Devolver Tumble Time

If you search for Devolver Tumble Time, you find an article describing the games genre as “Puzzle and Monetization.” Presumably because this article was written with ChatGPT. Apparently, the AI that wrote the article thinks that “Monetization” is a genre of mobile game. And the worst part is, I don’t think it’s wrong.

This is evidence that there is no hell but Earth, and there is no devil but man.

Usually I’d include images of the game. Tumble Time hasn’t earned that, so here’s an unrelated panel from the manga series Chainsaw Man.

Okay, so the game for a moment. Devolver Tumble Time is a “Tumble Matcher.” I don’t know if that’s what the genre is called, but I know full well it’s not the first game to do this mechanic. The first paragraph here should give you a taste of how this review is going to go. This game will get the same level of charity from me that Salvation Army gets, which is say: FUCKING NONE.

(On a more serious note for one moment: the Salvation Army is terrible. Don’t give them your money or stuff. Okay, now back to talking shit about a bad mobile game.)

The game’s primary mechanic is that a bunch of objects fall down, and you match them. Unlike something along the lines of HuniePop, or Beglitched, there’s an aggressive timer. As such, it’s almost always best to just make any matches as fast as possible. Ultimately, this means just tapping the screen semi-randomly as quickly as you can. There are levels, and there are collectible characters, but the tumbling is the game’s actual “mechanics.” I won’t be talking about the mechanics again in this review because they (mostly) don’t matter.

The other thing is, that even though there is an aggressive timer, you can always watch a longer-than-10-seconds ad to get an additional 10 seconds of game time to complete the level. So as long as you’re willing to expose yourself to infinite ads, it is literally impossible to lose. Or if you just spend money. That also makes it impossible to lose.

I think Devolver Tumble Time is trying to be something of a parody of mobile games. Is it satire? Well, Jonathan Swift didn’t go out and eat the Irish, when he wrote “A Modest Proposal,” so I think not. And while it may be ironic that a “good” indie publisher is trying to profit off their IP back catalog by tossing it all together into a standard “good simple game mechanic wrapped in microtransactions for mobile” thing, that’s done by literally every triple A publisher in the world. So I don’t think it’s ironic either.

So, Tumble Time is trying to be a parody. But I’m not sure it’s a very good one. The tone of some of the writing has a light mocking touch to it, poking at the greed of capitalism in general, and a bit at mobile games directly. But the game is also engaged in everything it seems to be trying to poke fun at. There’s a big fancy $99 dollar package you can buy that unlocks everything permanently, but only appears after you pass certain levels that you don’t get any rewards for, because they get “stolen” by the capitalist character, because you didn’t unlock other special characters.

That’s not a parody. That’s classic “One Time Offer” FOMO with a ridiculous price tag. “Ah” you say. “But isn’t it poking fun at the prices and values of items in mobile games?” to which I say “Not really.” That button isn’t a joke. If I press it and enter my password, I’ll be charged $100 dollars.

I could buy 6-7 of the other games the characters are from with that money. I could buy every single Serious Sam game.

The same is true of things like the Daily Login bonuses. These are just tried and true tactics of habit building. Same with limited hearts system, which yes, I can buy infinite hearts for $3, but that’s still $3. And infinite hearts doesn’t unlock all the characters which I can still spend REAL MONEY to do.

Putting on a clown suit, and clown nose and going “Haha, look how silly we are, we’re so silly” isn’t making fun of clowns. It’s being a clown. Clowns are supposed to be funny. Likewise, putting a thin veneer of mockery over an in-app purchase, daily login bonus, or limited hearts system doesn’t make it parody. It’s still the exact toxic bit of design you seem to want to make fun of.

The design that Tumble Time is guilty of.

A friend called the game “Self-Aware,” which I think might be more accurate. But self-awareness and nothing else is a cop-out. Being aware that you’re an awful person, like being aware that you’re a terrible generic cash grab game, and doing nothing to fix it, doesn’t make you better.

So, fuck you Devolver Tumble Time. I actually quite like a lot of games Devolver publishes. The ones I don’t, usually just aren’t for me. But Tumble Time can go die a trash fire. It’s a greedy and manipulative exemplar of every issue present in mobile gaming. It’s self-aware, while not trying to do anything different, and that’s what cements its guilt.

If you want a good puzzle game, go play Beglitched. I refuse to link to Tumble Time here. It hasn’t earned it.

Demon’s Tilt

Authors Note: Demon’s Tilt has ridiculous number of flashing lights and graphical elements. My friends described it as “making their eyes bleed”. So, photosensitivity warning: if you’re photosensitive, don’t play this game. This writeup doesn’t contain any of those flashing images, but the Steam page likely does.

