The Confidence of Hades

This week has been a bit of a write-off, blogwise, which is a bit of a pity because as far as the traditional Blaugust focuses of the week goes, 'Developer Appreciation Week' is the one that I actually feel like I have a little something to say about, for once.

It won't come as a surprise that along with pretty much everyone else in the world and the judging panels of something like fifty Game of the Year awards, I'm a big fan of Supergiant Games' Hades. It's a game that I finally got around to playing just a couple of months ago and that has been in very heavy rotation here at Leaflocker HQ ever since, in a period when I really haven't had the time to spend on videogames, a clear marker both of just how good it is, and also my persistent lack of an adequate dose of self-control. Hades does a great job of making me feel both clever and powerful as your progress through the underworld, which is no mean feat when we're talking about me (not the finest gamer in the land), so I add my voice of recommendation to the choir. Play it.

Apart from the the main attraction of the gameplay loop itself, there's a number of aspects of the design of the game that I wanted to touch on today that I think really speak to the confidence of Supergiant as a developer.

First, there's the seamless inclusion of the little things that are just expected in game with modern sensibilities. The whole game is set around the rivers of the underworld, so of course you can pause in your relentless killing spree to stop and do some fishing (complete with terribly fishy puns). Heck, the game wants you to, it will even pause the relentless timer to allow you to do so. And in a world where it's important for those launch-day metrics to be able to satisfy @canyoupetthedog, not only can you pat the terrifying hellbeast Cerberus, despite him being set-up as the penultimate boss of the game you give him treats instead of fighting him, because who could possibly want to fight such a good doggo? And of course, there's the romance subplots, Supergiant were happy enough with the core game that they had the time and the inclination to add a little of something for everyone, that just oozes confidence in what you're making.

Then there's the confidence of saying "yes, you're going to have to play this dozens of times to see all the story". That's pretty much a requirement of the roguelike genre, but the ability to ask the player to see the game through to the end over and over, seeing the same content again and again, and rely on the small changes of the systems between play-throughs to keep it interesting, and to double down by throwing in little jokes about it as you make them start again, that's true confidence. And players have definitely reponded. A quick look at the Steam Achievement stats as they sit now show that almost 50% of players finished the game once, 24% finish the story, and 7% reach the epilogue. Given that seeing the epilogue took me over 70 runs, those are excellent retention rates. Compare that to something with a similar campaign length, something like FTL, where only 17% of players ever defeat the boss on easy difficulty, and you'll see just how impressive those numbers are.

And finally, in my favourite example of showing confidence in your gameplay, there's the excellent way that Supergiant didn't tie the achievements in the game to the end of the things to do in the game. Now I love achievements and I love ticking them off, but I greatly enjoy that there's still a whole heap more for me to explore and discover in the game well after I ticked off "100%" according to Steam. The hardest Steam Achievement, the one for finishing the game with the Pact of Punishment set to level 16, is explicitly the second of three in-game bragging prizes. You can tick off all the achievements without perfecting your bonds with every character, without completing every fated path, without unlocking all the cosmetics, and without engaging at all with the Resource Director, the part of the game that the game itself explicitly tells the player is just there for nutters. Supergiant is happy to give you that coveted Platinum trophy, secure in the knowledge that you'll be back to find what you've missed in the game so far, just because the game feels so darn good. And they're right, almost 40 plays after I ticked off my last achievements, I'm still diving back into the depths of hells, for just one...more...room.

That's confidence.

IMHO: Yakuza 3

There are many times when I feel utterly ill-equipped to be attempting to talk about video games on the internet, a place full of intelligent and experienced people who have valuable and insightful things to say about the craft. People like Tim Rogers, or Noah Caldwell-Gervais or Hans Stockmann who it sometimes seems have not only played every game in existence, but can somehow summon up something of interest or somehow even something important to say about them.

And then there's me, someone who faced with having given myself the task of reviewing the remaster of Yakuza 3, a widely-respected open-world adventure game from 2009, really doesn't even have a frame of reference with which to judge it. I've been playing games all my life, from a NES and 386 onward without a noticeable break, and yet somehow the whole genre ( I don't even know what to call them, action role playing games, maybe?) completely passed me by. I haven't played an Elder Scrolls game, a Half-Life, a Fallout, a God of War, or a Soulslike. I played one of the Might and Magic games for a bit. I tried Bioshock but didn't really get into it. Any game where you're controlling a character in a 1st or 3rd person perspective, it's very likely that I haven't played it or seen someone play it, I probably haven't even heard of it. Is Yakuza 3 like those games at all? I can't really say. I think that might make me a fake gamer boy.

But judge it I must, because I set myself a target of reviewing all the Humble Bundle games this month and this game has the misfortune to be on it. My first impressions are that it:

1. Is mostly about the plot rather than the rather rudimentary game mechanics
2. Has far too many cutscenes (I think there were seven scene-setting movies before I could do anything meaningful with my character)
3. Leans heavily on the story of the previous games in the series (which I have not played) to make me care about the characters. Except the main dude, who is my dad now (sorry dad).

