Grab Bag – November 2024

I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.

From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following:
1. A hammer
2. A large set of strength cables
3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.

If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.

All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.

It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.

Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.

UFO 50

Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?

UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.

I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.

And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.

#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement.
#12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.)
#46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder.
#24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.

Zenless Zone Zero

I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.

I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.

I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.

So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.

And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.

But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?

Chained Together

Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.

Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.

There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.

Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.

But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.

In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.

Vagrant Song

I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?

I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.

I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.

You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?

Good news!

I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.

If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.

Pokemon TCG Pocket

In a sense, I am grateful for Pokemon TCG Pocket. It’s given me something to write about this week. I won’t have to endure the depressingly real world of Disco Elysium, or parse out how Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess works. I don’t have to return to UFO 50 and try to figure out how to review 50 games in one writeup.

No, I can just complain about a little app, and call it a day, and ignore some other things stressing me out.

Opening

The starting moments of a game are critical ones. They’re the moment that developer tries to hook you in. It can be a flash-forward, an exciting call to action, character creation, introduction to mechanics, or one of many other different things.

TCG Pocket starts by having the player open booster packs.

This is followed by opening more booster packs.

You can’t actually play a game with the cards until you’ve reached level 3, something you do by opening more and more booster packs, and critically, using the not-quite-premium currency to speed up the pack opening timer. Sure, you could wait the 2 days or so it would take it do it normally, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of the playerbase actually did this.

But after reaching level 3, is that experience worth it?

Not really.

Gameplay

The game generally plays like a simplified version of the physical Pokemon TCG.

Like the physical TCG, there are multiple types of cards, primarily the Pokemon and trainers. Pokemon cards are played out onto a bench, with one Pokemon in the active slot at any point in time. Only the active slot card can actually use attacks. Trainer cards are one-time use effects that can do a variety of things, generally drawing more cards, healing damage off your own Pokemon, or switching which one is in the active slot.

The game has been slimmed down from a standard Pokemon game, however. Players only need 3 points to win, instead of 6. Trainer card effects have been simplified, turning Professor Oak into a Pot of Greed. The bench only has 3 slots.

The biggest change has been made to energy. In the physical game, energy cards are a part of the deck. Only one can be played per turn, and they’re played onto Pokemon. Pokemon can only use attacks that they meet the energy threshold for.

In Pocket, they’re not part of the deck. Instead, you generate a single energy each turn, and can play energy onto a single Pokemon each turn. As a result, it’s no longer possible to get too many or too few energy, even though you can get the wrong type. This is a nice idea that’s currently irrelevant, because the game rewards mono-type quite heavily, with only one incentive for doing otherwise.

The thing is… it doesn’t really feel like it matters. The rewards for winning in PVP are basically nonexistent. None of the daily missions require it, and none of my non-premium missions require it either. PVE is more rewarding, but the events are on a timer you can speed up with money, and many of the rewards are one-time, or locked behind using a specific deck type instead of just winning. The game’s balance is also pretty middling, with just a handful of decks being relevant, and they rely upon 2 copies of one of the rarer cards.

And that kind of makes sense, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s about the battling. It’s about the collecting. Critically, it’s about the booster packs.

Booster Packs

Everything about Pocket is designed to reinforce opening boosters. The home screen is the booster opening page. The link to the in-game shop is more prominently displayed than the link to the battle options.

Booster pack openings are an 8 step process. Select a pack type to open. Select a pack from a revolving carousal. Swipe the top of the pack for a crunchy lovely opening sound. Tap through each card in the booster, with what I can only describe as a glittering chime for each card, and more for rarer ones. View the full results. Watch cards slot into your binder. Swipe up on new cards to register them into your card dex. Watch them slide into place, and your card collection count tick up.

It is then time to open another booster pack.

I’m breaking this down not because it’s overwhelming or slow (though it feels a little drawn out). I’m noting it because it’s indicative of where the game’s priorities are.

Overall

Many people do just collect physical Pokemon cards without playing the trading card game. I certainly did growing up. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with just enjoying the art and collecting them. If Pocket TCG was purely the collection elements, without the aggressive monetization, it wouldn’t be for me, but I wouldn’t have as many problems with it.

But Pocket isn’t just “Not For Me.” It’s an aggressive experience that’s designed to build player engagement habits, and convert those habits into cash. I don’t respect it, and I don’t recommend it.

I’m also not going to pretend that it doesn’t work, that it isn’t at least partly compelling. Bait is designed to be tasty. But I am not a fish. I can spit out the hook.

