Category: Video Games

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.

Honkai – Nexus Amina

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 and the Magic Orchards DX

Chico is fine. This is damning with faint praise, but those who have been reading for a while will know that I can damn a whole lot harder 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.

Elden Ring: NIGHTREIGN

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 don’t.

I would rather have my $40 back.