Tag: VideoGamesWeLike

Moonring

I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.

Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.

Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.

Dene

I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.

So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?

In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.

The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.

Mechanics

Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.

There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.

Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.

That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.

And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.

It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.

As soon as it stops crashing.

Conclusion

Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.

Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

Dorfromantik: The Board Game, as you might be able to tell from the title, is an adaptation of the video game Dorfromantik: Doesn’t Actually Have a Subtitle Because It Was Made First. Admittedly, capitalizing every letter in the latter half of that last sentence was a stupid bit, but it’s about the quality that this writeup is going to have, so I’m keeping it.

I’m not sure I have much useful to add about Dorfromantik: The Board Game (a name I’m going to shorten from here on out). Both versions of the game have won a billion awards, and a sold a ton of copies. Instead, I’m just going to look at a few parts of the game that raise interesting points, and then wrap up.

First though, let’s talk about the gameplay. Dorfromantik: I’m Going To Misspell This is a co-op and singleplayer board game. On a player’s turn, they do a single thing: they pick up one hexagonal tile and place it connected to other tiles. This is the only thing they will do on 98% of their turns.

Before you decide that all you need to do to win the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award is buy a hexagonal holepunch however, know that there is slightly more to the game than that. There are two types of tiles: task tiles, and generic tiles. If there are ever fewer than three task tiles on the board, the player must draw a task tile on their turn. Otherwise it must be a generic tile.

When you place a task tile, you also place a score token on top it. This is the number of items that need to be connected to score that tile.

This image blatantly stolen from Gem Klub on BGG. Hopefully they’re cool with it.

For example, in the above image, the river has a 6-task on it. This means that you need a total of 6 connected rivers to score the task tile, and it currently has 4 connected rivers. The wheat on the left side however, only needs 4 connected wheat fields, and currently only has 2.

I’m skipping over a lot of ways of earning points, but this is the core gameplay. Pick up tile, play tile. Rinse, repeat, and try to maximize score by maximizing the number of score tokens you can remove before you run out of other tiles (among other unmentioned strategies). This brings up the first point: it’s kind of odd to me that this is considered a co-op game.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not a bad thing. But Dorfromantik: The Are You Tired Of This Joke Yet is inherently multiplayer in the same sense that Sudoku is inherently multiplayer. There’s no individual resource, score or value whatsoever.

The game says it’s for up to six players, but there’s no difference in mechanics between a 6 player game, and a 60 player game, outside of maybe inconvenience. Unlike something like Beacon Patrol, Dorfromantik doesn’t even try to pretend to be a distinctly multiplayer experience.

The other interesting thing about Dorfromantik is that it’s a “Campaign Game.” It’s apparently not a “Legacy Game” because you don’t destroy the pieces.

In reality, all that means is that you unlock extra things, but you don’t get to eat any delicious juicy cardboard. While in theory you could put everything back into the tiny boxes it came with and start a new campaign, you’re probably not going to. Or at least I’m not going to.

Editor’s Note: Dorfromantik has put some thought into facilitating multiple campaigns at the same time by providing a pad of “campaign sheets” where different groups can track their respective campaign progress, but it would still be a hassle to sort out the unlocked components every time.

Look, I don’t see myself playing a board game 10-15 times, and then wanting to do it again but with none of the upgrades I spent the last 15 games earning.

I usually end these writeups with either a joke, or tying everything together, but I don’t really have either of those today. Dorfromantik for me is the perfect example of the 7 star BGG rating. “Good – Usually Willing to Play.” I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it enough to evangelize it. It deals with multiplayer and campaign setup in a way I haven’t seen before, but not one that’s unique or interesting enough for me to gush about it.

Dorfromantik: It Is Pretty Okay.

Escape Simulator

Escape Simulator offers the escape room experience, but offering a lot more content in the time/money department.

Escape Simulator is a set of digital escape rooms. If you haven’t heard of escape rooms: 1. Welcome, I’m not sure how you ended up on this blog of all places, and 2. in real life, escape rooms are sets of chained puzzles and challenges, usually with the end goal being to “escape” the room you started in.

Escape Simulator is a digital version of that experience, complete with full multiplayer for all official content. You and (possibly) your friends are all stuck in some sort of area, and need to solve various puzzles to get out.

The game has about 10 hours of content of official content. There are four 5-part challenge rooms, each about 10 minutes per part, and 6 more official larger rooms, each about 30-60 minutes each. (Yes, some of them have 45 minute completion times. No I’ve never finished a single one of them that quickly.)

Puzzles in Escape Simulator generally follow either a multi-chain or parallel puzzle structure. While there is a blueprint for how puzzles stack together in the structure of a room, the individual gameplay of a puzzle can vary a fair amount. Some arebased on decoding. Others are based on looking for hints in the environment.

Is it worth it?

Usually during a writeup, this is the part where I would explain game mechanics, and talk about their interactions. But since escape rooms consist of solving mysteries and puzzles, I’m not sure that does much here. Instead, let’s talk about something related for a moment.

Many video gamers video gamers do a certain kind of math before recommending a game (and I count myself as guilty of this as well). If the ratio of time to dollars is under 1 hour/$1, that’s no bueno. A game can be a brilliant, innovative and cleverly constructed experience, but if it clocks in at only 3 hours for $20, that’s already a hard sell.

