Usually this would be good, bad, and ugly, but today we have weird, weirder, and still pretty weird.
Last week was the Steam Next Fest, a great chance to check out a whole bunch of demos of new games! Of course, I did not do that until yesterday when it turned out the entire event was over.
So instead of information about games promoted via Steam Next Fest, I went, downloaded a bunch of demos in the first three pages, and played them. So here we go.
Thoughts – In theory, Cthulhu Pub is a game about building a restaurant for Elder Gods, and keeping it from being assaulted by things that want to destroy it. Of all the games on this list, I would say this one is in the roughest shape. I had to restart quite a few times before I figured out how to just… start the game without running out of money before finishing the tutorial. There are mechanics that aren’t explained, and it’s just generally kind of buggy and starts to slow down when you get a fair amount of monsters on the screen. But, it was weirdly compelling enough for me to keep trying until I figured stuff out, so it’s got that going for it.
Thoughts – Magical Girl D is an RPG where you play as a magical girl with a dick. The demo had three visual novel style sex scenes, and the PC had one non-basic special attack. I feel like those two sentences really capture everything you need to know about this game demo to decide if you want to play it.
Thoughts – This might be a good time to mention I can’t speak Chinese, because this entire demo was in what I assume was Chinese. It could be something else. It’s some sort of RTS, but again, the whole “I can’t speak Chinese” thing meant I didn’t get through the tutorial.” But, I mean, it seemed kind of cool.
Thoughts – Fishards is a neat little arena brawler, and I’ll most likely write more about it than just this little blurb. You are a fish wizard, and you try to kill other fish wizards in multiplayer battles. I’d say it feels like it has the most in common with Magicka, as you summon spells by combining various elements. Unlike Magicka, it actually runs on my computer.
Thoughts – I didn’t play a huge amount of this demo. The combat itself is much better than the other RPG on the list. The combat is a sort of real time charge bar system. Each character in your demo party has multiple meaningful attacks. I got to the first mini-dungeon, then went to do something else. With that said, the writing was… present. It was there. I did not really care for it.
Thoughts – I didn’t play a huge amount of this one. Treasure Tile feels like someone took an old roguelike, removed the permadeath portion, and strapped in Diablo/ARPG mechanics instead. While the game has some beautiful graphics, the combat itself just felt kind of off to me, and aiming skills felt difficult.
As always, thanks for reading, and if any of these seem interesting, I encourage you to play the demos yourself. Also, if anyone can tell me what that RTS game is called or how it works, that would also be cool.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Crowfall for the last few days. Let’s start with my opinion on the game: Crowfall is too fucking expensive to be worth playing. And when I say expensive, I mean both in terms of money and time.
If you want, you can close this article now, because the rest of it is going to be an extensive exercise in dead horse beating. If you’re still here, please grab your stick and join me.
I’d tolerate the mediocre graphics if the gameplay had any redeeming features. It doesn’t.
I want to start by talking about the easiest part of Crowfall to quantify: the simple monetary cost. Crowfall is $40, and it also has a monthly VIP system that costs about $15 a month. This puts it about on par in terms of pure cost with its competitors. Final Fantasy 14 is $60 for the full game with 4 expansions, and a required monthly subscription of about $15. World of Warcraft is $40, and also $15 a month plus the incalculable cost of knowing you’re supporting Activision-Blizzard, making it cost effectively infinite money. New World is $40 and the knowledge that you’re adding Jeff Bezos’s draconic horde of wealth.
This is a problem, because on a scale of “Virtual Disneyland” to “Digital Version of Detroit,” Crowfall is the latter. It wants to be a hardcore PVP game, with fights for territory, resources, and areas going on constantly. It has castles and landmarks that you can build up and guilds to join. As soon as you’re out of the pure tutorial world, when you die you drop 50% of your gold.
In the normal world, when you die, you drop half your inventory.
