Category: Video Games

Stalcraft

Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.

Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.

Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.

If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.

Gameplay Loop

After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.

Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies

There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.

A Hunting We Shall Go

Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.

Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.

Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.

It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.

A Noble Quest

Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.

Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.

Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.

Deliver these items.
Into an active volcanic area.

They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.

The Weird Bit

If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.

See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.

You ready?

Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.

The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.

To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.

It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.

That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?

I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.

That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.

There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.

I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.

In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.

But god, if it isn’t fascinating.

Animal Well

Animal Well is a tricky beast. At its heart, it’s a puzzle game. Sure, it’s a puzzle game with some platforming elements, and a bit of a metroidvania progression structure, but ultimately it’s a puzzle game.

I am not the best at puzzle games. I’ve never done a review of Baba is You, or Snakebird, and my review on Obra Dinn is by no means the most positive. The only reason Obra Dinn has a writeup is because I did in fact “beat” it.

Quick note. Animal Well is the first game released by Big Mode, Dunkey’s publishing house. If this is the standard for the quality we can expect, awesome. It’s not game of the year for me, but it will probably be for someone.

Return of the Eggra Dinn

So, did I beat Animal Well? Well, yes. But actually no.

Getting to the credits for Animal Well is not a very long journey. Both me and a friend who played it got there in about 8 hours. In this sense, Animal Well is not a very long game.

But if you play the game like this, you are probably missing most of it.

Like I mentioned earlier, Animal Well is a puzzle game. There is some platforming, but nothing incredibly difficult, and there are item pickups. But a majority of the game is trying to figure how to progress, and where to progress.

True to form, the game tells you to go right when you start, but there’s a whole set of secrets and hints to secrets directly to the left.

It’s a fairly unguided experience. After starting the game up, the player is shuffled through a set of semi-linear linked zones that function as a tutorial for the general mechanics (jumping, climbing, using items). But since this is a puzzle game, they also function as a sort of tutorial of what to be doing. There are zones hidden behind vines, there are small secret areas. Animal Well is trying to teach you its language.

Even from the start, ignoring the obvious path and going left reveals a secret egg. The first few starting screens are chock full of things to return to, and secrets to find, once you have picked up the right items.

This is the key lesson that Animal Well teaches: question everything. Check everything. Are there pixels missing on a map? It’s probably a secret entrance or area. Can you see something suspicious? You can get there. Come back later.

It’s a brilliant sort of puzzle, and for a majority of the game, it works quite well.

From here on out, any additional discussion of the game requires what I’d consider spoilers. If you love puzzle games, and clever hidden things, here is the time to stop reading. You can go buy the game, and discover them yourself.

Spoilers, and the great egg hunt

Since the credits rolled, I have played a bit more, bringing me up to just shy of 24 hours. I have found 60 of the game’s 64 secret eggs, several other associated secrets, and generally just explored a fair amount. It’s that exploration and investigation that makes a majority of the game’s content.

Most puzzle games are linear, or at least somewhat contained. Animal Well isn’t. Here’s an example. About halfway through the game, it’s possible to discover a set of Lynx cubs in cages. Playing music notes causes lights above their cages to blink. A bit further on, the player discovers a set of arrows on a wall.

It’s not such a big leap to then try to play those music notes near the cages, and voila, one of them opens up. It turns out though that there are five sets of these patterns, and only the first is visible in normal light. The remaining 4 require special light sources to show up, specifically the lantern.

Except the last pattern doesn’t show up with the lantern. It requires the blacklight. The game never signals that the black light exists. It’s possible to find 4/5 patterns, and then go insane searching for the fifth one, because you don’t have the right item yet.

Digital Easter

This is the struggle I have with Animal Well. It both demands a sort of breezy, as you go, come back later approach, combined with obsessive paranoia. Investigate every cranny. Search every nook.

Even the secrets have secrets! I am fairly confident the eggs have a hidden song encoded on them. If only I had all 64…

For a majority of the game, that approach is rewarded, because there are secrets around every corner, hidden eggs behind every vine, bonus puzzles and secret rooms.

But in the late game, that starts to dry up.

A background detail that turns into a key code.

The point at which I decided to call it a day was when I discovered a chest I didn’t know how to open. In the late game, the player gets a device called the remote. It can be used to activate switches remotely, and also scan for chests. It pinged a chest near a large patch of grass, so I decided to investigate. I tried every item. I wandered around looking for entrances. I tried to figure out how to get into this chest.

What is the solution? To scan a piece of grass above the chest with a barcode scanner.