It’s a bit weird, because I can’t think of another hobby group that actively does this, to this extent. Sure, the folks of Board Game Geek and the Board Gaming subreddits like to write about how much they care about replayability, while sitting on a throne of plastic wrapped purchases that they haven’t opened in the last four years, next to the other games they opened and never played more than once. But I don’t see movie buffs whining about the fact that Oppenheimer is $23 for only 180 minutes of film. Ski tickets can be $100 for just eight hours, and that’s not counting how much it costs to buy gear, get out the mountain, and the hospital bills after you fall off the chairlift.

Escape rooms, for example, are not cheap. I looked up prices for the ones around me, and one charges $38 per person for a one hour experience. Another was $100 for 4 people, and 45 minutes.

So, going back to Escape Simulator. It’s not really a “huge” amount of game. It’s also all puzzles, so it’s not really repayable. On the other hand, it works out to about $1.50 per hour, per person. Real escape rooms are about 20 times that.

Mods

Now, the other thing that Escape Simulator has on offer is fairly extensive set of mods. As good as the community content is, I have to view them as more of an addition than a reason to straight up recommend the game. The reason for this is that the quality and type of experience available in each one varies.

One mod I played was pretty much a straight up horror game. While generally very well put together, it did have a puzzle made vastly harder by the fact that the designer had chosen to add a spooky effect that made it hard to even see the puzzle.

Another mod had a particular brand of moon-logic in its answers. One room had a challenge that simply lacked mechanical feedback, rendering it incredibly confusing. And another was just a good solid puzzle experience.

Stolen from dictionary.com

The mods are amateur, in the literal dictionary definition. They are made by non-professionals for personal enjoyment. While the resulting experiences are interesting and fun, they often lack polish, or feel like they could have been playtested/tweaked to make a bit more sense.

In no particular order, here are a few mods I liked.

Karakuri Castle by namo_krub
Laundry Day by namo_krub
Little Emily by cico

Overall

I enjoyed Escape Simulator, but I’d mostly recommend it as a multiplayer experience. There isn’t any overall story or narrative to give meaning to the rooms. It’s just a set of fairly well designed puzzles with a surprising amount of high quality community content.

Escape Simulator is $15 on Steam.

Last Epoch

A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.

Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.

Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.

ARPG’s in Brief

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.

Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.

Skills and Skilltrees

But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.

Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.

The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.

As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.

Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.

Endgame

I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.

Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.

Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.

There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.

Life pro-top: Don’t try to take the screenshot of the early endgame boss during the fight.

Crafting and Items

A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.

There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.

There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.

Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.

Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.

The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.

In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:

Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.

Maybe I should have just written that instead.

Closing Comments

Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.

However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.

Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.

Last Epoch is $35 on Steam.

BattleBit Remastered

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about BattleBit Remastered. On one hand, I’ve played close to 60 hours of it, bought copies for friends, and generally had a really good time with it. On the other hand, the game already has thousands of positive reviews, and hundreds of thousands of players. So my writeup feels like tossing a single match into a volcano.

BattleBit Remastered is falls into the genre of the “Massive” FPS. That is to say, the smallest maps and game sizes available are 32 players vs. 32 players. The largest games are 127 vs. 127.

BattleBit doesn’t have any features that feel outwardly revolutionary or genre defining. The thing is, this doesn’t really matter because it does everything correctly. Perhaps the biggest thing for me is that the game is incredibly well performing even at the highest player counts and game modes.

A Quick Story

Because of the high player count, it’s easy to assume that BattleBit is a game where a single player or group of players can’t have any impact. I don’t think that’s true.

One of my favorite moments was when I was playing on a winter map with only a single set of roads. Working with my friends, we managed to sneak around back, and seize control of a small outpost area. We then built a spawn point near the area, and set of barricades blocking only road to the other 75% of the map. This meant that vehicles couldn’t get past, and led to at least a dozen enemy vehicles including APC’s and tanks just slamming full stop into the hastily erected barriers, and letting us shred them with rockets.

It’s moments like this that make BattleBit feel great for me. Working with other folks to flank or block areas can feel really fun and meaningful!

Just Very Good

It’s hard to figure out the best way to praise a game for just doing almost everything very well. Maps are interesting and balanced, offering spots for both sniping and close range combat. The guns feel pretty good, with comparable stats and time to kill. No single class feels overpowered.

The game also has an effective party and squad system that just works really well. Players can just create a party when they log into the game, and then invite friends later. There’s no having to back out, no MMR, and the high player count means I’ve never run into the “Oops, we already have a full party” issue.

That’s not to say that I consider BattleBit to be perfect. There are some small things that are frustrating around loadouts and stats. It’s not possible to have more than one loadout saved for any class, which means that swapping weapons based on the map is a bit aggravating. I also find the body armor/helmet/backpack system incredibly confusing, as cosmetic variations of various items are intermingled with the stat changing ones.

But none of these issues actually impact the core gameplay: running, gunning, and getting shot by a sniper halfway across the map.

In Conclusion

BattleBit is also blessedly free of all the other bullshit I usually feel obligated to point out or excuse. There is no battlepass, no microtransactions, no in-game cosmetic store. The game is $20. You can buy it once and then play it with your friends for as long as you want.

If you like first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, you can buy this game right now safe in the knowledge you’ll get your money’s worth.