Journey to Incrementalia

Journey to Incrementalia is single player idle game, placing it in a genre that I have some thoughts about.

But I beat it in six hours! I spent most of that time actively playing!

And I was only tempted to break out AutoHotKey and start writing macros once or twice!

All of which makes me wonder if it counts as an idle game/clicker game at all.

Journey to Incrementalia

The premise is simple enough. You are a necromancer. You have been brought back from the dead to reach Incrementalia, a mystical land of… something. And you’re going to do this by raising the dead, and hurling spells at anything that moves.

It starts out as a pretty standard idle game. Ponder the orb to generate mana, spend mana to summon skeletons, and watch skeletons break down the wall.

But it quickly breaks away from normal idle game scaling because of its resource system.

Resources and mechanics

Journey to Incrementalia has 3 primary resources: mana, souls, and skill points.

Mana is pretty standard. You click on your orb, you get mana. You spend mana on a small smattering of permanent stat upgrades, summoning units, and buying souls.

The other two are much more interesting.

Skill points are used to get access to spells, and to buff those spells. For example, one of the earliest spells in the game is the Goblin. Putting 1 point into it lets you hire goblins, and additional points buff the amount of poison goblins apply when they attack.

That said, the number of goblins (and other units) are still limited by souls. There’s a bunch of ways to get souls, but even at the very end of the game, I only had around ~2000 or so.

So this is the part where things get good, and change from most other idle games I’ve played. It’s free to respec skills, and change builds. But since the player is still limited by the number of units they can field, it’s necessary to think about army composition.

This turns the game into an optimization problem instead of just clicky-clicky number go up.

As I reached higher and higher walls, I found myself respeccing constantly. Maybe I’d just unlocked a new spell to buff skeletons. Maybe it was a unit that let me apply poison more effectively. Maybe I just had enough mana generation to sling unending waves of fireballs, ignoring units completely.

My personal favorite combo was one where I constantly sacrificed skeletons, causing them spawns ghosts that slammed into the wall, applying poison stacks. These skeletons would then be re-summoned automatically, and the process would repeat. It was a sort of necromantic carpet bombing, and I enjoyed it immensely.

This was the best part of Journey to Incrementalia. Looking at the skill tree and trying to do napkin math in my head to get the biggest numbers possible, or realizing that I’d overlooked a spell or upgrade, was a lot of fun. So was spotting overlooked combos.

Some Criticism

Journey to Incrementalia is very fun when you have a bunch of skills to play with. When you don’t, it’s much less enjoyable, and this included much of the early game. Pretty much everything to the 25th wall wasn’t as good.

The game also isn’t particularly replayable. Different selections on side-quests didn’t result in different rewards or quest text, something I found disappointing.

Finally, the game is still somewhat buggy. I didn’t hit any major issues, but I did find a bug where I could summon infinite volcanoes, which slowed my PC to a crawl. I’ve also seen posts from some folks whose game has just straight up bricked. Some of these have already been fixed, but these would have been dealbreakers if I’d encountered them.

Overall

Journey to Incrementalia was most fun when I browsing the skill tree, and doing napkin math. It was at its least fun when I had done that math, and was just sort of waiting for my strategy to play out.

I’m actually fine with the game’s length, even if I wish it came online a bit faster. There’s also a few spoiler-y late game mechanics that I wish it did a bit a bit more with.

Perhaps if it did do more with its narratives or builds, I’d feel more strongly about recommending it. As it is though, I don’t hate it or love it, and I’ll leave that decision to folks with $5 and an afternoon or two to burn to answer that question.

TCG Card Shop Simulator

I was having trouble finding something to write about this week, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a game I had hesitations about, but thought I’d enjoy: TCG Card Shop Simulator. And I was right on the money!

And while I personally enjoy the game, it currently lacks depth in any of its systems. I don’t really want to recommend it in its current state.

Side note: In that sense, it reminds me of MMORPG Tycoon 2, a game I purchased 3 years ago, and is now on version 0.2. Early access is a grave of ideas.

But let’s say you do fork over $13. What do you get right now? A sort of abstract sim game with some card collection elements. Here was my experience.

Tales From The Gameplay Loop

After I named my store, I ordered inventory and waited for folks to wander in. When those customers finished their browsing, I went and checked them out. The checkout mini-game is a majority of the “gameplay” that I’ve seen so far. There is a small element where customers can show up smelly, and need to be sprayed with air freshener. I dealt with this by setting up two auto cleaners near the entrance to my store to double blast anyone who walked in, like it was a tower defense.

