Ed Note: This is less review and more fugue state rant. It has been a very long week. Better writeups to come in the future when I have my brain back.
I found Spiral Knights while desperately searching for literally anything I could write about this week with even an ounce of passion. Work has been long, and while there are games I would like to talk about, six plus hours of meetings per day will evaporate anything even resembling a coherent thought.
Spiral Knights is interesting for a lot of different reasons, none of which have an ounce to do with the the actual gameplay. That’s because the gameplay is effectively multiplayer PvE 2d Zelda, grafted to a gear grinder. And even that oversells it a bit. It does have some minor puzzle elements, but these are rare.
What it has going for it is a fairly smooth multiplayer experience, allowing up to 4 players to join a party, and travel through its levels, which are called the clockworks. As already mentioned, those levels are somewhat random, and if the whole party dies, you lose all the stuff you got.
Still, this is a F2P game. You can pay to win in Spiral Knights harder than you can in most other games. You can buy resurrections and skip the grind by buying gear. You can even spend premium currency to buy non-premium currency off a sort of in-game real money trading house.
No, Spiral Knights is interesting because it’s somehow still around. For reference, the earliest achievement I have for this game is from god damn two-thousand fucking eleven. You know, back when I still had dreams, and my parents were together, and Obama was president. All good things, except maybe the second one.
In what universe does a 10+ year gap between achievements make sense?
Is it a sleeper hit? I don’t think so. Steam Stats has the game at about 150 players per day, and only 75 at low points. This means that for a non-zero portion of the time I spent playing it over the last few hours, I’ve been more than 1% of the online player base.
And yet, in an era where mobile games announce their closing and opening dates in the same tweet, this cutesy grindathon with less strategic and mechanical depth than Puzzle and Dragons has lived over a decade.
I don’t get it.
On the other hand, calling this a live-service game is inaccurate. What even appears to be the last actual patch was over 4 years ago. This is a shambling monstrosity, likely kept alive by… well, not even a skeleton crew, probably just a single skeleton. I wouldn’t be surprised if the main servers are running off something in a basement somewhere.
The forums are full of complaints and disappointment. The most lucid posts note that the game is effectively an archive of a past project. There are complaints about performance, and DMCA strikes the company running the game has levied against player-made mods.
On the other hand, Spiral Knights was fascinating to me 10 years ago. It was the game where I figured out how to arbitrage, trading TF2 items for Spiral Knights energy, and then back. It was also one of very few games that would actually run on the Mac I had back then.
Staring at Spiral Knights is a sort of fever dream: a game that should be dead, and yet still has my character, and their items, years after I’ve touched it. It is so old that I turned off my ad-blocker on the wiki, which is still up, and could still see the rest of the page.
I don’t actually recommend playing Spiral Knights, unless you want a sort of time machine to the state of F2P games in 2011-2016. It’s grindy as hell, and exists in that sort of space where everyone was trying to figure out how to make the best skinner box possible, but without having really greased the gears down yet.
Figuring out the genre for Shadows Over Loathing is a bit weird. On the one hand, you could call it a RPG. There’s turn based combat, lots of items to pick up and equip, and party and inventory management. A lot of the hallmarks of the genre.
You could also play through the entire game without engaging with any of those systems, and instead just solving weird puzzles and picking the right dialogue options in conversation and interaction. Meaning that if you wanted to, you could just play it as an adventure game.
So, y’know. To each their own I guess?
A lot of Shadows Over Loathing’s strength is in its writing. Will you find it funny? Well, here’s a very simple test for whether. This is the company logo of Asymmetric, the folks who make the game:
Yes, that’s the joke.
If this made you laugh, or at least groan, you’ll probably enjoy yourself. Otherwise you may have a mixed experience.
There’s also one other test that will quickly filter out would-be players: how do you feel about a game that looks like this?
Yes, they’re very well-done stick figures drawings, but they’re still stick figure drawings.
Now that we’ve filtered out anyone who simply wouldn’t have a good time, let’s talk about the actual game.
Gameplay Loop
I don’t have game that I can easily map Shadows Over Loathing to in terms of its gameplay loop. Generally, you wander around looking for something to progress the current state of the main quest, while doing side quests and discovering esoteric bullshit along the way.
