Tag: VideoGamesWeLike

Skin Deep

I like Skin Deep. I like it more than Quadrilateral Cowboy, the previous title by BLENDO Games. I wouldn’t have mainlined thirteen hours of it over two days the day it released if I didn’t like it. If you like weird indie stuff, and find yourself interested by an immersive sim where you save cats from space pirates, give it a look.

I’m front loading this so that when I spend several paragraphs complaining about the game in just a bit, no one gets the wrong idea here. I’ll say it again: I like Skin Deep. I recommend Skin Deep.

Give me more of this sort of thing please.

I just also happen to have some problems with the game.

Skin Deep is an immersive sim stealth sort of game. You are Nina, an insurance agent. The deal is simple: you get cryogenically frozen on long haul space trips. If the ship gets attacked by space pirates, you get unfrozen, at which point your job is to rescue the crew.

The defrosting is how each of the game’s 13 levels (each their own individual spaceship) starts, with you transforming from popsicle to human and stepping out of your pod. From there, it’s pretty much up to you how you want to approach things. The only thing you have to do is save all the captured crew mates by unlocking them from their little cages with purple key cards.

Image of a cat locked in a purple box from the video game Skin Deep.

Since this an immersive sim, it would be a bit tricky to cover every interaction available, so I’m going to quickly go over a few key ones.

Every level takes place on a space ship, with both an interior and exterior. The exterior is accessed a variety of ways, and as Nina has a third lung, moving around in a zero-g and zero-oxygen environments poses no problems for her.

Every ship also has a set of four systems available. These are: vents, windows, airlocks, and trash chutes. They function as a traversal tools with added benefits. Vents let you sneak around and hide, windows can be broken to suck enemies into outer space, airlocks let you leave the ship the normal way, and trash chutes let you leave non-normally, at the cost of becoming smelly.

These systems often start off locked. You can unlock them by finding and interacting with their respective fuseboxes to turn them back on. Later on, the systems become locked down even further by enemies.

Image of a Fusebox locked from the video game Skin Deep.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about enemies. There are five types of enemies: 3 types of space pirate, a turret, and a floating knife fish robot. The space pirates make up the bulk of the challenge, with the turret and swordfish being mostly incidental.

The catch is that the space pirates are all wearing Skull Savers(TM) which, upon death, will transport their head to a revival platform, and regenerate their body. Unless—of course—you grab their head before that happens, and stuff it into your inventory.

Image of a Skull Saver from the video game Skin Deep.

Which is as good a time as any to talk about Nina a bit more. You have five inventory slots, so every head you’re carrying takes the space of one useful item. So the best way to deal with pirates in the long term is to chuck their heads into the sweet void of space.

Given that we’re five paragraphs in, hopefully I’ve explained enough that the next set of complaints is going to make sense.

Complaints

The very first level of Skin Deep opens with mini-tutorial that shows you the following message.

And it’s not wrong, but I want to contest it a little bit. It’s true that damaged enemies will find their way to health stations, and request repairs for broken control panels… but that’s all I ever saw them do. As far as immersive sims go, the game felt somewhat underwhelming. Enemies react to sound and smell, but won’t notice missing items, or change up their patrol patterns even after you’ve freed prisoners they’re supposed to be protecting.

This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does prevent the game from ever feeling particularly alive, if that makes sense. It also leads to my bigger problem.

Different Day, Same Ship

By the end of Skin Deep, I found myself frustrated because I was using the same general strategy on every single ship. It went something like this: sneak around unlocking all the doors. Next up, find and unlock all the subsystems. After that, take over control of the ship cameras. Only then would I finally switch over to taking out enemies, or experimenting with whatever that ship’s gimmick was.

And the result was that every level felt samey. Not because they are! But even when each level had its own special gimmick, I tended to never use the gimmick until after I had already dealt with everything else. This leads to my big complaint.

For an immersive sim, I never felt incentivized to change up my primary plan, and adjust for the situation I was in, or to try to improvise. I did the same thing over and over again, because when I died (and I died a lot!) I would lose 10 minutes of progress, and have to start again. And it is very easy to die when enough things start to go wrong.

The last level is probably the peak example of this. Without spoilers, its “gimmick” is that it’s a lot larger than any other ship in the game. It also removes a few of the fallbacks or safeties that are available in other levels. The end result is that it’s much more punishing if you fail.

I don’t know if it’s a Blendo “thing” to make their final levels skill testing like this. I remember Quadrilateral Cowboy doing something similar, but in that game, it was only the final level where you finally got access to all the toys at once.

But Skin Deep didn’t give me more tools or toys to work with. Instead it was just more of a slog.