I have a bunch of small problems with Crowfall, but I have small problems with almost every game, so I’m going to talk about the big problem I have with Crowfall: the game expects you to do everything with other people. And not just a few other people, a lot of other people.
Let me give an example: One of Crowfall’s big ideas is that you are a “Crow,” a semi-immortal soul repeatedly brought back to life by the gods in order to fight for them. In terms of in-game mechanics, this means that to level up past a given point, you need to get and fuse with a new body.
Getting these bodies requires that you start by digging up body parts. In order to do this and get anything that’s not garbage, you’ll need the grave digger discipline. I believe it counts as an exploration discipline (more on that later). However, in addition to that discipline, which is a socketable rune, you’ll actually want an upgraded version of the grave digger, which you get by… farming random rune drops from digging up corpses. This requires you to have an intermediate shovel at a minimum, which means you’ll need to craft yourself a shovel, then upgrade it, which means you’ll need to mine and quarry stone, because those two are different. Once you have your upgraded rune that you got from RNG and upgrading (and you’ll need to socket Runecraft to actually upgrade it, I believe) you can actually start grinding again. Now, when you’ve finished grinding, you’ll have the body parts. You can’t use them yet, of course, you need to remake them. This means combining them with some other body parts, and also Ambrosia, which you’ll need an alchemist to make. Now that you’ve got all your body parts collected, you can finally combine them into a new vessel.
Hooray! Did I mention that doing this requires that you collect the right type of each body part for the right race of character that you want to create?
So why are we doing all of this? Well, because without doing it, you can’t actually play in a Shadows World, which is to say the big boy world. Up until then, you’ll play in what is basically a tutorial world. That’s right, this multi-step process just to create a character is more or less before you can actually start playing the full game.
Remember how I said we’d come back to that bit about minor disciplines? Well, you can only actually have two equipped at once, and you can only change them out in a temple. Long story short, there’s no reasonable way to do all of what I described above as a single person, or even a pair. You’ll need a guild or another group to work with. Without one, you’ll most likely have to stay in the beginner world, where drop rates are lower, and buildings seem to reset daily.
Now, it’s entirely possible you read all of this, and go “Wow, that seems like the game for me!” And maybe it is. Maybe you’re all excited about PvP, farming for random items for hours, and ganking other players.
One tiny problem: remember how I mentioned the devs hiding the player count up above? Well, that might be because the servers are incredibly fucking dead. In my time spent during the trial, I feel like I saw less than 30 players total outside of the spawn area.
Yeah, the game is not highly populated.
I have some other problems as well. The auto-attacks put all of your other abilities on cooldown, making combat super frustrating. The number of enemy types in PVE are really low. There’s no form of inventory sorting, meaning that your inventory more or less ends up looking like Minecraft. Speaking of mining, your auto attack and your harvesting abilities are bound to same key, so if you don’t click on that boulder correctly, you’re now in combat until that cooldown wears off in a few seconds. Oh, and if you try to put items of a type you already have into your bank, but don’t have an empty bank slot, you can’t. Even though you already have those items in your bank.
So yeah. Crowfall is an attempt at a sandbox, heavy player interaction MMO, but because there’s nobody playing it, and it takes forever to do anything. It’s filled with small annoyances, and systems that don’t feel fun (I’m looking at you, obscenely fast gear decay). Some of its ideas are decent, but on those bones sits nothing of interest.
It’s been over a month since D6 came out in North America. We had a spoiler-free writeup on the series earlier, and I’m gonna write this post assuming that you already read that one. Is that entirely fair? No, it’s not, but otherwise I’d be retreading a lot of already-visited ground.
Just in case you still choose not to read it, here’s the five second version. D6 has a new art style, performance problems, and gives you meaningful access to the unique mechanics essential to the game faster than its predecessors. Good?
Few more things to get out of the way before we get into this:
I cleared all content except Raksha Ba’al, the last endgame secret boss.