While this might just sound like stumbling along, it’s fun because of how much there is to see or do, and how weird it is. Fix a tiny lighthouse. Pull off a criminal heist with a bunch of elderly citizens. Do jobs for the mafia. Collect hats.
All of this is set against a backdrop of a main story that does a surprisingly good job of actually delivering on some of its loose 1920’s Lovecraft horror themes. One of the big issues with the pop-culturalization of cosmic horror is that Cthulhu has gone from the unwaking dreamer who will end the world to Godzilla with an octopus head.
Shadows Over Loathing is much more subtle, and given that it can’t really do horror with its art style, it aims for ‘discomforting’ instead. Sure, there are tentacles and shadow blobs, but there are also unwinding spaces that can’t exist and trees that call for a woodsman to deliver the axe. For every dozen fishmen, there’s one eternal baseball game that can never be called.
That said, Shadows Over Loathing was at its weakest and most frustrating for me when it got a bit too into the weeds of an adventure game. If there’s a single path through a situation, it can be quite frustrating if you’re unable to spot it. And because this game often runs on dream logic, especially during curse sequences, it can be easy to get stuck.
Running into Colonel Sanders as a vampire is funny the first time. But after the 5th time it’s just kind of annoying, especially when it’s the exact same dialogue tree.
In addition, while interesting, the overall narrative does feel a little rushed at the end. While the game is chock full of fun things to see and do, it felt like it was about 30% shorter than I was expecting in terms of the build up for the finale.
Combat
There’s one big system I haven’t talked about yet, and that’s the combat and leveling system. Shadows Over Loathing has a pretty unique take on character classes. They give you a sort of basic skill tree. But on top of that, you learn most combat abilities and a wide range of other perks from finding books. In addition, pretty much everything gives you experience points to spend.
Combat itself is a bit of a mishmash. It’s turn based, but you have action points to use for certain secondary actions, and you can use a given number per round in addition to that. Enemies can also be tabbed to see who and what they’re attacking, meaning the game is more of a puzzle to be solved than a DPS check or gear check.
Also, there are a lot of items, and switching them up is often necessary. How many items, you ask? Well, this is a screen of half of my hats.
And while we’re speaking about inventory, here’s a list of all my shoes.
I should note: shoes don’t appear to have a mechanical impact on the game, they just change your walk animation and play weird sound effects based on what you have equipped. But they’re still given an entire inventory slot. This fact is never noted or elaborated on in game once, and it’s a pretty good example of the tone of the humor in Shadows Over Loathing.
Final Verdict
I generally liked Shadows Over Loathing. I don’t strongly recommend it or dislike it. It’s weirdly novel, and I found it quite funny and clever, but it wasn’t earthshattering. It was a much better use of my time than Knuckle Sandwich to be sure. I do want to give it credit for a fantastic Steam Deck implementation.
If you want a funny and strange RPG/Adventure Game hybrid that will only require looking at a walkthrough 3-4 times, then I’d say Shadows Over Loathing might be right up your alley. It’s $23 on Steam and for the 15-20 hours I played, that feels about right.
Ed Note: This week’s writeup is a bit of an experiment and possibly the most unhinged thing I’ve ever written. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Part 1: Dinosaurs
I had a cousin growing up who really liked dinosaurs. I only ever saw him during whole family vacations, and one time he made everyone watch an incredibly stupid TV show about what if dinosaurs could travel to present day or something. It was dumb, and when it was over I was glad, because it meant that I no longer had to care about giant stupid lizards. Then I could go back to talking about cool things, like Pokémon.
These family vacations took place on the beach, and involved long walks up and down the coast. We spent the walks looking for cool animals to put in a bucket of water for a bit, and then put back in the ocean. I also spent a lot of that time talking about how cool Pokémon were, and which one was the best. That’s a really easy question to answer because it’s Kyogre.
This is the best Pokémon and if you disagree you can eat shit.
I have wanted a Kyogre since I was like 9. I am now 29 and the thought of being best friends with a giant whalefish that I could ride through the waves and across the ocean still fills me with sort of indescribable joy.
Which is to say, I have had the fantasy of having my own real life Pokémon for a very long time.