I generally like Demon’s Tilt. That’s not to say that I don’t have a bunch of complaints about it. But the more I play it, the less some of the minor issues bother me. It also might be because I’m writing this on an endorphin high from finally getting a Wizard Mode start, after playing for 8 hours.

Okay, let’s back up a bit. Demon’s Tilt is a digital pinball table for PC. Pinball has become something of my comfort food game for me over the last several months. My pinball obsessions was kicked off by a friend bringing me to hang out at an arcade bar that had several pinball machines. (You know who you are. I very much appreciate the visit.) Pinball has served to distract me significantly from the mild dumpster fire my life has been over the last few months.

I’m not going to go too heavily into explaining pinball as a game. I think it would take too long, and I wouldn’t necessarily do a good job of it. That said, I want to cover the basics and define a few words so I can use them later.

Pinball Basics

First off, basics. Pinball is a game where you try to keep a small ball in play, usually by hitting it with a pair of flippers on a large board (the table) of obstacles that the ball can interact with. Flippers are controlled with buttons, and control is typically binary; the buttons can only be pressed or released.

Letting the ball drop down between these flippers results in losing or “sinking” the ball. Losing all your balls results in losing the game, but you can usually earn a limited number of extra balls during play.

Finally, a few more general notes. It’s often possible to catch the ball by holding down a button, and letting a ball come to standstill in the clutched area between the lane and the flipper. This is called cradling. In addition, it’s often possible to smack the table, and force the ball to move in ways that it otherwise wouldn’t. This is called titling. If you tilt or mess with the table too much, too rapidly, the table will shut down, turn off your control of the flippers, and sink your ball. This is called tilting out.

Anyway, back to Demon’s Tilt

The big difference between Demon’s Tilt and most pinball is that Demon’s Tilt commits to being a truly “digital” pinball, as opposed to a digital simulation of a physical pinball table. It has a bunch of mechanics and designs that simply could not physically fit, or work in any reasonable way on a physical pinball table.

I respect the effort to create and implement these mechanics. Some of them are interesting and work well, and some do not.

The first big difference between Demon’s Tilt and a physical pinball table is it consists of what would traditionally be three separate tables linked together, and you can shoot the ball between them. Only losing the ball on the lowest set of flippers actually drops the ball from play.

Each of the three subsections has its own set of missions that can be completed for score, and to ultimately advance to Wizard mode. I found each sub-table a bit plain. It usually only has one main interactable element outside of the primary missions. There are plenty of interactable objects, but none of them felt meaningful unless they had a jackpot active, or were part of the currently active mission.

This isn’t helped by the fact that as far as I can tell, missions aren’t dynamic, and will always be started in the same order. This means that unless you’re moving between sub-tables rapidly or by mistake, you’ll complete all missions in the same order.

There are two other main digital elements in Demon’s Tilt that wouldn’t be possible in a physical table. The first is a wide variety of small pack minions and mobs that swarm and float across the table. You can remove some of these just by tapping them. Others actively interact with or block the ball. These are generally fine, but don’t feel hugely impactful.

The other is the bullet system.

Demon’s Tilt’s bullets are probably the most unique digital-only mechanic in the game, but they’re also my least favorite. Some table elements can emit bullets, usually in two colors: pink and gold. When the ball hits a pink bullet, it counts as hitting any other physics object, and the bullet disappears. Hitting a gold bullet does the same, except then all existing pink bullets are cleared.

I don’t think the idea of moving temporary obstacles is a bad thing. It’s an innovation that could only work in digital pinball. But the implementation here follows more of a shoot-em-up or bullet hell pattern. That doesn’t’ work because those games are based on having exact and precise control at all times of the player, which is almost the exact opposite of pinball. For many of these patterns, it’s best to just wait them out, rather than to try to push through them.

As a result, I end up just cradling the ball, and waiting for bullets to pass. Waiting like this felt bad. It didn’t feel as bad as hitting the ball into a set of bullets I didn’t see, and having the ball sink because of that. But still bad!

Some quick thoughts before I wrap this up.

Demon’s Tilt has a ridiculous amount of visual clutter. My friends described it as making their eyes bleed. Between flashing lights, effects, bullets, and other junk, it can be easy to lose track of the ball. And that’s with the screen shake turned off, and the table zoomed out. In multi-ball modes, it’s effectively impossible to keep track of balls on different tables.

