Category: Video Games

Dragonsweeper

I like Dragonsweeper. It’s also free. You should go play it in your browser here.

This is perhaps not the most elegant piece of writing I have opened a blog post with, but it’s also all true. Dragonsweeper is a small, clever twist on Minesweeper. It doesn’t cost any money. It won’t eat your entire day. There are no microtransactions, or other bullshit. It’s just good.

To quote the office: “Why use lot word when few word do trick.”

That said, you’re still reading, which means you haven’t been persuaded yet. That’s okay. Maybe you missed the first link. Here, I’ll link to again.

It’s possible that didn’t work either. Unlikely, given the incredible rhetorical barrage I’ve assembled so far, but possible.

It’s important to note though, that since Dragonsweeper is a puzzle game, in order to talk about it, I will be spoiling some of the puzzles. As few as I can! But some. This is your last chance to just back out and play it?

No? Well let’s continue.

Dragonsweeper is a puzzle version of Minesweeper. It uses the general framework of Minesweeper the same way Balatro uses poker: as a structure with so many things grafted onto it that it’s almost unrecognizable. But understanding the general concept or the original will make the initial exposure more tolerable.

Like Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper consists of a grid of tiles. Clicking a tile reveals what’s beneath it. If the tile is empty, just like in Minesweeper, that tile then displays a number of the sum of the surrounding tiles.

Unlike Minesweeper, most tiles on the board are not empty, nor do they contain mines. Instead, they contain monsters. This is a problem for our boy Jorge.

As Jorge spawns with only 5 health, clicking on a Minotaur early is an easy way to game over.

When you click on a monster, Jorge loses health equal to its power. If Jorge goes below zero health, it’s game over. Fortunately, defeating monsters also gives experience, and after collecting enough EXP, Jorge levels up, refilling their health bar.

But after the first few levels, the amount of EXP needed to level up is higher than the Jorge’s total health, and just defeating monsters isn’t enough. Instead, it’s necessary to crack open treasure chests, use healing scrolls, or find some other sources of EXP.

If you’re just starting the game, you will almost certainly die.

And then the real game begins.

This is your Last Chance to Back Out Before I Start Spoiling The Puzzles I Mean It This Time

In the corner of the screen is a little tiny purple book. When you click on the book, it tells you which monsters have which values, and how many remain. It also includes this little bit of text.

This right here is the heart of Dragonsweeper. See, Dragonsweeper isn’t truly random. It’s randomized, but after a few death screens, you might notice that the 10 value monster, the Mine King, is always in one of the corners.

Or you might instead pick up on the fact that the Slime Wizard is always guarded by six 8-value purple slimes, and always on the edge of the map.

You might spot that the 4 value gargoyles will always be facing another Gargoyle in a cardinal direction.

There are at least another five or so little patterns and rules like this. There are some I haven’t even found, and there are several that I didn’t spot until I had beaten the game, and was showing it to a friend.

For me, spotting these, and figuring out how to use them is what makes Dragonsweeper so brilliant. It’s very clever puzzle design where learning about how the board can be laid out, and how some things interact is the progression.

Again. Dragonsweeper is really good, and you should play it, and it’s free.

And a request for the developer: please make a full game. I have given you money and I will give you more.

Fellowship Demo

Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.

I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.

Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.

Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.

Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.

I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.

So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?

Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.

Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.

There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.

Grab Bag – November 2024

I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.

From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following:
1. A hammer
2. A large set of strength cables
3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.

If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.

All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.

It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.

Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.

UFO 50

Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?

UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.

I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.

And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.

#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement.
#12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.)
#46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder.
#24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.

Zenless Zone Zero

I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.

I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.

I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.

So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.

And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.

But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?

Chained Together

Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.

Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.

There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.

Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.

But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.

In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.

Vagrant Song

I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?

I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.

I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.

You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?

Good news!

I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.

If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.

Journey to Incrementalia

Journey to Incrementalia is single player idle game, placing it in a genre that I have some thoughts about.