Chapter 2: Feet Pics
The wonderful thing about the internet is that if there is something you really want, and there are enough other people who also really want it, someone will eventually make it and upload it.
The less wonderful part of the internet is that goes in reverse.
Feet pics are probably the most benign version of this. I don’t get off on nicely manicured toes, but enough people do. So if you’re attractive, and know how to file those nails, you can open an onlyfans, snap a few shots below the ankles, and pay your mortgage. It’s the invisible foot of the free market. In modern society there is no god other than money.
Credit to PaladinGalahad. This image contains a link to their deviant art, and if you click on it, you know exactly what you’re getting in to.
In the best case scenario, your kink is widespread enough to either become mainstream (like breasts) or at least popular enough that it gets its own Quentin Tarantino.
Behold, the Patron Saint of Foot People
Chapter 3: Pokémon Games vs Pokémon Franchise
There’s a deep dive in dissecting the Pokémon games, but the short version is that they have been selling the exact same formula for 25 years, and it is a good formula. Well, not good. Passable. These games are passable JRPGs carried by their combat mechanics and let down by virtually everything else. Story, art, progression: they’re all mediocre in Pokémon and sustained by turn-based combat mechanics that are old enough to drink.
The franchise has never changed, but its audience wants more. Pokémon has never once delivered on the desires of its audience. I think the best example of this is Pokémon Go. The game is a pedometer strapped to a GPS with pictures of Pokémon doodled on it. It could have solved world obesity if it wasn’t managed by a company with the dexterity of a walrus on horse tranquilizers.
Behold: A billion dollar game.
The point is: in the same way that some people really like dinosaurs or feet pics, other people really like Pokemon.
Chapter 4: Enter the Challenger
The well of discussion related to Palworld has been poisoned. The arable land it sits on has been burned. The earth has been salted. Because on our internet it’s more profitable be a pundit with quick takes than engage in being a reasonable human being.
Everyone discussing Palworld falls into one of two camps: they are either ready to suck the game’s developers off, or they are trying to find the devs’ addresses so they can send them a mailbomb. There is not a lot of middle ground.
Palworld is the incarnation of the open world Pokémon game that a subsection of Pokémon fans have wanted for 20 years. It is a game a game where you can capture a mammoth the size of a school bus. It is a game where you can hatch and ride a falcon.
Palworld materializes a fantasy that some audiences have had for longer than they’ve dreamed of threesomes, or having a stable job and being a homeowner. This is ultimately what Palworld offers. If that is not a dream you have chased for a majority of your life, you are likely to be disappointed.
What you’ll find is an open world crafting sim with a monster collection mechanic, and more bugs than bug type creatures. So far I’ve seen an infinite duplication glitch, a grappling hook that doubles personal lag switch, more pop-in than a pop-up book, enemies and friendly units unable to path, and a full on multiplayer game save file with over 25 game hours just get deleted.
This game is buggy as hell, and I’ve played 40 hours of it. And I want to play more.
Palworld sold 6 million copies because it satisfies, even poorly, a dream I think many of us have had for years. It is at best serviceable and at worst barely functional.
The game fulfills some of my deepest fantasies, but not even I would not argue that it is a good game. It is a functional game. Everything about it works and is fine.
I love Dumud so much.
But where other games ask me to do dumb shit like mine rocks, this game lets me mine rocks with a giant fish. Somehow that is enough to make me play 8 hours straight after work without eating.
In another game, if an NPC I controlled got stuck on a cliff, and starved because it couldn’t find it’s way down, I would lose my shit. Here I just shrug and carry them back to the food bowl.
Seriously, how did he even get up here.
Palworld doesn’t feel meaningfully innovative in almost anyway. Even its creature designs feel uninspired, and the rest of the game feels like it was built out of assets purchased from the Unreal marketplace. It’s a bizarre mish-mash of aesthetics and theming, and has some really weird design.
And none of that matters, because it has a fat fish boy and I love him.
Ed Note: This writeup was written prior to the release of the 1.2.6 version of Knuckle Sandwich. The 1.2.6 update added an extra item slot, balanced party members, “Added level increase to late-game party members during regular difficulty runs,” and major buffs to every single held item.In short, it makes some changes to a large number of the things I complained about. I don’t think it’s enough to fix the game, but I find it both worth noting, and somewhat vindicating.