While the player can hire helpers NPC’s to run the checkout, the only one I could afford was so slow that I just did it myself. It felt more practical to have them stock shelves, where it didn’t matter that they moved like molasses.

The other parts of the loop involve buying new furniture and displays for the store, buying stock, adjusting prices, and selling singles. More about selling singles in a bit. First, let’s talk about the other parts.

My general take on this game is that it functions mechanically, but lacks real depth to any single system. Employees don’t get better or worse as they work for you. There are a few different types of furniture, but they all function the same, and there’s only one type of play table. NPC’s don’t have names or preferences, there are no regulars, grinders, or “That One Guy.” The player can adjust prices, but it doesn’t seem to influence market value.

Furniture is both deeply unaspirational, and as as my friends will point out, better than what I have in my apartment.

In that sense, the game feels very static, almost like a clicker game. I would wait for things to happen, acquire money, buy a bigger store, buy more stuff to put in it. Rinse, repeat.

A sort of capitalist zen garden.

But I never felt like I was really working toward anything, or making more than incremental progress. That said, I do want to talk about one system the game has that did make me feel something.

Cracking Boosters, and Selling Singles

TCG Card Shop Simulator has a fairly reasonable system for opening booster packs to add cards to your own collection. It’s nicely animated, works reasonably well in partnership with the rest of the game, and is mildly compelling. But it’s not what I want to talk about.

No, what I want to talk about is how this game has finally made me understand why stores don’t like selling singles, mostly because the process is a huge annoyance for tiny amounts of profit. I never want to sell a single under $10 ever again.

And this is in a sanitized, digital version of the process! I don’t have to keep perfect inventory, or look up pricing, or worry heavily about shelf space. But every time some unblinking digital homunculus walks up to the register with a card that’s a $1.27, and a $5 bill, I want to leap across the counter and chase them from the store.

So in that sense, this game has made me feel a weird sort of sympathy for local game stores, and their equivalents. I now understand why no one wants to sell me 30 commons for $8.71.

Overall

Sure, TCG Card Shop Simulator is fun right now in a sort of zen/whiteout sense, but there’s no guarantee it will ever get all of the features it has promised, or even that I’ll remember the game exists by then. If you have $13, and need to just zone out from the world for a few hours, it’s great.

After 8 hours, my card store looks like… well, pretty much any other card store on the planet honestly.

But it lacks any real depth to any system, or even the aesthetic customization that would set it apart as a fun toy for designing a dream card shop.

TCG Card Shop Simulator is $13 on Steam.

Post-Script

As far as I can tell, NPCs in TCG Card Shop Simulator don’t react to anything you do, including jumping on tables, throwing boxes around, and just generally nuisance in the store.

Somehow while playing, this manifested into me envisioning my player character as a sort of long limbed, pale cryptid that always wears a flat cap covering their face, speaking only in curses and praise, clambering over counters and leaping across tables as it restocked and moved to check people out.

It also made me realize that I would still probably shop and play at this store, even if the owner occasionally scuttled across the table in the middle of the match if the prices were good enough.

This was followed by me roleplaying as this character for 30 to 40 minutes, including nodding my head, and saying “Blessings upon you, yes, yes!” whenever someone paid with exact change.

This is not a thing I usually do in games. I don’t know where this came from. Also, at some point I decided they had a tail like a lizard.

He should really be skinnier than this, all bones and sinew.

Thanks for reading.

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is most beautiful game I’ve played this year. Visually, it’s an absolute love letter to art and the physical creation of art.

I wish I could say something as nice about the gameplay or story.

I have to admit, I feel like I got beaten to the punch on this review. By Kotaku of all places. By some dude named Moises Tavera.

It really does look this good in-game.

This game is stunning. It’s rare that I suggest playing a game for the visuals. In fact, I think I’ll let that stand as my general recommendation when it comes to The Plucky Squire.

But take away those visuals, and you’re left with an easy and incredibly linear game. And it’s a shame, because The Plucky Squire has so much potential in its mechanics. But it never really offers the player any freedom to use them.

Story

The Plucky Squire is the story of Jot. Jot lives in a storybook world where he stops the schemes of the evil wizard Humgrump, with help from his two friends and the wise wizard Moonbeard. It’s implied that this has happened many times before, but this time, Humgrump blasts Jot with magic that kicks him out the story. For most of the game, you’ll be jumping in and out between the between the book and the “real world” of a child’s work desk.

This meta aspect of “Story within a story” isn’t really examined too much ( except for it possibly causing a time paradox). Again, this is fine. It’s a minor element, and it doesn’t bother me.