I did not figure this out on my own. It’s entirely possible that the chest doesn’t even have an egg in it. But it’s there. It showed up when I scanned.

The knowledge of this solution was the moment that I decided I was done with Animal Well. The game had won.

Conclusion

Animal Well is fascinating, but it demands a level of attention and effort I didn’t feel like I could give it to finish out the game. The correct way to play would be to screenshot the map, and then comb through it nook by nook, and cranny by cranny.

And I don’t want to do that. There are other games to play, other things to explore, I do not have the patience or ability to continue to drive myself nuts searching for one last thing.

Animal Well is $25 on Steam. If you loved Return of the Obra Dinn, maybe give it shot. And let me know your thoughts on twitter.

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Post Script

Since writing the rest of this article (Okay, 90% of it minus the conclusion), I looked up the locations of the 4 eggs I missed, and a few other things about Animal Well.

With that cheating done, here are some additional thoughts.

One of the eggs I just completely missed. I think I would have eventually discovered it.

The remaining three eggs are based around a single interaction with a specific item: the rubber ball. This interaction is not explained, or even demonstrated in any way with the item. It is (somewhat) hard to discover, because it triggers only in very specific circumstances. Of those three, two eggs were in locations where I was confident there was a secret, but didn’t know how to access it.

I then went and completed the final egg secret ALMOST entirely by myself, (it has a very clever final trick to it that I looked up). What was my reward?

Access to hints about the meta-game puzzles and ARG in Animal Well. At which point, I called it a day. I might look these up at some point, and do some of them, but frankly, I didn’t earn them in any sense, and they’ve already all been solved.

I think my ultimate take on the game, given that I’ve seen more of the structure now, is this: it’s built up in such a way that it tries to pull you in deeper bit by bit, first with searching for the flames, then the harder eggs, then the meta-puzzles. But because the whole game is a giant puzzle, I got lost easily

Cassette Beasts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I never actually played the multiplayer, since it wasn’t out during my play through.

Cassette Beasts is a monster collector RPG. After arriving on a mysterious island, you learn you’re trapped there. You also learn that the island is populated by monsters that can be captured in Cassette Tapes, and used to battle each other. There’s also a set of Gym Leaders Team Captains across the island, each of whom specializes in a different elemental type of monster. You get your own tape deck, and learn to use it to transform into the aforementioned monsters.

Then a hole opens up in the ground, and you fight a dying eldritch god in a subway station.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way. This happens just about 20-30 minutes into the game, but it’s the moment that Cassette Beasts sort of cues you into, that no, you do not in fact know what’s going on, and this isn’t a Pokemon clone.

Quick Notes

Two quick notes about Cassette Beasts.

First, I streamed my entire play-through of the game. If you’re curious about my experience, just watch that. (Especially if you think I’m being unfair about some of the bugs.)

Second, there’s a really good write-up by one of the developers of Cassette Beasts that you can read here. It contains spoilers, but it’s a really well written retrospective on the design choices they made, and why they made them, and I’m going to be referencing it a bit.

Cassette Beasts has two main game play states: overworld exploration/puzzle solving, and turn based combat.

Overworld

The overworld is pretty straight forward, and generally doesn’t have too many twists outside of the aforementioned eldritch god zones. You wander around, and over time you get a few traversal upgrades. You get a slowly descending hover, the ability to turn into a spiky ball to climb walls, and a dash to push through obstacles.

Outside of the weird zones, the Cassette Beasts overworld is by far the weaker of the two modes. It’s not the most inspiring thing to explore, and while it has cool moments, it also can be a bit buggy. There was a part where I just repeatedly clipped through the floor, which was bad, but not as bad as when the game just continually crashed.

Again, fun moments. But it’s mostly there to carry the meat and potatoes of the game, the turn-based combat:

Combat

Most combat in Cassette Beasts is 2v2, with some situations that change that. But in general, it’s your two monsters versus two opposing monsters. This is also where it starts to make significant shifts from Pokemon.

Here’s an example: thematically, you’re not actually capturing monsters, you’re just recording them to use their forms later. Since it’s a transformation, it breaks if you take enough damage. At which point any extra damage (either from multi-hit attacks, or other enemies) goes directly onto the player character. If it was Pokemon, it would be like saying that your trainer has a health bar. This means you can actually get knocked out mid battle, even while you still have monsters left to fight with.