I don’t recommend Knuckle Sandwich for reasons that are hard to summarize. In short, the game fails to live up to its spiritual predecessors in either mechanics or narrative, while making a variety of design decisions I disagree with, and that make it frustrating to play.
Genre-wise, Knuckle Sandwich is technically an RPG. It meets virtually every part of the general definition we have for those games, so it’s unfortunate that I think the term is actually useless here. I think a more accurate descriptor would be “weird RPG,” which is to say something very much in the vein of Earthbound, Undertale, or No Delivery.
The main reason I simply cannot recommend Knuckle Sandwich is that Undertale exists. I think there’s a strong argument that Undertale does literally everything except (some parts of) combat better than Knuckle Sandwich.
I also can’t really recommend Knuckle Sandwich to people who loved Undertale, because the game is just universally worse. I don’t like having to say that. Knuckle Sandwich isn’t phoned in, or low effort. It’s just not as good as the games that have inspired it.
Here’s why.
Combat
Combat is the heart of Knuckle Sandwich’s mechanics. There is some exploration. There are some puzzles. But in both cases, they are fairly minor. The vast majority of this game is its combat.
While Knuckle Sandwich starts with the traditional RPG blueprint (a basic attack, a mana system (EP) for special attacks, HP bars, etc.) it quickly makes changes to the system. All attacks, from both the player and enemies, involve playing a WarioWare style mini-game of some sort.
I’m going to go into lots of detail, mostly in order to justify the level vitriol I’m going to be leveling against someone’s long term passion project.
Let’s start with the player basic attack.
There are three basic attack mini-games. This brings up the first problem: which one you get is random. Which would be fine if they were equivalent in terms of damage. But that was not my experience.
They’re also just kind of frustrating to play, with some taking much longer than others. They take a long time to start up. You can skip the wait by pressing a button, but that same button is used for the damage input. So if you get impatient, try to skip, and accidentally double tap, you miss a turn.
Next up, the player’s special attacks. After 10 hours, and at max level, I had 4 special attacks. I was given one to start, got two from leveling up, and had a fourth from an equipped item.
This is an INCREDIBLY small amount of options, and many of the attacks are just bad. A 4 turn 1 point defense buff is awful, and I barely ever used it.
Finally, there’s also a defense command that regenerates a single point of mana and ups defense. But because of how enemy attacks work, it almost always felt like a mistake to use this.
Since some special attacks are granted by equipment, let’s talk about items real quick. Characters have 3 slots: a left hand, a right hand and an accessory. I only saw about 3 weapons total throughout the entire game. Two were knives and one was a pair of scissors. There were also several pairs of gloves that boosted defense, but since they took up both the left and right hand slot, they didn’t feel worth using. The strategic options are again, incredibly limited.
More annoyingly, equipped items take up inventory slots. This would be tolerable except each character can only carry eight items. This means if a character has three items equipped, they can only carry five other items.
This isn’t helped by the fact that key items have to go into your inventory. So if you find a key needed to open a door, you either have to toss items out, or backtrack to an item storage PC.
There are lots of design decisions in games that are subjective and up for debate. The item limit in Knuckle Sandwich is not one of them. It’s a bad system. It punishes equipping items, it punishes exploring for extra items that the you can’t carry, and it punishes carrying quest or bonus items with you in case they have a fun interaction or might be useful later. I hate it.
Before we fully dive into the rest of Knuckle Sandwich’s combat, I want to talk about how the game interfaces with with some other standard RPG mechanics. These are: party members, stats, and leveling.
In combat, you can use the player character, plus up to one other character. There are 3 primary party members, and a few more that join at various points. But for a vast majority of the game, you only have a maximum of one other party member available.
And for the brief portion of time while you have access to all of them, there’s no reason to use any party member but the highest level one. Experience points are not shared across the party. As such, one member will always be significantly higher leveled than the others.
It’s a really questionable structure. Combined with the fact that it’s hard to tell what stats even do, it makes me wonder why the game even has levels. In addition, enemies don’t respawn, so grinding levels isn’t even an option if for some reason you did love a specific character.
