Tag: VideoGamesWeLike

Baldur’s Gate 3 at 4 Players

It feels a little pointless for me to write about a game that has already been devoured by the game journalism/influencer cycle that is modern games media So to actually add some value here, most of this writeup is going to be from the perspective of how the game plays with 4 human players, and some of the oddities with that.

The best way I would describe Balder’s Gate 3 is that it’s a digital version of Dungeons and Dragons, run by a strict but infinitely patient Dungeon Master. Yes, you can win all these combat encounters by just shoving people off cliffs. Yes, you can attack random people around you. Yes, you can let yourself be dominated by the purple mindfuck octopus. It eats your brain, you die. Better load a save.

This is where Baldur’s Gate is at its best in some ways. The engine handles all the stupid fiddly bits around combat, rolling dice, keeping track of HP, movement, spell slots, inventory, items, weight, etc.

Brief aside: Baldur’s Gate also gets to do one thing that tabletop D&D doesn’t: forcing players to learn systems via failure. Unlike a standard D&D game, where TPK’s mean everyone rolls up a new sheet, BG3 can wipe the party, ask “Now, what did we learn from that?” and have you run it back. And when it comes to learning D&D’s esoteric bullshit, I think this is quite a strong way to do it.

Act 1: You meet in an out of control spaceship.

So first, some background. I’m not a massive RPG person, so the only way I had any real interest in BG3 was playing the game with friends. I also didn’t want to spend $60 only for everyone to drop out.

Before buying, I got the three friends I planned to play it with to promise that we would play the game every weekend at some point on Saturday until we finished it. The hardest boss (scheduling) already defeated, the adventure kicked off.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is split into 3 parts, or Acts as the game calls them, with limited ability to go back once you proceed from one to next. To my mind, Act 1 is the strongest, with Acts 2 and 3 being a bit weaker for reasons we’ll get to. But at 4 players, Act 1 worked quite well.

We spent a lot of time messing about in Act 1 and it had some of the most satisfying moments of the game for me. The highlight, though, was the Underdark, and some of the roleplaying choices it offered. Baldur’s Gate tends to play more with the tropes of “Good vs. Convenient” rather than “Good vs. Evil.” This is to say, you can get what you want by letting people suffer, or can stick your neck out for them, and have someone else try to chop it off.

I think the strength of Baldur’s Gate’s writing was the clearest to me when I found myself wanting to really have my character (a paladin) stick to his ideals even when it was incredibly inconvenient. On the whole, though, Act 1 as a group of 4 didn’t really have as many of the pain points that would start to crop up later, starting in…

Act 2: The woods are dark and deep and trying to eat us.

Act 2 is where problems started to crop up. If Act 1 is traditional D&D fantasy (after the opening), Act 2 ratchets it up a bit, bringing you into the Shadow-Cursed Lands. They’re lands that are cursed by shadows. And these shadows try to eat you. One cool mechanic is that they won’t eat you if you’re carrying a torch. Which is fine except if you’re a party of 4, everyone is going to be carrying torch. This means no one has a weapon out when you get ambushed.

It’s also where we started seeing bugs. Here are some notable ones. We got soft-locked at our camp, and had to lose an hour or two of progress. The host player’s computer crashed each time he talked to an specific NPC for a romance-chain cutscene. Once, one of our characters was permanently locked up jail, even while not jail, and required that special type of esoteric bullshit to fix.

Act 2 was also where the meta-gaming got ratcheted up, at least a bit. Of the 4 of us in our party, two hadn’t played the game before, and two had. There were a few encounters that we did not do in what I’d call the “full spirit” of the game. For example: when I go to talk to strangers, I do not usually immediately barricade the entire room with pallets in case, say, I’m attacked by flying ghouls mid conversation.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I don’t harbor any ill will towards my friends for this. I knew they’d played before, and it’s hard to just play a game knowing everything that happens, and not spoil anything. On the other hand, it kind of a bummer. I think sometimes failing to protect an important NPC and living with consequences of that is fair.

In addition, Act 2 also involved one of the major problems with the game at 4 players: NPC party member quest chains. Many of these chains require having the NPC present in the party for the chain. But your party is capped at 4 characters, which meant that we had to kick out a human player and have them sit on the side while everyone else escorted whoever it was to wherever they had to go.

