Category: Video Games

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.

Spiral Knights

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.

Better writeups to come next week.

Shadows Over Loathing

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.