So let’s talk about better parts of Knuckle Sandwich: the rest of the combat. There are two types of enemy attacks: standard attacks, where you can press a button to avoid all the damage, and the mini-games. For the standard attacks, enemies will perform some sort of mini-animation with a tell. Press a button right after the tell, and you’ll dodge the attack.
The individual mini-games are generally more fun, and are fairly varied. Some are shmups, there’s an infinite runner, and several are Wario-Ware like quick reflexes.
Some are less fun, like the one that asks you to do math very quickly.
But while I did call this the good part, that’s not entirely accurate either. Because while the individual mini-games are fun, they’re not hugely fun to play over and over and over. And combat really drags on.
And I have a problem with the bosses as well. To keep this brief, here’s a summary: Knuckle Sandwich has many boss fights where you don’t progress by “winning.” Instead, you defeat them by tiring them out, or just engaging with a separate system. As a player, since I didn’t know which fight was which, I ended up wasting resources and effort on fights where I didn’t need to, and that feels bad.
At it’s heart, the problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s combat system is that it just doesn’t have much strategic space. Many of the RPG mechanics feel ancillary to the real time mechanics, and the real time mechanics are a mixed bag that quickly becomes repetitive.
But now let’s talk about the story.
Story
From here on out, there will be spoilers for every part of Knuckle Sandwich. You have been warned.
My primary problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s story is that it feels unconnected. It hits all the story beats of the weird RPG. A weird world, bizarre characters, strange non-logic, and friends. But many of these don’t feel earned, or even internally consistent.
I’m not a writer, so I can’t break down exactly why the story didn’t work for me. Instead I’m going to give three or so examples.
Let’s start with cannibalism.
Early in the game, you’re attacked by a character while taking out the trash at your job. You kill the attacker while defending yourself. Then you have to chop up this person you murdered and serve them as burgers. Your boss gives a whole speech, and a bit about how you’re now in this together. This seems to be setting up for a sort of Barber of Seville situation, where the player is going to have to murder people who won’t be missed, and cook them.
Except none of that happens and the game seems to immediately forget about this plot thread until the literal Final Boss. Yes, those letters are capitalized on purpose. In retrospect, there are hints at what is going on, but the whole thing is mostly just… never mentioned.
Instead, you meet the other party members, and the characters that the game seems to suggest are your friends. But for some reason they don’t really feel like your friends. The biggest one for me is that your character is mostly just dragged in wake of these “friends” instead of actually joining them.
There’s also a big mechanical reason why they don’t feel like your friends. The “friend” characters don’t actually join the party until later in the game. At that’s where the RPG design really gets in the way encouraging you to only use one of them. While they’re all given their own sub-sections of the narrative where you work with them, those sub-sections don’t focus on those characters as people.
This matters because when Knuckle Sandwich later tries to pull a big emotional event, it lands flat. It’s sorta sad, but I wasn’t attached enough to these characters for it mean much. Likewise, when the game tries to do the “kill god with the power of friendship,” that moment fails equally.
None of Knuckle Sandwich’s supporting cast were given enough time for me to become really attached to them. I don’t dislike them as characters at all. But I feel about them the way I feel about my neighbors. Perfectly nice people. If they asked for help, say shoveling snow or jumpstarting a car, I’d be on it. But there’s no real emotional connection outside of a polite mutual ignorance.
All that out of the way, let’s talk about the biggest plot point of Knuckle Sandwich. You only get to know about it because it’s explained in a monologue in the game’s ending sequence. The whole game is…. actually, I don’t need to say what it is. Because it doesn’t matter!
The big reveal is barely relevant to the entire rest of the game. It isn’t really mechanically present, it isn’t brought up until after it’s been dealt with off-screen by an NPC. And then the game just kind of ends. You, the player, effectively never have to deal with it, outside of one very short semi-postgame sequence.
The vibe I get from Knuckle Sandwich is that the game was made in sections, instead of as a whole piece, and also made under a weird deadline. There are large sections of the game that feel sprawling and unconnected, and others that feel rushed and compressed. If you told me that Knuckle Sandwich as it currently stands is about 30-40% of the game that the creator had in mind, I’d believe you.