Bonus Round

So now let’s go over a few other things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. First up, the writing is quite good, and narrative is quite weird. There’s one very clever soft touch done for building character relationships that I quite enjoyed. The setting is interesting, but mostly serves as a backdrop for the gameplay and the rest of the story about a specific set of characters.

Also, there are bonus objectives for each level. I have to wonder if having them show up at the start, instead of after you’ve completed the level, would have made me want to try to use the level gimmicks more?

The controls are also a bit wonky at times, and I threw multiple guns when I meant to be firing them. As a general note: yes, this is less effective than shooting with them.

Overall

I enjoyed Skin Deep, but I wish I enjoyed it more. I still like it enough to recommend. It was $20, and I mainlined the whole thing over two days.

But I wish I felt like it delivered on the promise of the immersive sim more than it actually did. Or at least forced me out of my comfort zone with the strategies and planning, instead of letting there be an “ideal” strategy to beat most levels.

Still, if you want something interesting and weird, give it a shot. You might even enjoy it more than me.

Here’s a link to the Steam Page.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

Dragonsweeper

I like Dragonsweeper. It’s also free. You should go play it in your browser here.

This is perhaps not the most elegant piece of writing I have opened a blog post with, but it’s also all true. Dragonsweeper is a small, clever twist on Minesweeper. It doesn’t cost any money. It won’t eat your entire day. There are no microtransactions, or other bullshit. It’s just good.

To quote the office: “Why use lot word when few word do trick.”

That said, you’re still reading, which means you haven’t been persuaded yet. That’s okay. Maybe you missed the first link. Here, I’ll link to again.

It’s possible that didn’t work either. Unlikely, given the incredible rhetorical barrage I’ve assembled so far, but possible.

It’s important to note though, that since Dragonsweeper is a puzzle game, in order to talk about it, I will be spoiling some of the puzzles. As few as I can! But some. This is your last chance to just back out and play it?

No? Well let’s continue.

Dragonsweeper is a puzzle version of Minesweeper. It uses the general framework of Minesweeper the same way Balatro uses poker: as a structure with so many things grafted onto it that it’s almost unrecognizable. But understanding the general concept or the original will make the initial exposure more tolerable.

Like Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper consists of a grid of tiles. Clicking a tile reveals what’s beneath it. If the tile is empty, just like in Minesweeper, that tile then displays a number of the sum of the surrounding tiles.

Unlike Minesweeper, most tiles on the board are not empty, nor do they contain mines. Instead, they contain monsters. This is a problem for our boy Jorge.

As Jorge spawns with only 5 health, clicking on a Minotaur early is an easy way to game over.

When you click on a monster, Jorge loses health equal to its power. If Jorge goes below zero health, it’s game over. Fortunately, defeating monsters also gives experience, and after collecting enough EXP, Jorge levels up, refilling their health bar.

But after the first few levels, the amount of EXP needed to level up is higher than the Jorge’s total health, and just defeating monsters isn’t enough. Instead, it’s necessary to crack open treasure chests, use healing scrolls, or find some other sources of EXP.

If you’re just starting the game, you will almost certainly die.

And then the real game begins.

This is your Last Chance to Back Out Before I Start Spoiling The Puzzles I Mean It This Time

In the corner of the screen is a little tiny purple book. When you click on the book, it tells you which monsters have which values, and how many remain. It also includes this little bit of text.

This right here is the heart of Dragonsweeper. See, Dragonsweeper isn’t truly random. It’s randomized, but after a few death screens, you might notice that the 10 value monster, the Mine King, is always in one of the corners.

Or you might instead pick up on the fact that the Slime Wizard is always guarded by six 8-value purple slimes, and always on the edge of the map.

You might spot that the 4 value gargoyles will always be facing another Gargoyle in a cardinal direction.

There are at least another five or so little patterns and rules like this. There are some I haven’t even found, and there are several that I didn’t spot until I had beaten the game, and was showing it to a friend.

For me, spotting these, and figuring out how to use them is what makes Dragonsweeper so brilliant. It’s very clever puzzle design where learning about how the board can be laid out, and how some things interact is the progression.

Again. Dragonsweeper is really good, and you should play it, and it’s free.

And a request for the developer: please make a full game. I have given you money and I will give you more.

SolForge Fusion

Before I talk about SolForge Fusion, I want to talk about SolForge. SolForge was its predecessor. A digital-only card game that lived a brief 4 years, and then died. We should talk about why.

SolForge never had a problem being fun. Its core mechanic was, and remains, brilliant and simple. Here’s how it worked.

In SolForge, each time you played a card, it got stronger in future rounds. Decks were small, and every few rounds they’d shuffle all the upgraded cards back in.

This created a simple, but very exciting core tension: Playing the best card for the moment vs. playing a card that might be less ideal now, but was better later.