But I beat it in six hours! I spent most of that time actively playing!

And I was only tempted to break out AutoHotKey and start writing macros once or twice!

All of which makes me wonder if it counts as an idle game/clicker game at all.

Journey to Incrementalia

The premise is simple enough. You are a necromancer. You have been brought back from the dead to reach Incrementalia, a mystical land of… something. And you’re going to do this by raising the dead, and hurling spells at anything that moves.

It starts out as a pretty standard idle game. Ponder the orb to generate mana, spend mana to summon skeletons, and watch skeletons break down the wall.

But it quickly breaks away from normal idle game scaling because of its resource system.

Resources and mechanics

Journey to Incrementalia has 3 primary resources: mana, souls, and skill points.

Mana is pretty standard. You click on your orb, you get mana. You spend mana on a small smattering of permanent stat upgrades, summoning units, and buying souls.

The other two are much more interesting.

Skill points are used to get access to spells, and to buff those spells. For example, one of the earliest spells in the game is the Goblin. Putting 1 point into it lets you hire goblins, and additional points buff the amount of poison goblins apply when they attack.

That said, the number of goblins (and other units) are still limited by souls. There’s a bunch of ways to get souls, but even at the very end of the game, I only had around ~2000 or so.

So this is the part where things get good, and change from most other idle games I’ve played. It’s free to respec skills, and change builds. But since the player is still limited by the number of units they can field, it’s necessary to think about army composition.

This turns the game into an optimization problem instead of just clicky-clicky number go up.

As I reached higher and higher walls, I found myself respeccing constantly. Maybe I’d just unlocked a new spell to buff skeletons. Maybe it was a unit that let me apply poison more effectively. Maybe I just had enough mana generation to sling unending waves of fireballs, ignoring units completely.

My personal favorite combo was one where I constantly sacrificed skeletons, causing them spawns ghosts that slammed into the wall, applying poison stacks. These skeletons would then be re-summoned automatically, and the process would repeat. It was a sort of necromantic carpet bombing, and I enjoyed it immensely.

This was the best part of Journey to Incrementalia. Looking at the skill tree and trying to do napkin math in my head to get the biggest numbers possible, or realizing that I’d overlooked a spell or upgrade, was a lot of fun. So was spotting overlooked combos.

Some Criticism

Journey to Incrementalia is very fun when you have a bunch of skills to play with. When you don’t, it’s much less enjoyable, and this included much of the early game. Pretty much everything to the 25th wall wasn’t as good.

The game also isn’t particularly replayable. Different selections on side-quests didn’t result in different rewards or quest text, something I found disappointing.

Finally, the game is still somewhat buggy. I didn’t hit any major issues, but I did find a bug where I could summon infinite volcanoes, which slowed my PC to a crawl. I’ve also seen posts from some folks whose game has just straight up bricked. Some of these have already been fixed, but these would have been dealbreakers if I’d encountered them.

Overall

Journey to Incrementalia was most fun when I browsing the skill tree, and doing napkin math. It was at its least fun when I had done that math, and was just sort of waiting for my strategy to play out.

I’m actually fine with the game’s length, even if I wish it came online a bit faster. There’s also a few spoiler-y late game mechanics that I wish it did a bit a bit more with.

Perhaps if it did do more with its narratives or builds, I’d feel more strongly about recommending it. As it is though, I don’t hate it or love it, and I’ll leave that decision to folks with $5 and an afternoon or two to burn to answer that question.

TCG Card Shop Simulator

I was having trouble finding something to write about this week, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a game I had hesitations about, but thought I’d enjoy: TCG Card Shop Simulator. And I was right on the money!

And while I personally enjoy the game, it currently lacks depth in any of its systems. I don’t really want to recommend it in its current state.

Side note: In that sense, it reminds me of MMORPG Tycoon 2, a game I purchased 3 years ago, and is now on version 0.2. Early access is a grave of ideas.

