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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
————————————————————–
Post Script
Since writing the rest of this article (Okay, 90% of it minus the conclusion), Ilooked 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