What does annoy me is how simple the story is. Ostensibly it’s a tale about creativity and imagination, but it really only pays lip service to that concept. Jot is a writer, and his sword is a pen nib. Okay, that’s cool, but where is that mechanically?

There was a lot of space to foreshadow the game’s one big surprise (the villain was once an artist too!), but the developers chose not to do any forehsadowing. In addition, the “one big twist” isn’t relevant to the story.

Side Note: I don’t think that the Plucky Squire was trying to make Humgrump relatable. But I found him kinda relatable after the game reveals that he used to just be a bad poet. I’m an amateur artist who is quite bad at art, and struggles to enjoy it. I’m cognizant of my own lack of improvement. I put most of my energy into the job that pays me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from The Plucky Squire’s story. If I don’t improve my art, I’ll become an evil wizard?

There’s also a real disconnect between the game’s written message—that of a love letter to creativity and imagination—and how linear the actual gameplay is.

Gameplay

Ostensibly, The Plucky Squire is a puzzle platformer. Let’s start with the platforming. This game’s primary conceit is the ability to jump between a 2d top-down book, and a 3d “real world.” Both worlds control pretty much the same, outside of the third dimension. There’s also a very small number of side scrolling sections. There’s combat, but it’s so laughably easy that it mostly just serves to break up the puzzles

But the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles.

The puzzles are incredibly dull.

The Plucky Squire introduces a large number of mechanics that could have been used as part of a larger scale system of puzzles. And then it just… doesn’t use them. While you’re given a variety of abilities, they really just function as keys.

For example: the game gives you the ability to stop objects in the scene. But you only use it in a few specific areas to stop specific objects. The game gives you the ability to tilt the book. But tilting only pushes around one or two things, and it pushes them on hard coded rails.

This path unlocks with the stop time key. This other path unlocks with the bomb key. Another path unlocks with the tilt key.

Okay, this mini-game was actually decent.

The mini-games don’t really help. They’re amusing, but they’re also short, and it’s hard to see how Punch Out, or Puzzle Bobble really sell the themes of the characters you’re playing as.

And the stealth sections with the bugs just kind of suck. They are the only part of the game where I struggled at all, and it’s mostly due to weird patterns, and strange pathing and sight lines.

But speaking of bugs…

Bugs

The game is buggy. It’s less buggy now that it’s been 3 weeks since release. But a non-zero portion of my playtime was spent trying to fix a soft lock in the final chapter of the game where my characters got stuck looking at a bench. Sure, it got fixed, but it got fixed by another Steam user, not the devs.

There was also apparently a fairly big bug that would permanently lock up the game if you used two mechanics in a non-intended way. Again, this goes back to the whole “abilities act as keys to specific doors” thing.

I am pretty lenient on bugs and glitches most of the time, but there was point where it looked like I had wasted 6 hours of my life.

I was pretty grumpy.

In Retrospect

Okay, so looking back, I finished The Plucky Squire about 3 weeks ago. Then I got involved in some other stuff, and never finished this write up. This last weekend, and I did a game jam, and I got a pretty solid reminder of the fact that 1. Making games is hard and 2. Getting players to do what you want is hard.

With that lens, I don’t think the Plucky Squire set out to be patronizing to its players. I do think though that the game was likely rushed in development.

There are a bunch of small hints that point to rushed development. For me, the biggest hint is how Jot’s friends just don’t have character arcs. They’re foisted into the game, given a fear, given one screen of character development an hour later to get rid of said fear, and a mini-game section in the final boss.

And looking through this lens of rushed development, it makes a lot more sense as to why a set of potentially fascinating mechanics involving clever interactions are dumbed down to a set of linear puzzles.

I could be wrong on this, but the scale of the art in the game to me screams “over ambition” more than it does “dumbed down for kids.” You don’t make something this beautiful but mechanically and thematically hollow on purpose. You make it because you ran out of time.

Conclusion

The Plucky Squire is a 10/10 for art, and a 6/10 for story and gameplay. What does that make it over all? I don’t know. It’s too visually impressive to be a seven, but it’s frankly not invigorating enough in either mechanics or narrative to elevate it to an eight.

Maybe the truth is that numbers are a bad way to assess art. That said, this piece of art cost me $30 bucks. If it had been $20 or $15, I might be more lenient.

As it is, I’d advise anyone curious about the game to wait for a sale and pick it up when it’s a bit cheaper. It’s worth seeing. It’s just not worth playing.