don’t find myself wanting to play more.
Metaprogression
The game that keeps coming to mind as I play Sol Cesto is Spelunky 2. It’s probably a bit of an aesthetic similarity, as both trade in some sort of sacrificial Aztec temple theme. This theme is one of the things I actually have no complaints about with Sol Cesto, as I find its unearthly wall-carvings-come-to-life art style as quite appealing.
No, the problem is gold.
Opening treasure chests gives you gold, and gold is both the currency used to both buy items from shops during a run, and they way you unlock meta progression options AFTER a run. And as you can see below, there is a LOT of metaprogression.
This is, frankly, a tension I find deeply unfun. Do I try to win and push my current run forward, or do I just cash out so I can keep unlocking more options, unlocking more abilities, and generally increase my chances of eventually succeeding? Do I take teeth that make me more powerful and tilt the odds in my favor, or do I take the ones that give me more gold?
My goal on a run of a roguelite/roguelike is to win the run. When I fail, I want to fail because I made a mistake that I need to learn from, not because I haven’t farmed enough yet. Spelunky was the king of this, because when you died in Spelunky, it was always your fault. Somewhere along the line, you made choices or took risks that resulted in your own demise. With Sol Cesto, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The other thing is the length of runs. Sol Cesto runs are not short, and if there is some sort of shortcut, I haven’t found it yet. My first run to get through 100 floors was something like 40 minutes, and I had to spend the first part of that piloting through floors of enemies I’d already seen at least a few dozen times.
I’ve already proven I can solve these, so why do I have to keep doing them again and again?
I’d be ready to put Sol Cesto down if it wasn’t for one other thing.
Secrets
Edit: 4/30 – Someone pointed out that this next section has spoilers, so if you’re playing and enjoying Sol Cesto, or decided you want to try it yourself, you may want to skip this bit.
Spoilers ahead! You have been warned.
Fairly early on in Sol Cesto, I figured out that you could grab the shopkeeper’s nose. It was a neat little visual thing; a little Super Mario 64 inspired goof.
Except then I realized that if you drag it back far enough you can launch it into his head to stun him for a few seconds and steal everything in the shop.
Then I noticed that on the pail that lets you cash out gold for use in a future run, one of the bricks in the background was a different color, and leaning out of the wall. So clicked on it until it fell out, and I found some more cash.
There’s more of these sorts of things. Some elements on the screen can be clicked on for gold when they show up. Full clearing a screen gives a single extra gold coin. You can bomb teeth statues to get buffs, and use reroll dice on most screens.
And this is why I’m hesitant to entirely give up on Sol Cesto. I keep wondering if there’s some secret that cracks this thing wide open… some trick I haven’t spotted yet. Something I’m missing that changes everything.
Maybe clicking on a specific tile secretly increases your odds of landing on that tile?
Maybe using items on the smith can let you get extra stat points?
….
Maybe this dungeon is just making me go crazy. I think I need some sunlight.
I’m just kinda sitting here, staring at my screen and trying to figure out how to introduce Chico’s Rebound. You can probably tell that it’s not going great, and that I’ve been forced into meta-narration. Because otherwise I am going to sit here until the flesh rots off my bones and the sun burns out.
Chico’s Rebound is a sort of follow up to Chico and the Magic Orchards, a game I wrote about a few years ago. It’s also not really a follow up, because while the characters are the same, the core gameplay isn’t at all. Magic Orchards was a light puzzle game with some exploration elements.
Rebound instead takes its inspiration from that classic iPod1 game breakout. If you’ve played Breakout, you know the basic deal. If you haven’t… well. It’s pretty simple. You have a ball, and at the bottom of the screen you have a paddle of some sort. You bounce the ball off the paddle, and when it hits bricks, they disappear. Get rid of all the bricks to clear the level. Pretty much just PvE pong.
I really hope we all know what Pong is?
Anyway, that’s what Chico is cribbing off of: a souped up version of Breakout with more mechanics. It also has some other mechanics, including overworld exploration and some puzzles, but the less said about these, the better. They’re not particularly fun, and I found myself struggling a fair bit with them when it felt like I shouldn’t be2.
Instead, the main gameplay is the variants of Pong. There are a lot of fun ideas here. One world has fire and water powerups that interact with growing and burning down plants. Another ghost themed level lets the ball swap between corporeal and phantom states, ignoring platforms in the other modes. Another world has a set of mushrooms that swap colors when hit, and can only be destroyed by hitting a matching colored switch.
These are good, and pretty fun. Unfortunately, this is where most of my praise ends, because Chico’s Rebound is doing some really weird stuff with its controls. To explain why, we need to talk a bit more about Breakout and how progression in Chico’s Rebound works.
Most of the time in Breakout, any connection of the paddle to the ball launches the ball back up. The ball only resets if you drop it and it goes off the screen. In Chico’s Rebound, however, you can regrab the ball by just touching it. If you want to keep the ball bouncing, you have to do an input to do a tailspin. If you fail to do that input, Chico just grabs the ball, and then you can relaunch it.
This would make the game trivial; you could just clear all the blocks with no risk. Except Chico’s Rebound has a scoring system, and to cut to the chase: unlocking more levels ultimately requires beating previous levels at certain score thresholds. Getting higher scores requires high combos, and losing the ball offscreen or catching the ball both drop the combo.
The end result is that you need to do the tailspin input constantly, and if you mess up at all, even if you were in the right part of the screen…. you probably have to restart the level.
It doesn’t help that the controls feel inconsistent at times, and I found myself dropping hits I’d thought I’d done an input for. I found that the frustrating controls overwhelmed most of the enjoyment I got out of the game’s unique level mechanics.
The game also has bosses. I generally liked them, but some require you to patiently regrab the ball and wait. Those are a bit less enjoyable.
Chico’s Rebound was $8 and 4 hours long. I don’t really regret it, but I wish I could recommend it more strongly.
Apparently iPods are retro now. If this makes you feel old, you are welcome to join me in this shallow grave I will be digging for myself shortly.↩︎
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Chico’s Rebound’s overworld, but it’s so disconnected from the game’s main mechanics. Imagine each time you wanted to play a level of Mario, you had to solve a crossword first. That’s the energy here.↩︎