It’s a huge frustration, and makes it very difficult to want to do these quests, as it meant not actually playing with my friends. You know, the people I’m there to play the game with. But more on that in…

Act 3: We’re outta time, and only got 4000 minutes to save the world.

Act 1 is pushing the shopping cart down the hill. Act 2 is the wheels getting a little wobbly. Act 3 is the bit where the wheels fly the fuck off, and the whole thing flips head over heels.

That’s not to say Act 3 is bad. Baldur’s Gate, as it is realized in the game, is one of the best designed cities I’ve ever seen in a video game. They manage to make every inch of it both relevant and interesting, but without feeling like it was designed just for the player. It’s fascinating design that I can observe, but not parse in any way that I would be capable of mimicking.

And because it’s so jam packed, there is a ton to do. That said, it does feel less fleshed out on occasion than some of the other acts. Finally, this where the “Add the party member to the party” comes back with a vengeance. There were at least four party quests we didn’t touch because it would have meant someone had to stop playing.

That’s not to say there wasn’t enough to do. Despite having party members who had played the game multiple times, we found a new-to-them side quest that elaborates on some pretty critical lore for one of the primary characters. I cannot stress enough how content packed this game is.

I do have one story I want to share though. Throughout the game, we had kept an NPC alive, and done various side quests around him. Many of these were a pain, but it was really fun to see him change as we helped him, and grow.

Then in act 3 one of my friends murdered him for armor. It felt really bad. It was made even worse by the fact that we didn’t need this chest armor, and this person got it only because they wanted to respec into a brand new build for the 5th or so time.

This was probably the biggest moment that broke the fantasy for me, and it’s unfortunate that this happened right before the…

Finale: wake up and choose violence.

The finale to Baldur’s Gate is a comparatively short affair compared to the rest of the game. It is an impactful and cinematic story moment and set of fights that doesn’t quite overstay its welcome.

It is also unfortunately where the game just shits the bed technically. Performance is incredibly bad. Some of the enemies really don’t quite look like they belong. We saw at least 3 fairly major bugs occur, including enemies not spawning, one member of the party having all of their items unequipped while still equipping them, and watching a magical spear that returns after being thrown… not doing that, and just vanishing.

It’s unfortunate, because instead of a blaze of glory, BG3 goes out with the equivalent of an oil fire. Instead of a sense of dramatic triumph, the primary emotion I have when I think back on this part of the game is frustration. I’d rather fight mind flayers than pathing and the framerate.

But when the dust settles, it’s time to take stock of the casualties, and the story.

Hey, remember when I mentioned issues with the NPC party member quests?

Epilogue: So long and thanks for all the flesh.

So. Because we hadn’t done many of the NPC quests, the “post” final fight sequence of cutscenes was one of the most depressing end-game sequences I’ve ever seen. Because we left almost every character to suffer.

This included watching Wyll, who only hours ago had promised marry my 7 foot dragonborn paladin, rushing off to the Hells with Karlach. So yes. After 76 hours, BG3 ended with my character getting cucked by Karlach. Yes, I am salty. Can you tell?

It’s unfortunate, but the result is that Baldur’s Gate 3 ended on kind of a low note for me.

Baldur’s Gate undeniably deserves its game of the year award. But it’s not a perfect game by any means. It’s a masterpiece as a result of its scope and depth, but not its polish.

And to be frank: it doesn’t quite work at 4 players.

Slay The Princess

Slay The Princess is a horror visual novel, in the purest sense. It’s well produced, with excellent voice acting, and art that does a very good job of communicating what it wants to. For anyone turned off by the “horror” aspect, this game has maybe one “jumpscare”-esque moment. It also doesn’t rely on any breaking of the 4th wall, like messing with files with on your computer or those sorts of things.

As a result, it almost entirely relies on the strength of its writing, art, and voice acting to tell a story, and a really interesting one. This makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.

As such, I’m left with two choices. I could engage with the work itself, and try to access it. Or I could dance around it, and look at the space it exists in, without engaging with it directly.

This writeup will be the second one. At the end of this writeup, there is a link to a page full of spoilers, because there are some things I want to discuss, but simply cannot without spoiling the game. But that page isn’t here, so if you are afraid of spoilers, you can keep reading (just don’t click on the link. There won’t be anything here that couldn’t be seen by looking at the steam page, or booting up the game.

To some extent, game reviews and criticism aren’t particularly well suited for evaluating games that are almost entirely reliant on narrative. Literary criticism tends to do much better at that. Game reviews are better at evaluating mechanics.

