Category: Video Games

Welcome to Didn’t Make the Cut #2, where we continue our way through all the games in the itch.io Racial Justice Bundle that just didn’t want to make me play them. The ordering here doesn’t reflect anything other than how interesting I thought they were. These are all the things that just didn’t keep my interest long enough to warrant a full article.

Extreme Meatpunks Forever

I can’t write an entire article about Extreme Meatpunks Forever because I didn’t play the game for longer than like 20 minutes. I feel like this was a fair shake, but I really wasn’t feeling it.

Like, here is the summary of the game from its itch.io page.

A visual novel/mech brawler about gay disasters beating up neonazis in giant robots made of meat.

Heather

Which is. I dunno. I think you can probably read that and decide if the game is for you or not.

My one sentence review of the game would be this: the game feels like a playable Zine. The game feels very cobbled together. The backgrounds are ASCII, the characters are single images, and the writing wobbles between really neat sci-fi and dialogue that doesn’t include things like capitalization and punctuation.

This one just wasn’t for me.

Music was fucking banging though.

Walden

I can’t find my notes for Walden, but more or less, it feels like a very light survival simulator.

There’s a type of game that exists which is biblical or religious, and they tend to exist in order to try to get you interested whatever religion or such they’re selling. The problem is, they tend to be made by people who are religious first, and game designers second. The intended result is usually to use the game like the lure on the end of those deep sea fish, where the fish’s jaws metaphorically represent joining whatever cult made the thing in the first place.

Usually they’re not very successful, because the other fish (game companies) have far more exciting lures, and those fish jaws only represent things like microtransactions and loot boxes. And I guess the risk of becoming a pathological gambler is better than becoming a member of the Mason family?

Regardless, Walden feels like a game made by that sort of person. Except instead of trying to convince you to give them your life savings and move to a commune in Pripyat to be one with the Everglow the Light Mother, the designers of Walden seem to want you to read the book that inspired them to make the game. If this was their goal, I think they kinda succeeded.

I’m actually fairly curious about reading Walden (the book) now. Maybe avoid it if you’re afraid of “transcendentalist philosophy.” (Apparently that’s what the book’s about. I just stole this from Wikipedia, so I hope it’s right.) Still not gonna play any more of the game though.

If you’re still interested in Walden, you can find it here.

Art Sqool

In Art Sqool, you walk around a weird world and draw things, given instructions and graded by what I assume is Microsoft’s mascot Clippy’s brother who got into hard drugs instead of software development. You can pick up more brushes and colors in this world, but that’s it. It’s not really a platformer in any typical sense. It’s mostly just exploration across the “Campus,” which gives the impression of what a wasting illness called “Clipart” would look like on skin.

Whenever I’m playing through these games, I like to take some brief notes that I can review later in order to give thoughtful, detailed opinions. For example, this is what I wrote about Extreme Meatpunks Forever.

-At least it’s a game
-Not a very interesting one
-Seems like it’s mostly visual novel
-I do not care about these characters
-Some aspects of the worldbuilding seem cool
-Rad Music

My Dumb Review Notes for Meatpunks

“Now wait”, you think. Isn’t this bit supposed to be about Art Sqool? Well yes, dear reader, it is. But I present those notes as an example. Let’s now look at the notes for Art Sqool.

-This ain’t a game
-Why does this exist
-Remember kids, when making games, don’t forget to include gameplay
-I hate this

My Dumb Review Notes for Art Sqool

Now, given that all interactive visual media can be more or less considered a game, and after discussion with someone else, I’d like to present the following quote.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for art that wasn’t stupid. Generally speaking, when a person constructs a thought-machine of this kind, what they’re actually trying to do is determine what isn’t art.

Jerry Holkins

And to be fair the same is true of games. Saying that something is or isn’t a game is arbitrary, and as such, I’m willing to concede that the first line of my notes is wrong.

In a secondary non-concession to the fact that this is still my article to write, I’m not linking the game here. I think it’s stupid, bad, and I loathe it. Fuck Art Sqool.

That’s all I got for today. Until next time.

