Category: Video Games

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is most beautiful game I’ve played this year. Visually, it’s an absolute love letter to art and the physical creation of art.

I wish I could say something as nice about the gameplay or story.

I have to admit, I feel like I got beaten to the punch on this review. By Kotaku of all places. By some dude named Moises Tavera.

It really does look this good in-game.

This game is stunning. It’s rare that I suggest playing a game for the visuals. In fact, I think I’ll let that stand as my general recommendation when it comes to The Plucky Squire.

But take away those visuals, and you’re left with an easy and incredibly linear game. And it’s a shame, because The Plucky Squire has so much potential in its mechanics. But it never really offers the player any freedom to use them.

Story

The Plucky Squire is the story of Jot. Jot lives in a storybook world where he stops the schemes of the evil wizard Humgrump, with help from his two friends and the wise wizard Moonbeard. It’s implied that this has happened many times before, but this time, Humgrump blasts Jot with magic that kicks him out the story. For most of the game, you’ll be jumping in and out between the between the book and the “real world” of a child’s work desk.

This meta aspect of “Story within a story” isn’t really examined too much ( except for it possibly causing a time paradox). Again, this is fine. It’s a minor element, and it doesn’t bother me.

What does annoy me is how simple the story is. Ostensibly it’s a tale about creativity and imagination, but it really only pays lip service to that concept. Jot is a writer, and his sword is a pen nib. Okay, that’s cool, but where is that mechanically?

There was a lot of space to foreshadow the game’s one big surprise (the villain was once an artist too!), but the developers chose not to do any forehsadowing. In addition, the “one big twist” isn’t relevant to the story.

Side Note: I don’t think that the Plucky Squire was trying to make Humgrump relatable. But I found him kinda relatable after the game reveals that he used to just be a bad poet. I’m an amateur artist who is quite bad at art, and struggles to enjoy it. I’m cognizant of my own lack of improvement. I put most of my energy into the job that pays me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from The Plucky Squire’s story. If I don’t improve my art, I’ll become an evil wizard?

There’s also a real disconnect between the game’s written message—that of a love letter to creativity and imagination—and how linear the actual gameplay is.

Gameplay

Ostensibly, The Plucky Squire is a puzzle platformer. Let’s start with the platforming. This game’s primary conceit is the ability to jump between a 2d top-down book, and a 3d “real world.” Both worlds control pretty much the same, outside of the third dimension. There’s also a very small number of side scrolling sections. There’s combat, but it’s so laughably easy that it mostly just serves to break up the puzzles

But the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles.

The puzzles are incredibly dull.

The Plucky Squire introduces a large number of mechanics that could have been used as part of a larger scale system of puzzles. And then it just… doesn’t use them. While you’re given a variety of abilities, they really just function as keys.

For example: the game gives you the ability to stop objects in the scene. But you only use it in a few specific areas to stop specific objects. The game gives you the ability to tilt the book. But tilting only pushes around one or two things, and it pushes them on hard coded rails.

This path unlocks with the stop time key. This other path unlocks with the bomb key. Another path unlocks with the tilt key.

Okay, this mini-game was actually decent.

The mini-games don’t really help. They’re amusing, but they’re also short, and it’s hard to see how Punch Out, or Puzzle Bobble really sell the themes of the characters you’re playing as.

And the stealth sections with the bugs just kind of suck. They are the only part of the game where I struggled at all, and it’s mostly due to weird patterns, and strange pathing and sight lines.

But speaking of bugs…

Bugs

The game is buggy. It’s less buggy now that it’s been 3 weeks since release. But a non-zero portion of my playtime was spent trying to fix a soft lock in the final chapter of the game where my characters got stuck looking at a bench. Sure, it got fixed, but it got fixed by another Steam user, not the devs.

There was also apparently a fairly big bug that would permanently lock up the game if you used two mechanics in a non-intended way. Again, this goes back to the whole “abilities act as keys to specific doors” thing.

I am pretty lenient on bugs and glitches most of the time, but there was point where it looked like I had wasted 6 hours of my life.

I was pretty grumpy.

In Retrospect

Okay, so looking back, I finished The Plucky Squire about 3 weeks ago. Then I got involved in some other stuff, and never finished this write up. This last weekend, and I did a game jam, and I got a pretty solid reminder of the fact that 1. Making games is hard and 2. Getting players to do what you want is hard.