The ball’s bounces and physics behavior are a bit unusual. The physics isn’t inconsistent, but the ball often behaves in ways that didn’t feel intuitive, at least for the first several hours. The top-down 2D view also requires learning the table a bit, as it’s not clear where certain lanes will go on first glance.

The music is quite good. I think there are only 3-4 songs, but I still enjoyed them.

Ultimately, I enjoyed Demon’s Tilt, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t already into pinball, and who isn’t also willing to experience some weird shit. The attempts at implementing digital-only mechanics are respectable, but don’t always pan out. There’s a lot of visual clutter to the point of impairing gameplay, and the game’s physics model can feel janky.

Demon’s Tilt is $20 on Steam. There are some interesting mechanics worth experiencing, but the price is a bit steep for a single table. Still, if you’re looking for an interesting pinball experience, it might be worth checking out.

James Marriott, who hurt you?

This rant is a response to this opinion piece in the New York Times. You can read it if you want context, but your life is likely richer for not doing so.

There, I’ve fixed your writeup for you.

In his piece “AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too” James Marriott includes a quote from Daisy Christodoulou: “ChatGPT sometimes produces superficially plausible essays that fall apart under closer scrutiny. But plenty of humans write essays like that too. In fact, it is one of the criticisms of PPE graduates.”

There’s something ironic in including a quote about things being superficial and falling apart under scrutiny, in an article that feels incredibly superficial, and falls apart under scrutiny. I’d quote more of his article in this response, but that means more people might have the misfortune of reading his 8 disconnected and unclear paragraphs.

Because I’m not James Marriott, and I value the time of people who read my pieces, let me offer my quick conclusion:

Mr. Marriott, you do not have a problem with artists or “creatives.”Nor do your lawyer friends, who have people roll their eyes at them, or ignore them at parties. You have a problem with assholes.

The fact that every artist you’ve ever met fits this profile does say something about the company you’ve chosen to keep.

Anyway, let’s get back to your opinion piece. I’m not 100% sure what your opinion is, which is bad, given that I’ve read your article 7 or so times now. Perhaps it’s that “Artists are a bit too full of themselves, and need to be taken down a peg.” Have I got that right? Have I summarized in one sentence what took you eight paragraphs?

Of course, you’re a professional journalist, and I’m not. Actually, my day job is working for a software company that sells what, at least on some level, amounts to automation software. This is likely why you were able to craft such a wonderful headline that grabbed hands, and filled those “creatives” you wish to see humbled with such rage.

James Marriott’s writeup addresses none of the actual issues many artists and writers have with the current generation of what I’ll lump as “content generation technologies.” He doesn’t talk about how their underlying training data may have been taken and used without compensation. He doesn’t cover how many of these models can be flawed backboxes. He just seem happy that this makes artist artists upset.

And so I must ask, Mr. Marriott, why? Why does it give you such glee that so many might be put out of work? Why is it, that when given space in a publication that more people read in a day than will read anything I ever write in my lifetime, you take that space to make perhaps the most petty argument that can be comprehended in favor of AI generated art and writing?

This is barely an opinion. It’s not even a rant. It’s a whiny self-centered hope that an emerging technology will “make some people who annoy me unhappy.”

I wanted to close this rant out by making some more ad hominem attacks, but unfortunately I can’t. You see, I can’t find any more of his work. When you google Mr. Marriott’s name, you find a comedy YouTuber/musician, with 2 million subscribers, and a few hundred thousand views on each video, and no other articles or writing by the one being ripped on in this article.

Isle of Arrows

Isle of Arrows offers an interesting take on the tower defense genre, but a dependence on good RNG to survive pulls it down.

I don’t hate Isle of Arrows, but I can’t recommend it. It has a nice art style, and interesting core mechanics. But the reason the game took me 12 hours to beat is that randomness plays too heavy a factor. Having good runs is difficult, and having satisfying runs almost impossible.

Very minor quibble: the situation present here in the game’s Steam banner can never happen in game. And now you will share in that suffering with me.

Isle of Arrows is a tower defense tile placement game. You start with a single pre-placed arrow tower, a few pre-placed road tiles, a bomb and a bridge.

Your job is to turn this.

Into something like this.

Game Mechanics and Systems

You have 4 resources: Life, Gold, Bridges, and Bombs. If enemies reach the tiny gold octahedron at the end of the route, you lose a life. Enemies themselves will always spawn on the last road tile on a path to your octahedron.

Gold is the only real spending resource. Each round, you’re given a tile for free that you can place. You can either place that tile, or skip it. Then you can spend 2 more gold to draw the next tile. Repeat until you’re out of gold. For example, if I had 10 gold, I could place my current tile, then advance choosing to place or skip up to 5 more tiles.