SolForge didn’t die because of bad mechanics. It died because it didn’t make any money.

But here, from the ashes, comes SolForge Fusion, a brand new digital/physical/web3 card game! Bringing back the traditional upgrade mechanic, it’s replaced its deck construction with a combo of KeyForge and Smash Up.

Gameplay

SolForge Fusion is played over four phases of three rounds each. At the start of each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then each take alternating turns, generally playing a single card into one of five lanes.

One player is given the forge to start, marking them as the first player for that round. They will play the first and third card of the round, while the other player will play the second and fourth (and final) card. Creatures played by the player with the forge are aggressive, meaning they will attack the turn they are played, while creatures played by the non-forge player will defend, but not attack. After one turn, every creature in play moves to the top of the lane and attacks.

If this sounds complicated, it boils down to: alternating first player, and since the first player is somewhat punished by the opponent getting to see all of their plays before combat, they also get to go on the offensive.

At the end of each round, players discard their unplayed cards and creatures slam into each other dealing damage equal to their attack. Unblocked creatures deal damage to the opposing player. After three rounds, cards are shuffled back into their owners’ decks, including upgraded cards, and the process repeats.

Whoever runs out of health loses, and if both players have health after all four phases, whoever has the most wins. There is a bit more to it than this, but this is the general loop.

So, is it worth playing?

Yes.

That’s a yes that I’m going to caveat heavily over the next few sentences, but I’ve had a lot of fun with SolForge Fusion. Specifically, a lot of fun I’ve had exclusively playing the digital version of SolForge Fusion.

I wrote about SolForge Fusion briefly before in 2022, but I was writing about the paper version of the game. To summarize my opinion from then: the game is simply far too clunky to play in paper. In digital, though, all of those issues are managed by the computer, so it’s a silky smooth experience*.

*Compared to the physical game. More on this later.

A second caveat is that I’ve spent most of my time playing the Roguelike PVE mode. It’s a sort of Slay The Spire thing where you pick a deck and fight through a series of enemies, culminating in a boss. While the content feels limited, it’s just very fun to play. Currently there are only 2 campaigns, and only one is free. The second costs $10.

But now that we’re talking about money, let’s talk about the in-game economy.

The in-game economy is a mess.

SolForge Fusion has Web 3 integration. Here’s the whitepaper. I got 3 slides in before my eyes glazed over, mostly because the first 3 pages are the exact same set of words, rephrased.

Side Note: The official position of this blog is that crypto can suck it. At some point I may clarify my position on this.

Now, you can ignore this and play, in which case… it’s still a mess. Even after playing for 18 or so hours, I haven’t saved enough gold to get one permanent deck.

There’s also a premium battlepass that comes with the second PVE campaign. I paid to unlock it, and then realized that the good rewards on it would require me to play 40-60 more hours of the game. Frankly, I feel like I got my $10 worth out of the campaign, not so much out of the battlepass.

It’s just a mess.

Side note: I posted about the grindy battlepass on the SolForge Discord, and the response I got was that it’s intended for long term players who have played the game a lot more than me. I understand that viewpoint, but I think it misses the point, because the end game track rewards are additional decks. As a new player, I would have liked to have more than 4 decks to play with, so that I can actually… y’know. Experiment and enjoy of the game. Which might have led to me playing an additional 40-60 hours. But given that really only have one deck to play with currently, I’m now a bit burnt out.

Bugs and Weirdness

As I was playing a few final games to put the finishing touches on this writeup, I played an online game where the server hit a critical error and crashed, kicking me back to the game’s login screen.

There are also a few goofy UI things. For example, when you complete a quest, it doesn’t auto-claim, so it’s possible to complete your quest and then forget to actually get your rewards.

Also, the store still has purchasable items for an event that already ended, and can’t be played further, so that’s great.

These things are small, but they’re part of a clunky experience that just drags things down a bit.

I’m sure some folks will defend the game by saying “It’s an early access alpha!” to which I say “It has a fully released cash shop that takes real money, as such I will treat it as a fully released game”.

Overall

SolForge Fusion is fun, which is a bummer because I still don’t feel compelled to spend any more money on it than the $10 I put in. Given that I may well be the patron saint of spending money on card games I don’t really play, that probably doesn’t bode well SolForge Fusion’s long term success.

One thing I didn’t touch on in this write-up is that the player base seems low. I didn’t mention it because it’s not really relevant. There’s PVE, and if the game detects that you’re sitting in the PVP queue for too long, it’ll match you against some pretty decent bots that count as players for the purpose of rewards.

So yeah. Download it. Play it for a bit.

Then just decide if you want to play more, or go do something else. I wish I could say that its fun gameplay will carry it to success. But there’s a lot of junk here, and quality is often no indicator of games’ long term profitably.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.