I played without any DLC except the free Hololive DLC.
My save file has about 300 or so hours on it. I’d say that translates to about 80-100 hours of gameplay, maybe a bit more. The reason those numbers don’t add up is because I spent a lot of time auto-grinding.
ART
Disgaea 6 has a very different look than its predecessors. Instead of using 2D sprites like the previous games, D6 uses 3D models. I don’t like them as much as the old sprites. In addition, the super over-the-top skills feel a bit more toned down than usual in terms of visual flashiness. I didn’t see anything that was super memorable, and many of the skill animations feel shorter, as compared to things like D5’s Super Olympia which crushes an entire solar system as part of the attack.
STORY
If I’m rushing through these elements, it’s mostly because I want to just address them and get them out of the way. Compared to the other games, I’d say D6 has a stronger finish and conclusion than 5, albeit with somewhat weaker middle. The characters are solid. There are some fairly funny moments, and a few more brutal ones. All in all, it’s fine. It does follow the same pattern as D5: many characters get a power up at various points in the story arc that correspond to their growth as a character, making that growth feel a bit forced, but it’s an overall improvement.
GAMEPLAY
And here we are: the big one. The chonky boy. The factor that the rest of this post is going to be devoted to: D6’s gameplay loop. So how is it?
Well… it’s a bit different than other entries in the series, actually. Let me explain what I mean.
Disgaea has a reputation for being a grindy game, but despite that fact, grinding usually isn’t necessary to beat the “Main Game” and see the credits roll. It’s more or less required to beat endgame content, but even then, grinding in Disgaea tends to be a bit different than traditional grinding. Instead of the classic “Walk around, find encounter, spam attacks, rinse repeat,” Disgaea tends to take more of a puzzle route. End game grinding in Disgaea is less about how much you grind and more about making your grind as efficiently as possible.
Let’s take D4 as an example. D4 has a set of end game maps that culminate in a map that is incredibly simple. It’s just a large square of enemies, arranged in a specific pattern. And it’s possible, with the right set of skills, abilities, and setup, to hit and clear this entire map in one hit, and hit the level cap after a single fight in this map. This isn’t an oversight. The map is designed in such a way to be beaten like this, and cleared incredibly quickly.
D6 is different. Unlike other games in the series, you will have to grind to beat the main story, because the level cap has been extended twice, all the way up to something like 9,999,999,999, along with the stat cap. The leveling process itself is much faster, and but there are still a few points where if you’re playing each map once, you won’t be high enough level to clear the next one.
And this is where some of the game’s new systems, Demonic Intelligence (D.I. for short), auto-play, and auto-repeat come into play. DI is effectively a visual programming language. Each unit can store up to five of these, and have a single one active. When you toggle on the auto-play feature, the game will have your units execute commands based off their active DI. If you toggle on auto-repeat, when you clear the map, you’ll just start it over again. Which means this is the point where D6 switches from being a tactics game, to being an incremental game.
DI is a really cool idea. I really would like to say I love it. Unfortunately, I can’t because in its current incarnation, it has some massive flaws. Disgaea 6 doesn’t have any form of documentation/information about exactly how DI works. When I say documentation, I mean explaining how the various functions work. For example, it would be great if the game explained that “The Target an Enemy Function will target the closest enemy starting by checking clockwise…” but it doesn’t. And while normally this wouldn’t be too bad, it brings me to the second point. There’s no real way to debug or step by step execute DI Instead, you can either have it turned on or off. There are also several commands that are effectively useless such as option that lets you target a specific square on a grid, without any way to figure out how gridding for maps works.
The end result is a system that is very hard to get it to dowhat you want. Instead, I found myself just sort of brute-forcing it. I would run DI setups that I thought would fail, and they would end up working. More often than not, though, the DI setups I thought would work instead failed. Instead of using DI as a solution to automate grinding to high levels, I tended to make simple patterns, and just have units leveled up high enough that I could face roll through content.