With that lens, I don’t think the Plucky Squire set out to be patronizing to its players. I do think though that the game was likely rushed in development.

There are a bunch of small hints that point to rushed development. For me, the biggest hint is how Jot’s friends just don’t have character arcs. They’re foisted into the game, given a fear, given one screen of character development an hour later to get rid of said fear, and a mini-game section in the final boss.

And looking through this lens of rushed development, it makes a lot more sense as to why a set of potentially fascinating mechanics involving clever interactions are dumbed down to a set of linear puzzles.

I could be wrong on this, but the scale of the art in the game to me screams “over ambition” more than it does “dumbed down for kids.” You don’t make something this beautiful but mechanically and thematically hollow on purpose. You make it because you ran out of time.

Conclusion

The Plucky Squire is a 10/10 for art, and a 6/10 for story and gameplay. What does that make it over all? I don’t know. It’s too visually impressive to be a seven, but it’s frankly not invigorating enough in either mechanics or narrative to elevate it to an eight.

Maybe the truth is that numbers are a bad way to assess art. That said, this piece of art cost me $30 bucks. If it had been $20 or $15, I might be more lenient.

As it is, I’d advise anyone curious about the game to wait for a sale and pick it up when it’s a bit cheaper. It’s worth seeing. It’s just not worth playing.

Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a short game. Just under 3 hours. I could have played it while watching Return of the King, and still have 20 minutes left before the credits. On the other hand, each hobbit foot probably took 9 people to make, and that’s the number of bodies left in my wake by the time the game ended. James Bond has a license to kill, but I don’t.

Pictured here: Something I did not do a single time in the game.

It may just be that I don’t make a very good noir PI. As I made my way through Gunpoints levels, I found myself wondering what the game would look like if someone else was playing. Would they elegantly rewire switches? Carefully trick guards into opening doors for them? Swiftly and effectively smash down windows, and call elevators?

Or perhaps they’d still just play like me: a crab in a trench coat. Scuttling about and turning off the lights, and almost brute forcing their way through the level.

While Gunpoint is ostensibly a sort of stealth platformer, the Crosswire device is its standout mechanic.

You can make the lights turn off when a guard pulls the trigger on their gun, or call the elevator with a motion detector. Or you can just make the security camera open the door for you instead of setting off the alarms.

However, levels only start with the ability to rewire objects on the red frequency. For any other color/shape of wire, you need to get to and attach a hacking device to a breaker. In later levels, reaching this is a large portion of the puzzle.

It’s also a good place to talk about the flaws of Gunpoint. None of these are big, but they all feel like things that would have gotten some more consideration if the game released today.

For the Crosswire, the flaw is that two of the primary colors are red and green, which feel like it would be quite easy to screw up if you were color blind. And while symbology for what can be linked together, the symbols only appear when an object is moused over.

The narrative and the mechanics are often in conflict. The biggest example would be how much fun it is to jump on guards and beat them up. There’s a fun audio cue, a button prompt, and then at the end of the game, I get told how many people I killed and injured.

It just feels bad.

None of these are dealbreakers. Just small annoyances. And perhaps Gunpoint would have overstayed it’s welcome if it had been longer. Still, I do wish there was a bit more too it.

Another Night In A City That Goes To Bed On Time

Gunpoint is fine. Eleven years ago it was probably an incredible indie experience, but these days, the bar is higher, and frankly, in that time Tom Francis has made better games like Tactical Breach Wizards. It’s not my worst use of $10 this year, but it’s not my best either.

As a final brief note, I want to mention something. Once you beat the final level of Gunpoint, you get the door-kickers. These are a pair of boots that allow you to just run full tilt and kick down doors. They are incredibly fun, completely break level structure, and I really have to wonder why it wasn’t possible to give them to me before I beat the game.

Like, yeah, they’re busted, but it would have been such a great finale.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.

Tactical Breach Wizards

I accidentally locked myself in my bedroom this morning, a problem I dealt with by climbing out of a window. This is an actual thing that happened, because I am an idiot.

It does however, provide a useful segue. After managing to get back into the parts of my apartment that aren’t where I sleep, I sat down to play more Tactical Breach Wizards, a game where problems can also be solved via windows.

Most of the time that solution is to shove someone through them.

Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics/puzzle game by Suspicious Developments. If you’ve ever played a tactics game before, you’ve seen at least the bones of what’s on offer here: Given a small set of elite units, you’re forced to fight your way through a series of mooks in a linear campaign, played in turns on a grid map.

Except in Tactical Breach Wizards, where the enemy has assault rifles, chain guns, grenades, and automated turrets, you have a skull named Gary, a wand with a scope on it, chain lightning, the ability to raise the dead, rewind time, and illegal narcotics.

The end result is that there’s a lot less laying down strategic overwatch, and a lot more trying to figure out how to shove someone into a bullet you will fire in the future to get enough mana to make a body double of yourself to hack a turret.

Image taken several seconds before throwing myself out a window. Just like in real life!

And while the game starts out simple, it builds up to be far more complex. Fortunately, the you also get a much wider variety of tools to use as additional characters join the party, and as you use the perk system to boost those characters.

The characters are quite well rounded, and tend to have both a personal consistent theme, and a synergistic gimmick. As an example, let’s look at Jen.

Pondering the orb.

Jen’s basic ability is a “non-damaging” lightning blast. The non-damaging is in quotes because while the shot does not do damage, being shoved into a wall, exposed electrical cables, or another enemy still hurts! Her primary spell is a bit like a boosted version of the shot: a set of chain lightning that can link multiple enemies together and shove them around. Finally, she has a broom that can be used to jump out any window and then enter via another, and a grenade that knocks everyone back.

In addition to all of this, many of her upgrades focus around giving her additional movement phases. The the end result is a character that can move themselves and others. And while on the surface, Jen doesn’t have any direct damage, the ability to throw yourself out a window, jump to the other side of the map, and throw a grenade that tosses 3 battle priests out of a fancy stained glass window is incredibly effective.

At the same time, her kit is also very synergistic with other characters’ abilities. One party member has an ability that allows him to shoot into the future by picking a space with no enemies in it, and shooting if one enters. Another throws speedballs at enemies that increase their knockback taken. Jen can push enemies into the space locked down by the first, and blast enemies debuffed by the second much further.

And pretty much everyone who ends up in the party is designed this way: highly synergistic while also fulfilling a valuable roll on their own.

The enemy of all law abiding-ish citizens: the traffic cop.

I don’t really have any complaints about Tactical Breach Wizards, but I do have some observations. I found the game quite difficult, probably because I played on hard. But there were still several levels that felt a bit too puzzle-y for my liking. I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards the most when it felt like there were multiple solutions and paths to complete a level, and much less I was trying find the single right solution.

Now, the game absolutely gives you the tools to find those solutions. 99% of enemy actions are deterministic, there’s no penalty to restarting a level. Every single action on a turn can be rewound and replayed. At the end of each turn you can foresee the future, and see how enemies will act. It’s just that I enjoyed the game more when I felt like I was trying to punch my way out of a gunfight, instead of repeatedly restarting because I moved one square to the left incorrectly five minutes ago.

I don’t think it’s spoilers if it’s the start of the second level of the game.

There’s one sort of last big thing about the game I want to call out, but not really discuss: the writing and story. It’s very good. I’ve heard some people compare it to Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett is actually my favorite author, and I’m hesitant to say that that the game as a whole reminds me of Pratchett, or at least Discworld. There are are humorous moments that feel like Pratchett, but the game has a tone much closer to his work that he did with other authors, like All The Long Earth, or Good Omens.

The longer scope means games can do a lot more things than books or movies, and Tactical Breach Wizards jumps around tonally. It’s a buddy cop flick, then it’s an action thriller, and then it’s a war story. There’s a certain level of harshness and melancholy to the later parts of game that feels appropriate. But it’s not a level of harshness I would associate with Pratchett.

The best compliment I can give the writing is this: My investment in the story served to pull me back to the game each time I quit to take a break after finding myself struggling with a level.

More Like Tactical Beach Wizar- wait, they make that joke in the credits.

Overall, I enjoyed Tactical Breach Wizards. It took me around 14 hours and that was on hard while ignoring many of the bonus objectives and extra modes, so if I’d loved it 100% there would still be more to play. It was $20 well spent.

That said, I’m not super interested in playing more because I’m about to start playing through everything else Suspicious Developments have made, including Heat Signature, Gunpoint, and Morphblade. So let’s find out if they’re just as good as Tactical Breach Wizards absolutely is.