The primary mechanic of Slay The Princess is reading text. As far as mechanics go, is it a fundamentally strong mechanic? Yes. We have an entire medium of work reliant on that mechanic that isn’t games. They’re called books. Slay The Princess also has images, which means we can compare it to comic books, which are also pretty popular. Or we can call them graphic novels if we’re being fancy.

I think it’s a very strong visual novel, and if you enjoy horror, or games focused around narrative discovery like Gone Home, I would recommend it.

That said. If you want spoilers and longer form discussion, here you go. I suggest you only read this if you have no interest in the game, as doing so will destroy parts of the experience.

Slay The Princess is $18 on Steam.

Quickity Pickity

I spent some time dragging Dragonwood over the coals recently. As such, it seems fair to spend an equal amount of time talking about another very simple game that I actually really enjoyed. That game is Quickity Pickity.

Quickity Pickity is a manual dexterity, real time set collection game. The goal is to be the first player to win 3 rounds. Here’s how rounds work.

Each round, the goal is to build sets of fruit. Fruits have 3 characteristics: they can be smiling or frowning, they have a shape, and they have a color/pattern. A set of fruit is multiple fruit tiles that all have the same expression and either the same color or shape.

All the fruit tiles start face down. Once the round starts, players flip up fruit tokens in real time, and take them to place into their own sets. The catch here is two-fold. First off, once you place a fruit in one of your sets, it can’t be moved or removed. Secondly, if you take a fruit, you must place it in a set.

But while the general gameplay is the same each round, the scoring changes.

At the start of each round, the players flip up a score card. These determine how points are awarded for the round, and are fairly variable. They might payout aggressively for large sets, or instead just reward a large number of points for medium sets. They might even punish for sets that are too large, or only payout for sets with an even number of fruits.

In addition to this, each round has a special fruit: a specific color and shape that rewards bonus points. Bonus fruits give yet another thing to keep track of and switch up.

The round ends when all three of a set of monkey tokens have been flipped up, at which point players stop and score points. Now remember when I mentioned that fruits can’t be moved? Well, if you accidentally placed a mismatched fruit into a set (for example, put a frowny face fruit in a set of smileys), there’s a massive penalty of minus 10 points per bad set. This almost always enough to lose the round.

While I liked Quickity Pickity, I do have one big gripe and it’s with the round ending monkey tokens. It’s very easy to flip one over, and not notice, and there isn’t really a penalty or reward for spotting that fact. Twice in the 9 or so rounds I played, we flipped all the monkey tokens up without realizing it. We only noticed later that the game was supposed to be over.

Monkeys also have an interesting effect of being an acceleration mechanic. If a player thinks they have a big enough lead, they can quickly try to close out the game by quickly flipping up tokens with no interest in collecting sets.

But these are minor complaints. The score cards do a really good job of actually making each round feel different. I had to actively change up my strategy each round based on what the payouts were. And this is while there’s room to improve the actual set building. Bonus fruits also did a good job of contributing to this, keeping the game from feeling stale.

I really liked Quickity Pickity. It’s simple, fun, and offers decisions that aren’t inherently complex, but are compressed into such a tight time frame that they’re still fun to try to solve.

If you’re looking for an interesting small game, it’s $23 on Oink’s website. As always, that not a sponsored link or anything. I just think think Quickity Pickity is good.

Tiger and Dragon

Tiger and Dragon my favorite game Oink Games has published. It’s also my favorite game with Dragon in the title that I’ve played recently. (The other two in that category are Dragonwood, and Dragon Castle.) It’s stayed entertaining even after playing 8 or so times, and is relatively simple.

Tiger and Dragon is sort of a trick taking game played with a set of numbered domino-like tiles, for 2-5 players. The group I’ve played with likes it best at four players, but I personally also really enjoy it with three players.

Here’s how a round works. Each player takes number of tiles based on the number of players, with the starting player taking an extra tile. Then the starting player places one of the tiles from their hand, as an “attack.” Going clockwise, any player can play a tile that matches that number to block. If they do, they then become the attacker, and choose a domino to play, and the process repeats.

But if none of the other players choose to block, and it cycles back around, the original attacker gets to place a single tile from their hand face down, and then attacks again.

The goal of the round is to be the first player to empty your hand. Whoever does so scores points based on the battlefield in use. Battlefields modify the games scoring rules, and the first player to get 10 points wins.