I wanted to like Beacon. I really did. But overall right now, given that the game isn’t even finished, I can’t recommend it. So what is Beacon, why might you want to play it, and why should you avoid it?

Beacon is a top down real time isometric roguelike. It’s interesting if nothing else for actually not being 2D, despite the fact that the player doesn’t have a jump, and the whole game takes place in 3D environments. Interesting isn’t the same as good though, so we’ll come back to that later.

So why shouldn’t you play Beacon? Well, for starters, the game isn’t actually finished. Currently you can play through about six stages, and then the game just kills you at the end, because there isn’t anything else there. Secondly, it seems somewhat unstable. It took me less than 10 runs to get to the end of the current final area in the game. The only reason it isn’t a lower number is because the game crashed on a very good run early on, and forced me to restart.

Let’s say you don’t care about these reasons. Well, Beacon does very little that’s actually new. The game plays like a Frankenstein of mechanics. Each run starts by selecting the DNA you’re going to use for the run. This includes things health, stamina (yes, they’re two different things), armor, crit, luck, and I stopped caring because there are too many of them. This is followed by the DNA being sequenced, at which point any DNA mods you got are applied, and DNA has a chance to mutate, which permanently changes functionality of your character during the run. You arm might split open and replace your melee attack with a sonic projectile. You might get the ability to…. lifesteal while set on fire. Or maybe your legs just become pus-filled blobs that leave a trail of slime whenever you dash. It doesn’t really matter though, because:

1. Most of these end up playing the same, and

2. You’ll get multiple runs with those pieces of DNA, after which they die, and you can’t use them anymore.

I couldn’t see a pattern in which specific mutations actually occur, so I couldn’t, for example, use DNA to build a fire-based build, or anything. Also, some mutations are just boring. I had one that just massively decreased crit, on DNA that I had picked to increase crit.

Cool. So, since that’s done, let’s actually play. Each level is randomly generated, but ends up following a pretty similar pattern. Throughout your run, you’ll pick up DNA to use for future runs, guns, side equipment, sidearms and grenades.

Taking a step back for a minute, weapons are one of the few things that feel like they’re done correctly. Many of them are quite interesting (bone boomerang gun) and extra weapons can be recycled for ammo mods, which give a permanent boost for the rest of the run to your remaining weapons.

Grenades are worthless. I don’t know why they’re in the game, and I don’t know why you’d use them. They’re boring, pointless, and hard to aim.

Okay, now let’s talk about pickups and auxiliary. I don’t know which one is which, and I do not care. All you need to know is that the game lets you have one of each, and the grouping of items in these slots makes no sense.

For example: an item that gives you a chance to fully reload your magazines on kill, as a passive. Or a 5-use boost jump. An item that caps your health at 75, but gives you permanent health regeneration. Or a 10-use of a set of daggers that lifesteal if you hit with them.

There is literally no reason to ever pick up the consumables instead of the passive boost ones, the passive are just that much better. Also, unlike guns, these can’t be recycled for ammo mods. You can destroy them to get a single extra grenade. Hooooorayyy.

This brings me to my biggest gripe with the game overall: the art.

Beacon has beautiful art, but it’s almost entirely counter productive to the actual gameplay, i.e. being a fast-paced run and gun roguelike. The readability of the screen is garbage. Everything is done in a sort of low poly style, but instead of making it easier to tell whats going on, it’s messed up with tons of unnecessary detail, lighting, and other graphical crap. My favorite example of this would be the fact that slime and acid look almost exactly the same, but one is simply an armor reducing debuff, and the other is a DOT that can kill you.

Oh, and speaking of death, the game has insta-deaths. Falling off a ledge won’t kill you, but if you make the unfortunate error of somehow ending up on top of a bunch of spikes, that’s it. Run over.

There are good moments in Beacon: the dodging can feel nice, the weapons are cool. But the game feels like a bloated Frankenstein monster. It tries to do too much all at once, and ends up a playing like someone tried to make an ice-cream shake by going to a variety of fast food joints, ordering a small milkshake at each, then taking them home, shoving them into a blender, straw, cup, lid and all, and then just lighting the thing up. Drinking this shake means that sometimes you’ll get strawberries and chocolate, and sometimes you’ll get strawberries and small shards of plastic.