It’s important to note that you can only ever see the next single tile that you’ll draw. While enemies can drop gold, your primary source of gold is income. It’s almost interest: each round, you’ll get 1 gold, plus 1 more for each 10 gold you have stored. (Up to a max of +4 at 30 gold banked.)

The tiles you draw have placement requirements, though. Tiles must be connected to another tile you’ve already placed, they can’t overlap with existing structures, and they have to be placed on ground.

Which brings us to the last two resources: Bombs and Bridges. They both serve a similar purpose in allowing you to break some of the rules. Bombs can be spent to place a tile on an already existing tile, and bridges can be spent to allow you to build out into the air. While there are ways to get more bombs and bridges, there’s no way to guarantee it.

There are a few more tile types. There are roads that can be placed to expand the path to your shiny defense shape, and there are towers that can be placed to shoot enemies as they travel along the roads. There are also traps, which have some effects on enemies placed along the road, and non-combat tiles such as water that often come attached to other tiles. Finally, you can place economy tiles to generate resources, usually as a one time effect based on where you place them.

Isle of Arrows has a beautiful isometric look. It’s fun to watch your island expand! But Isle of Arrows has a big fundamental problem: the randomness.

The Problem

At its simplest, the problem boils down to a question of DPS. There’s no guarantee that you’ll draw enough towers with tiles to have enough damage to clear late game waves. But more importantly, there’s no guarantee you’ll see any specific tower. So it’s hard to strategize. You can’t build or plan with the expectation of “Eventually I’ll get X.” You can play 40 rounds, and never get a ballista. Or you can get 3 sniper towers in the first 10 tiles, and zero in the next seventy.

As a result, I couldn’t set up and build to do anything clever. Sure, I could try to to build a long straight road that would be cleared with a boulder tower, but I’d often never see one. I could set up a winding route that would be perfect with ballista, but if it didn’t show up, that route was just a waste of space.

As a result, my strategy was pretty much always the same: pool gold until I got to 30 banked. After that, I’d just place tiles wherever they provided maximum utility in the moment. There was no grand strategy, or clever synergies. Instead, it was just a fight stay ahead of the curve.

I think this is why my brain feels a bit melted after playing Isle of Arrows. I never really changed up my core strategy. Instead, I just tried to have any tower I placed cover as many tiles as possible, and hoped for the best.

I think a peak example of this randomness was visible in my clear of the game’s final level, Burning Embers. Burning Embers has a fire theme, and a tower called the cluster tower. Cluster towers get a damage bonus for each other cluster tower they’re linked to. But they’re fairly rare, and in my first several attempts, I saw either one or zero of them.

But on what would be my final run, I lucked into an early cluster tower, and then several more later on. Those cluster towers made the difference, bringing down the final tanky enemies, because of that cluster damage bonus.

But there was no way to build or plan for this. There was no grand strategy. It was just “Hey, you got lucky on the rolls, here’s some good stuff.”

And more irritatingly, there are no systems to compensate for the inverse happening, and just getting screwed by RNG. Random draw is the only way to get towers and tiles. You can’t choose to spend an exorbitant amount of money to buy a single specific tower. You can’t choose to modify the pool you’re drawing from. You can make all the right choices, and still lose.

Getting Kobyashi-Maru’d isn’t fun, but it’s made even less fun by the fact that there is really only one strategy. As I mentioned before, it boils down to just getting as much value out of tiles on the turn you draw them.

Isle of Arrows is nicely polished. I want to like the random tile system for an interesting take on tower defense. But the randomness and capriciousness makes it feel like there’s no point to trying out multiple strategies, or trying to be clever.

Give me ways to mitigate being screwed by your system! Let me pay a premium to bring in certain towers if I can pool the money. Or do something akin to Loop Hero, where certain arrangements of tiles and towers morph into a larger super tower structure. Give me some form of decision making that isn’t just pushing my luck, or maximizing current utility.

Isle of Arrows is $13 on Steam, at time of writing. Any desire I have to continue playing the game is mostly out of a sense of spite, and to vindicate my own opinions. I’m confident I can clear all maps with all factions. After all, I’d just need to get lucky.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide if that constitutes a endorsement.

Author’s Note: I didn’t really mention the faction mechanic. There are five factions outside the starter faction, they all change up the gameplay slightly. They usually make it harder. Architects don’t get flags to expand the island, but gets bridges after each wave. Cannoneers don’t get flags, but convert any extra life or bridges into bombs. Pathfinders can build roads both ways, but get swamped with road tiles. I’ve got two problems with factions. First, the general high level strategy doesn’t change per faction. Second, each faction is usually more difficult than the preceding one. As a result, clearing each map with an additional faction just feels like grindy busywork instead of an interesting choice of challenge, or a fun variant to try out on a map.