The strategy and fun of Tiger and Dragon comes from how the tiles are numbered. Each tile has the same number of copies as its value. There’s a single 1-tile, two 2-tiles, three 3s, and so on all the way up to eight. There are also two special tiles, the Tiger and Dragon, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

But let’s say another player attacks with a three, and you have a three in hand. You can block with that three, or you can decide to try to hold the three, and force another player to block. If another player blocks with a three, you now have the only three. This means that when you attack with the three, it will likely cycle the entire table, letting you play an extra tile for free.

Unless of course someone plays the Dragon.

The Tiger and Dragon are spoiler tiles. The Tiger can block any even tile, but be blocked by any even tile. The Dragon does the same thing, but for odd tiles. This makes them the strongest defenders, and the weakest attackers.

The end result is a very fun game of bluffing and hand management, that I highly recommend, and hope gets restocked at some point in the future. (I guess you could buy it off Amazon.)

I heavily recommend Tiger and Dragon. It’s incredibly repayable, has a fantastic level of planning and bluffing, and is just generally a very fun game.

Author’s Note: Apparently Tiger and Dragon is based off an old Japanese game called Goita from 1860. The amusing part of this for me is that the apocryphal designer of Goita has a Board Game Geek page, which for some reason I find very amusing.

Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated

I liked playing Clank Legacy. After playing through the full campaign of 10 games, if you asked me to bring out my copy and play a game, I’d say “Sure.” If you pulled out a fresh copy, and asked me to play, I’d probably pass.

Let’s talk about why that is.

The full title of Clank Legacy is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. I’ll just be calling this game Clank Legacy for the writeup. The subtitle does give us the game’s primary source of flavor and story: the Penny Arcade D&D Actual play. It’s an interesting enough story, but the entertainment value is carried by the humor and tone rather then the narrative arc.

It’s also an incredibly self-referential title.

Ah, yes. The Clank Legacy is Legacy Clank.

Clank Mechanics

Clank is a deckbuilder with a board movement component. The goal is to get the most victory points, but unlike Tanto Cuore or Dominion, the biggest source of those points is from moving around the board and grabbing artifacts, gold, and items instead of buying VP cards from the buy row.

In most senses it’s a fairly standard deckbuilder. Each turn you draw five cards and play them. When your deck runs out of cards, the discard pile becomes your deck.

As I mentioned, the game starts to diverge from standard deckbuilders when it comes to the goal. The end goal is to get from the starting zone, grab an artifact, and get back to the starting zone without dying. There’s more it than that, but it’s a decent general overview.

Cards generally give one of three resources: Movement, Skill Points, or Combat. Movement is used to move around, Skill Points are used to buy cards from the game’s version of the card market, and Combat is used to defeat monsters in the game’s version of the market.

The next big place where clank differentiates itself from many other deckbuilders is that you must play every card in your hand each turn. And this is a bad thing because decks start with two copies of Stumble, a card that generates Clank’s eponymous mechanic: clank.

From left to right: Skill, Movement, Clank, and Fight.

Clank is a semi-random damage mechanic. Whenever you generate Clank, you put a wooden cube of your color into the Clank pool. Whenever a new card is added to the market, if it has a Dragon Attack symbol on it, all the Clank goes into the Clank bag, and then a number of cubes are drawn out. If your cubes get drawn out, you take them as damage. If you take all of your life as damage, you get knocked out, and may score zero points.

There’s another primary way for attacks to happen, though. Once a player does make it back to the starting zone, they score some extra victory points, and each time they would take a turn, they instead perform a dragon attack against all other players.

There’s a key interaction that I want to highlight here, because we’re going to come back to it later:

  1. Clank has a buy row of random cards, and those are refilled after each turn when a player buys cards with Skill, or defeats monsters with Combat. There aren’t any other ways to interact with the row.
  2. Clank’s primary mechanic to force players to end the game is that some of the cards trigger dragon attacks when they flip up into the buy row.

Just keep this in mind. It’s going to be important in a bit.

Legacy Mechanics

Time for the other half of the title! Legacy. This is a Legacy board game, and as such, it involves all the classic Legacy mechanics. Permanent powerups, permanently changing board state, and using the game’s campaign structure to perform mechanical scaffolding, slowly doling mechanics and ramping up complexity over the campaign.