And generally speaking, this would be mostly fine if it wasn’t for another new system: Karma.
Karma functions as a replacement for the Chara World systems from previous games. These are areas that you would use to permanently boost your characters’ growth and stats.
In D6, instead of having an item world equivalent like D4, or a Mario Party board game like D5, each time you reincarnate a character, you get a certain amount of Karma. You’re then given a menu where you can spend this Karma on a variety of things, including extra evilities, stat boosts, and…. max level and stat caps.
And here’s the problem: because of the ridiculous scaling in D6, scaling your stats with Karma feels like the most effective way to boost scaling. But because the level cap is so high, it takes several hours of grinding with DI to have your party hit the level cap. Or you can do this bullshit and have a single member of your party hit max level in about 5 minutes, but there’s no way to use DI to farm it.
Regardless of how you choose to do it, once you do, you hit one final wall: The amount of Karma you get per reincarnation is “relatively” small. And because this is Disgaea, let me give some exact numbers. Each reincarnation from max level gives about 120,000,000 Karma. Each stat point past 2,000 costs 5,000,000 Karma to buy. Stats cap at 4,000. There are like 6 stats. I was gonna say “I’ll let you do the math”, but that’s a cop out, so instead, here it is.
Getting a single character to max stats would require you to run this 3-5 minute setup about 500 times. So, assuming maximum generosity, just about 25 hours, if each loop took 3 minutes. There is no way to speed it up or make it faster.
I wouldn’t say this is the defining factor of D6 for me, but it does highlight what feels like the weirdness of the game. It’s a game based around massive numbers, but makes getting to them a chore. It adds autogrinding and looping, but it does so in a way that makes the system hard to utilize, and debug, and means that you end up skipping more content than you play. And even when you use those systems, in the hyper late game, they’re less efficient than actually playing the game by such a massive amount that you may as well just ignore them.
While it might seem like I don’t like D6 given how much time I just spent tearing parts of the game apart, those things only came to annoy me because I spent so much time playing the game. I do want to call out D6 for what it does well: making an attempt at innovating with some of its mechanics and systems, and trying to make them more core to the main game.
The attempt at switching to 3D, and the new combat animations aren’t great, but hopefully that’s the result of unfamiliarity with new tools and systems. DI is a very interesting system, but it’s heavily busted because of the lack of ability to debug and step through behavior. The frame rate is garbage for no reason, so hopefully that gets fixed.
As an entry in the Disgaea franchise, D6 simply wasn’t as fun from a purely tactical gameplay standpoint as D5. The lack of exciting combat mechanics like Overloads, somewhat reduced skills, and lower character class pool didn’t feel as interesting.
So here’s my verdict:
If you already like the Disgaea series for the story and humor, D6 is worth playing through for those.
If you already liked the series for munchkining tactics and extensive vidya bullshit, and don’t give a shit about the story, D6 is probably not going to be your cup of tea.
And if you’ve never played a Disgaea game before, well, it depends. D6 is in many ways a good introduction to the series, with some of the simplified systems, and auto-grinding. But those same elements also make the meta-flow of progression less interesting, so if you want to see what the franchise’s mechanics are all about, I’d suggest D5 instead.
A list of Good Stuff you can get on Microsofts Gamepass Service.
Ah, Gamepass. If you haven’t heard of it, Gamepass is Microsoft’s “Netflix for games” service. After some jackass gave me shit for pre-ordering Back 4 Blood, saying that it would come out on Gamepass, and I could play the whole thing for like $10 instead of $80, I decided to see if there was anything else on the service I’d care about. And there is! In fact, my opinion is if you play more than 3 AAA games per year, it probably makes sense to subscribe Gamepass for a few months of the year.
So anyway, that’s what today’s thing is. A list of the good games on Gamepass that I’ve been playing recently, what each game is, what I think of it, and why you should play it. Some of these you’ve probably heard of, and some you probably haven’t. But anyway, let’s get into the list.