But let’s say you do fork over $13. What do you get right now? A sort of abstract sim game with some card collection elements. Here was my experience.

Tales From The Gameplay Loop

After I named my store, I ordered inventory and waited for folks to wander in. When those customers finished their browsing, I went and checked them out. The checkout mini-game is a majority of the “gameplay” that I’ve seen so far. There is a small element where customers can show up smelly, and need to be sprayed with air freshener. I dealt with this by setting up two auto cleaners near the entrance to my store to double blast anyone who walked in, like it was a tower defense.

While the player can hire helpers NPC’s to run the checkout, the only one I could afford was so slow that I just did it myself. It felt more practical to have them stock shelves, where it didn’t matter that they moved like molasses.

The other parts of the loop involve buying new furniture and displays for the store, buying stock, adjusting prices, and selling singles. More about selling singles in a bit. First, let’s talk about the other parts.

My general take on this game is that it functions mechanically, but lacks real depth to any single system. Employees don’t get better or worse as they work for you. There are a few different types of furniture, but they all function the same, and there’s only one type of play table. NPC’s don’t have names or preferences, there are no regulars, grinders, or “That One Guy.” The player can adjust prices, but it doesn’t seem to influence market value.

Furniture is both deeply unaspirational, and as as my friends will point out, better than what I have in my apartment.

In that sense, the game feels very static, almost like a clicker game. I would wait for things to happen, acquire money, buy a bigger store, buy more stuff to put in it. Rinse, repeat.

A sort of capitalist zen garden.

But I never felt like I was really working toward anything, or making more than incremental progress. That said, I do want to talk about one system the game has that did make me feel something.

Cracking Boosters, and Selling Singles

TCG Card Shop Simulator has a fairly reasonable system for opening booster packs to add cards to your own collection. It’s nicely animated, works reasonably well in partnership with the rest of the game, and is mildly compelling. But it’s not what I want to talk about.

No, what I want to talk about is how this game has finally made me understand why stores don’t like selling singles, mostly because the process is a huge annoyance for tiny amounts of profit. I never want to sell a single under $10 ever again.

And this is in a sanitized, digital version of the process! I don’t have to keep perfect inventory, or look up pricing, or worry heavily about shelf space. But every time some unblinking digital homunculus walks up to the register with a card that’s a $1.27, and a $5 bill, I want to leap across the counter and chase them from the store.

So in that sense, this game has made me feel a weird sort of sympathy for local game stores, and their equivalents. I now understand why no one wants to sell me 30 commons for $8.71.

Overall

Sure, TCG Card Shop Simulator is fun right now in a sort of zen/whiteout sense, but there’s no guarantee it will ever get all of the features it has promised, or even that I’ll remember the game exists by then. If you have $13, and need to just zone out from the world for a few hours, it’s great.

After 8 hours, my card store looks like… well, pretty much any other card store on the planet honestly.

But it lacks any real depth to any system, or even the aesthetic customization that would set it apart as a fun toy for designing a dream card shop.

TCG Card Shop Simulator is $13 on Steam.

Post-Script

As far as I can tell, NPCs in TCG Card Shop Simulator don’t react to anything you do, including jumping on tables, throwing boxes around, and just generally nuisance in the store.

Somehow while playing, this manifested into me envisioning my player character as a sort of long limbed, pale cryptid that always wears a flat cap covering their face, speaking only in curses and praise, clambering over counters and leaping across tables as it restocked and moved to check people out.

It also made me realize that I would still probably shop and play at this store, even if the owner occasionally scuttled across the table in the middle of the match if the prices were good enough.

This was followed by me roleplaying as this character for 30 to 40 minutes, including nodding my head, and saying “Blessings upon you, yes, yes!” whenever someone paid with exact change.

This is not a thing I usually do in games. I don’t know where this came from. Also, at some point I decided they had a tail like a lizard.

He should really be skinnier than this, all bones and sinew.

Thanks for reading.