Cobalt Core

I finished Cobalt Core months and months ago, and Fritz has been bothering me to review is ever since. So! To buy myself some peace and quiet, let’s talk about this sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

This game was made for me. I love roguelikes, especially roguelike deckbuilders—I’ve 100% completed Hades and Slay the Spire, and I’ve sunk countless hours into trying to do the same in Monster Train (not yet, but one day). I’m a sucker for crew-on-a spaceship games. And Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favorite games ever (published by Brace Yourself Games, the publisher of Cobalt Core).

So on paper, a spaceship deckbuilder roguelike that’s like if FTL, Hades, and Slay the Spire had a baby published by the publisher of Crypt of the Necrodancer would be the perfect game for me… And it is. Cobalt Core is fantastic.

The Mechanics

Okay yeah I guess I have to explain the mechanics.

You have a spaceship. It points to the top of the screen.

There’s an opposing spaceship. It points down towards you. Fight!

You and the opposing spaceship take turns. On your turn you play the hand of cards you drew from your deck, doing things like firing your blasters, activating your drone bays, shielding your ship, or moving your ship left and right. Your ships are aligned in vertical lanes, so that each component of your ship is lined up with a component on the opponent’s ship (or empty space). You’ll move your ship around to try to make sure that your blasters line up with the opponent’s vulnerable cockpit, and that their blasters line up with empty space.

The rest is pretty straightforward deckbuilder roguelike. Try to kill the opposing ship without taking too much damage (ideally none). Spend money to upgrade your ship with “relics” (to borrow the term from Slay The Spire) heal yourself, and add cards to your deck. Choose your route through each system between combat, hard combats, shops, encounters, etc. Each system ends with a miniboss, and you’re trying to beat the final boss.

And there are a reasonable amount of pre-run options. You can choose different ships with different specialties and configurations. Also each card in the game belongs to one of several suits, one for each of the crew members. At the start of the run you choose which 3 crew members you’d like to play with this time, and that determines what cards you can see. Each crew member has their own focal mechanics, like the one who’s good at drones, or the one who has strong attacks that overheat your ship.

The Story

Another place Cobalt Core really shines is its story. For a while, it seemed like roguelikes and story didn’t mix, and most deckbuilder roguelikes didn’t even try to have a story.

(To some extent, I wonder how much “writing story” and “designing card game mechanics” are skill sets that don’t overlap.)

When they tried, the narrative would be very very lightly implied with environmental storytelling. Seriously, why are we slaying this spire? Something something, pact with heaven, so now I’m on a monster train.

Then Hades happened, and suddenly every roguelike is trying to be character- and story-driven. It’s really hard to land that, but Cobalt Core pulls it off. The characters are cute, and I wanted to learn more about them. And perhaps even more challenging: the dialogue is good and funny. I’m not going to write anything more in order to avoid spoilers. Just go play it.

The one iffy story bit is how the story is rolled out. Whenever you win a run, you can unlock the next cutscene from one of the crew members you chose to play with. When you unlock all the cutscenes, there’s a final final boss battle and you can win.

I didn’t mind this, and I was interested to unlock all the custscenes. But the cutscenes got in the way of the “one more run” feeling that can make roguelikes so great. The most clever roguelikes even elide one run into the next so that you just keep trying. And Cobalt Core’s cutscenes do the opposite, interrupting my play experience and providing a point to put down the game. Even though I liked the scenes, I often found myself pausing the game and walking away without watching them.

I don’t really know why Hades is able to offer story in the hub without disrupting that flow. Maybe it’s because each of the dialogue updates you get from characters are so short, and there are always only a few. But I’d have liked to see more of that in Cobalt Core.

The Problem

In my opinion Cobalt Core has one big problem: there just isn’t enough of it. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Absolutely. In fact, go buy it now on Steam or Switch.

But I’m used to roguelikes really letting me test my mettle by giving me tons of difficulty ratchets and interesting achievements to chase. Cobalt Core really doesn’t have these. It has a few ships and 4 or so difficulty increases to unlock, but there’s no incentive to even play on those other ships. I had to invent my own personal goal of winning on highest difficulty with each of the ships, and even that wasn’t too hard.

So in short, go buy this game, play it, and then the studio can invest that money in adding to the game. I don’t even want much; just a list of arbitrary challenges/achievements, and maybe 15 more difficulty ratchets. Add those, and I think Cobalt Core is perfect.