Attacks use a fairly simple energy system, where each attack has a cost. At the start of each turn, each character gets a set amount of energy. As such, using big attacks means having to save up energy for a bit, or finding another way to generate it. But it does mean you can’t just spam your most powerful attacks out for free each turn.

There are a lot of other really interesting systems here, including the way type match-ups work (pretty much nothing like Pokémon), and the fact that all moves are effectively items that can be equipped and unequipped from your monsters. But the short version is that the combat is good, and I often found myself trying to break it, or experimenting with various setups, which is what I want in a game like this.

Fascinating and Frustrating

I like Cassette Beasts, but I also found it kind of difficult to play at times. The game is incredibly open-ended in letting you progress its story and quests, but that comes at the cost of occasionally feeling directionless.

There was one bit where I spent at least an hour and a half trying to solve a puzzle that it turned out didn’t really exist. The actual solution was to bring a specific character to that area that I hadn’t met yet.

There was another time late game where I pretty much just ended up grinding, because it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to beat a boss at my current power level.

At the same time, I pushed through those moments, because I wanted to see how the story would resolve. The boss designs were cool, and while the world is a bit barren, it’s still exciting to find the small secrets in it. For a two person project, it’s hard not to be impressed by the game.

It’s a very solid game, and I’d probably spend more time on it if there just weren’t so many other games available to play. As it is, though, it has just a bit too much friction for me to be interested in spending more time on it after beating the main story.

The Planet Crafter

Ed Note: It would be much easier to just call the game Planet Crafter, but since the game’s title is The Planet Crafter, and SEO exists, I’ll be writing the full title each time.

I like The Planet Crafter. I’m saying that now because a lot of things I’m about to say might give an impression otherwise. So I want to get this out there: It’s a fun game.

It’s just kind of weird.

A lot of games describe themselves as offspring of other games, and you could do that for The Planet Crafter. You could say it’s descended from Cookie Clicker and Satisfactory.

But The Planet Crafter doesn’t come from a happy home. Instead, after the divorce Cookie Clicker got full custody until about the 13 hour mark, when Satisfactory finally got parental visitation rights back, and finally got to introduce The Planet Crafter to the idea of automation.

It’s a weird balance. Much of the play time is spent building structures to make numbers go up, so that you can unlock other structures to make numbers go up faster, in what feels at least like an idle game sort of structure. Eventually you get automation, and it’s possible to make some things automatic. But the game isn’t really about those systems.

For example, electricity generators don’t need to be connected to structures they’re powering, so the game doesn’t really lean into “Optimize the placements of inputs and outputs” the way Factorio and Satisfactory do. It sort of just trundles along. Even the structures that are dependent on placement don’t require too much effort to optimize. They each only boost up to eight nearby structures, and it’s pretty easy to just plop them in range.

General Funkiness

Undertale, one of my favorite games of all time, was made in GameMaker, a development choice that has big “In a cave, with a box of scraps” energy. It’s a good reminder that games are ultimately judged on if they are fun, and not much else.

It’s a thought that has stuck with me through most of my time with The Planet Crafter. The game is just kind of wonky, and there are a lot of funky decisions that make you wonder if the game works this way by design, or just because the developers couldn’t do something they wanted.

As an example, a large portion of The Planet Crafter is just walking around and grabbing stones, then running back to your space shack to refill on oxygen.

Sure, there’s also some building, but a lot of the early game is walking and picking up rocks by pointing your rock pickup beam at them until they are picked up. Somehow, an experience I could replicate in my driveway becomes absolutely thrilling the second I need some more iron to put up another wind turbine.

The thing is, this sort of functional design works here. The building is pretty much fine. Buildings don’t always go where you want, but because deconstructing anything gives a full resource refund, it’s pretty easy to fix any problems. The text on items isn’t always 100% accurate to what they actually do, but with the occasional exceptions of the rockets that cause asteroid storms, it mostly doesn’t matter. The units used on certain measurements aren’t correct, but only one person I played with noticed that.

That’s not to say everything functions. Some parts are just plain broken. The worst offender of this is the game’s mini map, which you can only move by clicking on in-game arrows. You can’t pan it by clicking and dragging, it doesn’t save your place, and the only overlay options available are basically useless. Also, it doesn’t really appear to be a minimap, just a camera that’s positioned up above the skybox that faces straight down.

And speaking of systems that mostly work…

Multiplayer

The Planet Crafter multiplayer is another example of “This system is functional, occasionally breaks, but is also just a bit weird.” Outside of a few times where I’ve disconnected, and some items disappearing it mostly works! But it also doesn’t let you join from the Steam menu, and doesn’t have dedicated servers.