Also, the game is cakewalk fucking easy. You’ll spend more time being annoyed at trying to figure out where you need to go than you will in interesting fights.

I feel bad about tearing things to shit.

I picked up the Racial Justice Bundle at least in part because I wanted to expose myself to a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t otherwise play. I also started this blog mostly to recommend games to other people. (And to like, pretend to be a game journalist, but same difference.)

This puts me in a bit of a bind regarding A Mortician’s Tale. Aspects of the writing for the game seem extremely strong and well thought out, but as a game, I’d say it’s far closer to a visual novel. The gameplay, at least as far as it’s present, has almost no player agency. I’ll talk about why I feel this way in a moment, but my overall verdict on the game would be this:

A Mortician’s Tale as a game is likely to appeal to individuals who like short, experimental things. The game took about 45 minutes to an hour for me to complete, and that was while reading most of the in-game emails from NPC’s. It has very little replay value outside re-reading text. Unless you have an curiosity for the subject matter (death and funerals) or experimental indie projects, I don’t think you’ll enjoy it.

Despite all that, it’s worth noting that I didn’t put the game into a “Didn’t Make The Cut” article because I did find it fairly interesting and thought-provoking. Let’s talk about that, and also, a brief warning: this article is about to sorta reach that point that most online recipes do, where it says very little about the actual thing you came to the article for (game stuff) and a lot more about the author of the article.

There are three main sections to the game: Preparing Bodies, Attending a Funeral, and Reading Emails. I’m just gonna go through em real quick in that order.

Preparing Bodies is the majority of the “gameplay”-like aspect of A Morticians Tale, and it’s pretty similar in execution to something like Trauma Center: Under the Knife or maybe Cooking Mama. You have a variety of tools that you use in order to accomplish things, but the main kicker is that you actually cannot screw this up. Like, the game will not let you use a tool incorrectly, or at the wrong point in time.

On the one hand, I get it. If you make a death-positive game about the importance of what happens with people after they die, letting the player poke a smiley face into the body of a teenager who killed himself might not fit the tone.

On the other hand, it means that the extent of actual gameplay in the game is limited/non-existent. While being guided through the actions of preparing a body is interesting, the fact that there is no real need to focus or learn anything. After the first body, I more or less just clicked and went as fast as possible, because you don’t actually have to learn anything, and the game doesn’t let you screw up. Anything interesting in this section of the game is limited to learning about the process that is used to prepare a body to be displayed.

Next we have Attending the Funeral. I found this to be a weaker part of the game, as it mostly consists of listening to 4-5 people talk in discussions that are less than a paragraph, and then leaving. Here’s why I’d consider it weaker.

I’ve been to maybe five or six funerals, most of them before I was 18. Almost all have been generally Christian as far as funerals go, but the people in them are fairly different. Off the top of my head, here’s a short list:

1. Grandparents
2. Classmate
3. Family Friend
4. Tutor/Neighbor
5. Family Friend Relative

I mention this because the reasons for these deaths widely varied. Some of these people were very old. One had a long term fatal illness. One was a suicide. Another was in great shape, went for a run, and was killed by a heart attack.

My point would be this: regardless of the death, or the expectation and preparedness for it, funerals are incredibly emotional. A Mortician’s Tale never captured any of that emotion for me. Regardless of who has died, it’s hard to not end up overwhelmed at least a bit, whether it be from loss, or from empathy for those who have lost of a loved one.

This brings us to the last part of the game, reading emails. I would say that this is one of the strongest parts of the game in terms of writing, but again, it doesn’t actually allow any interaction or choices. It’s more like a neat sort of creative writing.

There’s a bunch of interesting stuff here regarding the death business, the up-sell of funeral packages, and the whole concept of as death as an industry. But none of it is actual gameplay.

I already gave my verdict on it up above, but while I wouldn’t recommend the game to people who are solely looking for a game, it’s still interesting as an experience. Also, I’m pretty sure it took me longer to write this article than it did for me to beat the game. So, yknow. Not sure what that means.

Until next time.