TLDR: There’s a faction system, but it feels like it exists to pad playtime, not make it more fun.

PAX Unplugged: Indie TCGs

Two interesting indie TCG’s from PAX Unplugged this year were Genesis and Gem Blenders. Here’s my general thoughts on the two.

TCGs are a complex subject. There’s the supply chain. There’s the fact that printing booster packs is expensive. There’s the fact that the space of trading card games has been dominated by the big three (Magic, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh) for years on end. There’s an argument about whether or not these games are effectively lottery tickets with a better consolation prize. There’s the impacts that TCGs have on smaller game stores, and a billion other factors revolving around them. There’s the question how many lifestyle games the market can support.

I will be addressing exactly zero of these topics in this writeup. Instead, I’ll be looking at two indie TCGs I saw at PAX Unplugged: Genesis and Gem Blenders.

Genesis: Battle of Champions

Genesis is a 2-4 player independent TCG. Unlike many other TCGs I’ve played, Genesis is actually played on a board: a large 5×6 grid. Each player starts with a hero out, and you win by being the last hero standing.

Heroes define a few important elements of the game including your starting health, and also the cards and archetypes you can include in your deck. Unfortunately, I can’t speak to the deck construction or color archetypes as I only played one game of Genesis, and it was with preconstructed decks.

Anyway, back to the gameplay. There’s a few interesting things about Genesis that I want call out. First, you start with your full mana pool, and it doesn’t regenerate during the game. For example, my character started with about 125 mana, and was down to 10 by the time the game finished. This means that you can drop your most powerful cards on turn one if you wish.

Mana is the most common limitation in existing TCGs. But in Genesis, it felt like I was limited by cards in hand, and space on the board. Many of the monsters felt a bit fragile in the large scheme of things, usually taking only 2/3 hits to kill.

Two other things I want to mention. The game has a stack for resolving actions that was a little difficult to parse during my demo, but I’m sure would be fine once I got used to it, and direction matters. One of the primary things you do is rotate cards to face various directions, indicating where they can attack.

Overall, Genesis was interesting. I was curious enough to pick up some preconstructed decks, but that was primarily as samples to add to my board game collection. I’m not hugely in the market for another TCG at the moment, and I wouldn’t say I was really grabbed by the art or world building in my incredibly brief exposure to it.

If you want to learn more about the game, or find yourself curious, you can check it out here.

Gem Blenders

Most Indie TCGs tend to end up mimicking on of the big three in at least some small way. For most of them, this ends up being reminiscent of Magic’s land/non-land system. You have cards that generate resources, but are very hard to remove, and cards that are used to move toward your victory condition, but are easier to remove.

Gem Blenders flips that, and uses something that will probably be more familiar to players of the Pokemon TCG: You start with a set of 4 blenders out, and you put Gems onto them. Blenders can then “Blend” into higher tier blenders with better stats once they have the prerequisite gems attached to them.

Unlike Pokemon, Blenders don’t get knocked out, so the game is mostly about playing your gem per turn, and slowly trying to build advantageous board state. I also got crushed by the individual demoing it at the show. So it can join Mythic Mischief in that category.

The one other interesting thing to me was Gem Blenders’ action system. There’s no limit on the number of action cards you can play per turn, but you can only play a max of 5 total in a game.

Side note: It was interesting to me that both Gem Blenders and Genesis had these mechanics where you started with a full set of resources, and spent it as the game went on.

Gem Blenders was more appealing to me and I actually got a chance to sit down with the creator. We chatted for a bit about his longer term goals for Gem Blenders, what he sees as important for an indie TCG, and why he wants Gem Blenders to be a TCG in the first place.

It was a really interesting chat, and I hope to get a chance to transcribe it and put it up on the site. It’s been a busy last few months.

If you’re curious about Gem Blenders, and would like to learn more, you can find the game’s site here.

Wrap Up

Overall, I liked my limited time with Gem Blenders a bit more than Genesis. A large portion of that is just personal taste. I found Gem Blenders’ weird art style to be appealing, and I like games where I build up forces overall a bit more than games where I just shred stuff down.

I still think both of these are neat games, and I picked up starter sets for both. Will I play them as full TCGs? Unlikely. Magic and Pokemon already occupy most of my interest for the time being. But I’m happy to see some indie TCGs that really seem to be trying to be solid card games, and not FOMO messes.