The one big thing about multiplayer, though, is that it lets you really divide and conquer. One person can be out exploring while another is building more production, and a third is messing with the game’s somewhat weird systems for capturing butterflies and animals. It feels like it would be an exhausting game to play on my own.

Overall

As I said in the start, I like The Planet Crafter. It’s a bit wonky, and unpolished in areas. But it’s incredibly fun to play, and I can’t think of another game that gives quite the same sense of the world being changed as the result of your actions.

Turning a corner and seeing a forest where it was once completely barren, or seeing the sky change color is a oddly magical experience.

PAX Report – Path of Exile 2

So, one of the coolest things I got to do at PAX was sit down and see the media demo for Path of Exile 2. I’d like to thank the folks Grinding Gear Games and Octavian0/Chris for showing me the game, since I’m obviously a much smaller outlet than a lot of other folks. If you’re curious about why you should care about my opinion click here.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a bunch of interesting small things, but as someone who previously played a bunch of PoE, two things stood out to me from the demo:

  1. A focus on making the game much more reactive than Path of Exile is.
  2. An intention to simplify the parts of the game that can be simplified.

Let’s go through them!

Increased Reactivity, Less Spamming

There were two big sets of changes I saw in the media demo of Path of Exile 2, and the demo I played. The first was that bosses felt and played differently than in the first game. I watched one boss fight thathad a sort of bullet hell sub-mechanic, and I fought against two bosses in the demo.

Of those bosses, the demo’s version of “Hillock” is a good example here. Hillock is the very first sort of mini-boss in the game, and he’s just a big chonky dude. In PoE, he just runs at the player, so you kite him back, and whack him down.

In Path of Exile 2, the boss has a much larger variety of attacks, including summoning packs of zombies, and a ground targeted panel that crosses a large portion of the screen and has to be dodged with the game’s new roll/dash. Plus, Hillock was just generally much more aggressive with its gap closers.

On the player’s side of the media demo, Octavian0 showed off a much larger level of interactivity between skills than I’ve seen previously in PoE. This included things like: throwing down clouds of poisonous gas and igniting them with fire; and setting up plants to grow over time, but that can be detonated early by casting another skill onto them. Instead of just having PoE’s synergy between skills, there was real interactivity between them.

Simplification

This might sound bad, but it really isn’t. In this case, I’m mostly talking about simplifying some of PoE’s internal systems, specifically mechanics around getting early game items.

I saw two big examples of this. The first was skill gems. Instead of single gems, gems now come as uncut gems that when dropped, and you use them to choose what skill you need.

The second was around…. GOLD. Yes, PoE has gold now, but it seems like it’s mostly to buy campaign items from vendors. And honestly, it feels like a really good change for onboarding. I’m someone who loves PoE’s economy, but asking a new player to understand the idea of alterations and chromas and vendor recipes, as well as the skill tree has always felt like a bit much when I try to get new friends into the game.

So yeah. Simplification of systems that can be simplified.

Some Other Notes, and Neat Stuff

I’m just gonna be rambling now, but there was a bunch of other cool stuff I saw. For example, there are gonna be mounts! And Rhoas have been been redesigned look more like Chocobos, and less like head-crabs with legs.

The WASD movement feels great, as does the dodge roll. It honestly feels better than right clicking. There are skills on weapons, so that seems neat. Also, many bosses seem to build up stun, giving them a much nicer sense of pacing than “dodge dodge dodge dodge pray flask dodge”.

Overall, after what I’ve seen, I’m really excited for Path of Exile 2. It’s gonna be a different game, and potentially a much harder one, but it looks incredibly fun. It’s trying to address a lot of the problems Path of Exile has, just as a result of 10 years of incremental updates.

My Background

I like Path of Exile. How much do I like Path of Exile? Well, here’s my Steam playtime.

And this before I switched over to the single player client, where a majority of my play time is.

For fellow PoE players, who are going “Yeah, but for all we know, that was spent farming tab cards in Blood Aqueducts,” I offer the following notes.

  • I killed Uber Elder when it was peak end game boss.
  • I almost exclusively play necro/summoners, but I’ve also played trappers/miners in a few leagues.
  • Most of my playtime was between Delve League, and Echos of the Atlas, with a smattering afterwards, so I am a bit out of date. That said, I tried to chat with some folks who have played more recently, and did a quick act 1 run for comparison with the demo I played at PAX East.