Ikenfell is a turn-based tactical RPG with quick time event-style minigames for attacking and blocking. (Think the Super Mario RPG sorta stuff.) Plotwise, the hook is that you go to a magic forest that has a wizard school in it to try to find your missing sister who was attending said wizard school.
Storywise, I thought it was amazing. The music was almost all really good. There was one boss battle where the music sort of took me out of the moment, but that was it.
With that said, the game is a little grindy. Unless you like the grind, I suggest turning on the game’s accessibility options or cheat mode to farm EXP, and then turning them back off for the boss fights, where the combat is the most interesting. The puzzles are also pretty good.
I love Psychonauts 2. It’s the best platformer of the year in my opinion. Psychonauts 2 is a puzzle platformer that requires a lot of outside the box thinking and trickery.
While it frontloads a lot of mechanics, I got used to them pretty quickly. The side quests feel amazing even when they’re just fetch quests. The Art style was mildly off-putting, but I got used to it after a bit. The story is also really good, and better then the first game in my opinion. While a lot of the gameplay returns from the first game, there are a few new abilities, including a time stop. There are also lots of new minigames. Finally, the pacing of new enemies is much better than its predecessor: there’s a new enemy each area, and a fairly good variety of foes.
If you do decide to pick up Psychonauts 2, I highly suggest you get the “Deal Double Damage, Take Double Damage” ability as soon as you can, because without it enemies can feel a bit tanky. Like trying to break a brick with a pool noodle.
Clustertruck is a fast paced 3d platformer. Unlike what the splash image might imply, you do not spend it smashing trucks into each other. Instead, you play a high-speed highway version of the floor is lava, except the only part of the floor you can stand on is trucks being launched at incredible speeds.
While I think Clustertruck has the best movement of anything in this list, I really don’t like how the abilities you use get unlocked. You have a trick meter that you fill by doing tricks and stuff. Except by the time I got to the final level, I had unlocked maybe half.
On that subject, I did not like the final level. It breaks a bunch of the conventions that the rest of the game set up, and not in a fun way.
Ed Note: We already have a full writeup on Hades that you can read here. As I don’t feel like retyping out 90% of that review, I’m just going to put two or three choice quotes from that article below, and call it good enough. Frankly, I think all the game of the year awards from…. everyone really do a good enough job.
“I have no criticisms.”
“The only roguelite that has ever made me want to keep playing just because of the strength of the story.”
“The characters and their relationships offer unique takes on the characters that you may already be familiar with, but will still be presented in a new light.”
So yeah, everyone loves it, and everyone but me has played it.
Sunset Overdrive is a action adventure game, with both third person shooter elements, and little bit of Tony Hawk movement. Its tone feels a bit like Borderlands.
This game came out in 2014, and it does sorta show. Character creation was limited, and all the characters look ugly IMO. But that’s the aesthetic. Graphics quality is fine for its time. The guns feel good, there’s a huge map to explore, and the characters are memorable and odd. There was one annoying child I wanted to run over a with bus, but after a bit, I didn’t want to run him over as much. So. Character development.
I do have two problems with it, but I have only played 5 hours so far, so perhaps these get alleviated? Anyway, here they are.
It can be hard to find where resources you need for an upgrade are. There’s no radar or anything.
I really don’t like the holdout missions where you have to protect some payload from zombies. In every other game with this sort of mission, you want to hold a position and mow them down. Since Sunset Overdrive instead wants to constantly be moving around to keep up your combo meter, the end result is the two systems clashing, and these missions feeling kind of junky to play.
So yeah, if any of these strike your fancy, you may want to check out Gamepass for PC.
Note: These were all played through Gamepass for PC. The editor to too lazy to check if they’re on all Gamepass for Xbox, because he doesn’t own one.