But the end result is failure to deliver on both the weirdness of the world and the attempted emotional story beats. Instead, it feels like a set of strung-together vignettes or dream sequences.
Art
This is going to be the one part of this writeup that isn’t me just trashing 5 years of someone else’s work. While I have no strong feelings on the game’s music, I do really like the art. I really don’t enjoy the glitched sections, but I think the animations and art style for almost every other part are great.
The art also feels high effort. For example, the weapon equip system is a bit nuts (in a good way). The game seems to have sprites for each character carrying each item. Personally I’m very curious as to how it all works behind the scenes.
But there’s something else I want to talk about. There’s a single thing about Knuckle Sandwich that I really love. And that is a very specific tone that the game manages to evoke. I don’t know if it’s even intentional, but I love it nonetheless. The primary character of Knuckle Sandwich spends the game with a bruised face, and bags under their eyes, and in my playthrough used knives and scissors as weapons.
The end result is a character who looks utterly defeated, and yet chooses time and time again to square up against cult members, robots, mecha suits, and alien gods. They get up, and they keep moving forward. There’s a distinct tone of simply not caring anymore that I find incredibly unique. I can’t think of another game that made me feel like this.
It’s doesn’t redeem of the rest of the game, but it is memorable.
Conclusion
Knuckle Sandwich is made with heart, and I wish I could recommend it. But the game simply isn’t fun to play. Its strategic elements are light to non-existent. Its real time tactical elements are enough of a mixed bag that they can’t make up for the lack of strategy. The story, while not a mess, feels poorly paced, and manages its plot points badly. The music is fine, and the art is well-made, but those things don’t make the rest of the game fun.
On the flip side, at least Knuckle Sandwich was made by someone who appears to give a shit. I don’t know that I’d purchase another Andy Brophy game on day one, but I’d at least look at it. Knuckle Sandwich might not be worth playing, but it’s not something that should be ignored. And if somehow this post has convinced you that Knuckle Sandwich is what you need, you can find it here.
Ed Note 2: Images are from the Steam Page, and Knuckle Sandwich press kit. I played this on my Steam Deck, and didn’t take screenshots. Frankly, I’m not replaying just to get screenshots.
We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and what better time for a bit of cleaning? Specifically, cleaning out the backlog of all the games I played, didn’t write about, and now too much time has elapsed for me to give a fresh review. For each of these games, I’ll be giving my general impressions, and talking a little bit about why I didn’t actually get around to doing a full writeup. I’ll also go in semi-chronological order, so let’s get to it, starting with one of this years indie darlings:
Pizza Tower is a side scrolling platformer that I think is supposed to be in the vein of the old Warioland platformers. I say “I think” because I’ve never played one of those games. My lack of familiarity with the genre is what prevented me from doing a writeup of any sort.
See, I usually like to talk about games in the context of other games, their inspirations, and what they do better than their predecessors. But everything about Pizza Tower is incredibly alien to me. It has an art style that I think is supposed evoke Courage the Cowardly Dog. It has an extremely fast pace, and is very focused on speed and collectable items for points. It was a really difference experience from other games I’ve played.
And frankly, given that the game has an overwhelmingly positive rating with 44,000 reviews right now, I’m not sure I have much to add. I thought Pizza Tower was weird, but good. It also has my favorite game soundtrack of the year, because it just goes wayyyy harder than it has to.
I’m honestly surprised that I never got around to writing about Inkbound. It was one of my games to watch from February last year. And then I bought it, and played 40 hours, and never did a writeup.
Inkbound is a lot of things. It’s a roguelike. It has good multiplayer. It’s an isometric turn-based battler. And it’s really fun. So why didn’t I do a writeup?
Part of that is that I’m conflicted on how I feel about Inkbound’s structure. My internal conflict isn’t helped by the fact that the game itself is in a state a flux. If I’d written a full review earlier, I would probably have complained about the game’s microtransaction store, which has now been completely removed. I would have also probably praised the game’s dual movement/action resource system, where both moving around and performing attacks pulls from a single resource pool. That system has also been replaced.