And because it’s a board game instead of a video game, it involves Legacy components and behaviors. Half a dozen sticker sheets, a bunch of envelopes with hidden contents, tearing up cards, removing tokens, and eating cardboard. That last one might just be me.

There are a lot of envelopes. Like, a huge number of them.

On the the whole, I found it a bit cumbersome. Not bad, just unwieldy. It also requires some additional components that aren’t included, notably a permanent marker of some sort. And maybe an x-acto knife to cut stickers in half for the parts of the game where you’re supposed to place them on creases on the board, and they don’t stay stuck.

I like the Legacy components. Now admittedly the game’s lookup book for events, the Book of Secrets, fell apart at the binding almost immediately. But I’ve had actual books do that to me, so I’m willing to ignore it.

Yes, I painted the minis. Yes, I was much more proud of them before I looked this closely at this high resolution picture. No, the Dwarf isn’t done yet even though I’ve already finished the campaign.

The legacy elements themselves are quite fun an interesting. There are a few that are a bit underwhelming, for example one that is effectively just madlibs. But there are some really fun ones around upgrades, events, and expanding the board. They’re quite enjoyable, and very compelling to interact with and chase after.

Keep that bit in mind as well.

The Actual Critique

So, we’re now like eight paragraphs deep about game mechanics. In a moment, we’re going to discuss the game a s a whole. But first one last distraction.

Imagine a world where chess pieces are edible, and quite tasty. It’s not important why. What’s important is that if you choose to play chess, you’re going to be tempted to eat at least a few of those delicious, delicious pieces. So on your turn, you can play the actual game, Chess, or pull one of your own pieces off the board and have it as a snack.

This is a game design problem. Actively consuming your resources to do something that opposes the theoretically primary goal changes things. And if you play with an opponent who agrees that eating is more fun than playing, you might spend part of the game just taking turns munching on pawns instead of going for check. It’s a very different experience.

This is of course, a metaphor for the primary “problem” I have with Clank Legacy.

Stickers > Victory Points

It’s more fun to run around doing quests and unlocking legacy events than it is to to get victory points. Putting out stickers, reading things from a big secret book, and unlocking new cards and quests is really fun! It’s the whole point of Legacy games.

This means that in many of the games I played, the game stalled out. It wasn’t that we weren’t having fun… But we definitely weren’t optimizing for “winning.” We were optimizing for doing as much legacy “stuff” as possible. We would actively tell our opponent what our plans for the next turn were, and what cards needed to stay out. Often, we would give thoughts or advice on the opponent’s plan to try to help them have a better turn.

Clank Legacy is, in theory, a competitive game. But it wasn’t very fun for me to play it like one. Trying to “win” felt like it came at the expense of trying to actually have a good time.

The main issue here, is that when this happens, the game turns into a version of the Cold War, instead of a race. Because the advancement of threat and danger is dependent on the market row, and players buying from the market row, there’s no outside force pressuring the players to run home.

In addition, if one player wants to accelerate the pace of the game, they have buy cards from the market row. And if those cards aren’t good, they’re actively making their deck worse.

Overall

I liked Clank Legacy. I’d play more of my copy, because despite finishing the campaign, there are still interaction points, quests, and other special things we haven’t completed. And it also might be fun to actually go and play a round competitively! I’m not sure. I haven’t played it like that yet.

But if someone asked me for a fresh campaign, I feel like I’ve seen enough already that I wouldn’t be interested in starting from scratch, or replaying through some of the initial games with very simplified mechanics.

Spoiler Warning

You’ve been warned. From here on out, we’re getting into spoilers. You can still stop reading this sentence. Or you can stop at this one. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So you know that whole design problem I mentioned up above? The one where the game can be stalled out with no issues, because the buy row remains stagnant?

One mechanic I haven’t mentioned is the patron. Patrons modify setup and few other game mechanics, generally in a small and (quite frankly) often negligible way.

Except for the last Patron in the campaign, effectively the final boss fight. Instead, it’s the only Patron in the game that actively clears cards out of the row every turn. In addition to that, if it reaches a certain (very badly defined and poorly worded) threshold/trigger, it clears EVERY card out of the row.

It’s the only mechanic that does continually clears cards out of the market row in the whole campaign. And then, because this is a legacy game, you destroy that Patron, never to use it again. So the designers are clearly aware that they could induce the extra time pressure, and prevent the cold war stalling. But they actively choose to do it only once, for a single game.