Super Mystery Dungeon came out 5 years ago, but I’m playing it now, so… yeah.
Ed Note: the full name for any of the games in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series tends to be Pokémon Mystery Dungeon : <Title of the Rest of the Game>. Because these titles end up being 7 words long, I’ve shortened them down to just <Title of the Rest of the Game> for this writeup.
I really like the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. This shouldn’t be confused with the Mystery Dungeon Mainline series, or any of the spinoffs. In fact, I recently tried to play one of the mainline series, which led me back to playing Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon instead, because Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate kicked my ass.
So what exactly makes up the Mystery Dungeon series, why do I like the spinoff Pok é mon games better, and am I filthy casual for jumping off the mainline series?
First off, let’s briefly talk about the Mystery Dungeon Series as a whole. It’s the name for a whole bunch of games published by Chunsoft. And because I’ve only played one game in the series that isn’t a spinoff, I’m gonna just link the Wikipedia article here. Generally speaking, though, it’s one of the few games that can be described as roguelike without annoying that magical group of people who are overly twitchy about the roguelike label being misapplied. That is to say, it’s a turn-based dungeon crawler on a grid.
So, second question. Why do I like the Pokémon spinoff games better? While this article is specifically talking about Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, I’ve played and really enjoyed Blue Rescue Team and Explorers of Time. Gates to Infinity was mediocre. But it didn’t turn me off the series enough to avoid Super Mystery Dungeon when it came out. To answer why I like the spinoff games better than the mainline ones, I’m going to compare the games to what I’ve seen so far of Shiren, and list the things the Pokémon games do differently. Here’re a few of the reasons:
Wiping in a dungeon in the spinoff games doesn’t reset your level. While you do lose all your items and money, you don’t go back to level 1. This means that you can grind your way through bullshit, and a wipe doesn’t feel like a complete loss of progress.
Speaking of which, escape scrolls/escape orbs (items that let you escape the dungeon with all of your stuff if everything looks like it’s about to go to shit) actually drop in the Pokemon games, while they apparently only show up if you get rescued in a dungeon in the mainline series.
Oh, and revival seeds exist, so that when an enemy you haven’t seen before TPK’s your squad, you can actually keep playing, instead of just getting dunked on.
The fact that the game has Pokémon as the characters is a benefit, but perhaps even more importantly for me, as the games go on, you get the ability to play as almost any of them, which gives a massive pool of playable characters.
Outside of all these mechanics though, one thing I’ve always liked about Pokémon in general is the sense of exploration. There’s always been something neat and magical for me about the idea of venturing around somewhere and discovering something fantastic. And while I don’t get that feeling from the current mainline Pokémon games, it’s still present in the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs.
So now that we know why I like the Pokémon spinoffs the best, let’s talk about why I like Super Mystery Dungeon the most of the spinoffs.
While the general gameplay is the same, there are a few big changes to how teambuilding works for the post game. For starters, you recruit new team members by completing missions and adding them to your connection sphere. This is nice compared to the older games which instead required you to defeat an enemy, and then win a hidden role to recruit them. In addition to that, you then had to either complete or escape the dungeon with said team member.
Next up, treasure! Super Mystery Dungeon has treasure chests, like the games before it, but also has gold bars, a secondary currency that you keep regardless of whether you wipe or not in a dungeon. They’re just fun to get, and unlike other items, they don’t actually show up on the mini-map. Instead, they show as little sparkles that you have to walk over, and when you do, you’ll get gold bars or another useful item.
If I have a complaint about Super Mystery Dungeon, it would be that prior to the postgame, the game felt a bit slow. To be fair, I was playing it about 3 years ago. But I remember being frustrated by how slowly I learned new moves and leveled up.
So that’s the Mystery Dungeon set of games. If the idea of a cool little Pokemon dungeon crawler with a massive amount of content and postgame appeals to you, break out that 3DS, grab yourself a copy off eBay, and dive in.