I may do a writeup on the game in the future. I love the game for its mechanics, and I’m mildly frustrated by it for other reasons. But there’s been so much more added, and so many changes since I logged my 40 hours. At this point even if I sat down today and wrote something, it wouldn’t be indicative of the game’s current state.
Before I say anything about APICO, I think it’s worth noting that I paid approximately $9 for it and bunch of other games on an itch bundle, and not the $20 it currently costs.
APICO is another multiplayer game that I mostly played with friends, and as such, there were quite a few systems I never actually engaged with. It’s trying to be a comfy pixel world game where you breed bees, and gather honey. I think it’s supposed to feel small and cozy.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d like to respond to that design goal with the following screenshot:
Not pictured: my other friends running around desperately trying to keep our system functioning.
Instead of the comfy sim, APICO turned into something closer to Satisfactory. We attempted to hyper optimize production and throughput, which is why I had 12 interactable item windows open at once. As you might expect, it did end up feeling rather grindy.
I don’t really like or dislike APICO a huge amount. It was amusing to play with folks, but some of that was the chaotic dichotomy between the game’s cute pixel art, and our frenzied thrashing to keep our honey cola soft drink production up.
I probably would have gotten around to doing a writeup on PlateUp if I’d played more than 4 hours of it. It’s a multiplayer food production game in the vein of Overcooked. But it trades specific levels out for a roguelike set of upgrades and runs.
That said, I only played 4 hours of it because that’s how long it took for there to be a conflict between my friends, and then we never returned it to it. And I have no desire to play a game like PlateUp by myself.
End result? I dropped it much earlier than I would have otherwise, and I’m also now realizing it might have been a waste of $20. Oh well.
Dragon Castle was one of three games with “dragon” in the name that I played in a one week span, the other two being Tiger and Dragon, which I loved, and Dragonwood, which I hated. Being the awkward middle child of the trio, compounded with the fact that I only played it once, meant that I never really got around to talking about Dragon Castle.
It’s a perfectly functional sort of tile drafting/placement/set collection game. I enjoyed it. But I didn’t play it enough, and it didn’t leave a strong enough impression for me to really be like “Oh, I love this, I must speak about it more.”
But hey, you know what game did leave a strong impression? Aegean Sea. It was first game I’ve ever played where 3 turns in, everyone at the table decided that they would rather play something else, and unanimously sort of just rage quit.
Rage quitting a board game might not sound like much coming from me, the poster child for ADHD medication. That said, I was playing with a professional game designer with multiple published games, and someone who just tracks how many victory points everyone else at the table has in games like Feast for Odin. In their head.
Goodbye Aegean Sea. You will not be missed. (Which is weird because I like other Carl Chudyk designs)
I’ve described Farlight 84 as Wish.com Fortnite. It’s a battle royale shooter, and outside of the cool vehicles, it doesn’t have a single piece of personality.
If AI ever does get around to generating games, this is the sort of thing that it will make. A generic mobile shooter stuffed with microtransactions and lootboxes. Characters that feel like they were designed by combining a list of demographics and fetishes, and making sure there was something for everyone.
Farlight 84 is polished gravel. Functional, technically effective, and displaying all the heart of the Grinch at the start of the book.
So I’d like to admit something. I couldn’t stand Mario Bros Wonder. I don’t understand how this game was even in consideration for game of the year.
Here’s the thing: I’m usually not in the position of not liking a game everyone else loves. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. The best example I can think of for this is Cult of the Lamb. And I think something similar happened here.
I found Wonder to be almost entirely spectacle at the cost of interesting mechanical innovations. And before you stab me, yes, I do mean the wonder flowers. The thing about the wonder flowers is that while what they do is new for Mario, it’s not new for games or even platformers. And I don’t even think Mario does it best. Mechanics like being chased by your shadow have been done in Celeste, and other 3D Mario games. Singing piranha plants are fun, but this demo level from Billie Bust Up feels like it executes the idea much better.
Anyway, I didn’t do a full writeup on Wonder because I think it suffers from the same problem as Cult of the Lamb. Because I play a lot of games, I’ve seen these perfectly fine mechanics done better elsewhere, even though they are executed here with in a very polished way.
But yeah, I felt robbed of $60 after playing this.
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