I was going to go into more detail on those points. On how the gameplay that is not fighting feels like just an excuse to get you either to the fights or to yet another cutscene where we learn that our tough guy hero is just a big softie really. On how the fights feel so rote and uninspired that you just want to get back to the aimless roaming around and cute little side quests. On how the introductory exposition may well be the worse example of un-lampshaded introductory exposition I've even seen. But honestly I think the dot points above pretty much cover everything that I have to say about this game. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure that this game, and games like it, are just not for me.

Except...hold on just one cotton-picking second. Because wait, what's that sign hanging above that unassuming little staircase? "Mahjong Camp"?

If you ever hear people saying nice things about the Yakuza games, it tends to be that they're chock full of weird and wacky moments and odd side quests that you can get lost in, and that they're extremely Japanese, to such an extent that for Yakuza 3, for example, a lot of the content judged more obscure to a western audience, the Japanese trivia, the hostess clubs and the mahjong, for example, were cut out in localization. It turns out that in this remastered version that excised content was added back in, and that I had inadvertently stumbled across this city's one and only mahjong parlour. In an instant, I forget about the boy that has gone missing from my orphanage that I was ostensibly supposed to be searching for, and ascend the stairs.

Inside the mahjong parlour, I am invited to trade my money for mahjong sticks. Having just barely begun the game, I have very little money, but I can afford one game. I sit down at the beginners table with a mix of working folks (who kept emoting that they needed to get back to work or feed the kids) and serious gambler types (whose emotes seemed to mostly consist of sneers) and proceed to get my ass absolutely handed to me. 

Forced back out onto the street to scrounge for cash to feed my new-found gambling habit, I run into a few groups of thugs and swiftly relieve them of their hard-earned cash and belongings. After a short trip to the pawnshop, it was back to the mahjong parlour, where once again I sat down at the table and this time everything was coming up Milhouse. I repeated my victory on the intermediate and advanced tables in short order, although the fact that I kept seeing some of the same faces at each of the tables combined with no discernible change in the gameplay suggests that the table names must be at least a little bit academic. Though who really knows, we're talking about a game of chance here, after all.

The interface for the minigame is a little strange, partially (but probably not completely) caused by insistence on using a mouse and keyboard for a game that emphatically wants to be driven by a controller. This means it's frustratingly easy to accidentally call tiles when you're trying to draw instead, which would be a fatal flaw if this were a serious mahjong platform. The rules are a customisable to a small degree, and seem to be pretty well implemented, though they might be very slightly different to what I'm used to (since I should have had a win from the bottom of the river at some point but it was disallowed). My favourite feature is that the ability to call riichi is hidden, you have to realise that you have a ready hand and press another button to make the option appear, which is a nice little touch of realism that I appreciated.

It's impressive that the designers have gone to such lengths to put this detailed minigame in here, and after checking out the mahjong, I also dove into a few back alleys until I found the gambling house and a bar, both of which also housed a number of other seemingly well-rendered mini-games, each with variants and details of their own. While the main game of Yakuza 3 might not be my cup of tea, I find I'm willing to beat up enough punks to collect enough cash to try out all the minigames, at least, even if I might never find that poor lost boy at the orphanage, so it has that going for it. And that's not nothing.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 4.9 hours
• Children abandoned to their fate: 9
• Gangsters squeezed: Somewhere around 30 or so
• Mangan hands achieved: 4
• Rating: 5 hapless thugs out of 10

The rankings so far

I find it hard to rank games that are so different to each other, but in the end I decided to give it to the one that I'm more likely to leave installed on my hard drive, so the gangsters lose out to the dwarves.

1. Hammerting
2. Yakuza 3

Next up in this series, due some time in the next few days once I've had a chance to download and properly absorb it, is Deadly Days.

IMHO: Hammerting

Back in March, when I was last a little active on this perpetually fallow little blog, I got six posts into a twelve post series about my thoughts on the February Humble bundle. Though I played a couple more games in that bundle (and have one mostly-written post to join my extensive collection of drafts that will never see the light of day), rather than head back in time I thought I might give the concept another whirl with the most recent bundle instead. But here's a couple of problems that I foresee with this approach:

• Starting again means that I'm further from the finish line, which as a chronic project-starter seems like a pretty poor plan. But I always was a sucker for punishment, and besides, more games means more posts in a month where I'm trying to put out a lot of words, right? 
  
  
• Having not planned to do Blaugust before I got on my flight, I haven't had a chance to pre-download any of the games back when I had lightning fast British internet. Given the general slow speed and regular drop-outs of the internet connection here in quarantine, I don't have high hopes of being able to get my hands on all too many of the games over the next week or so. We'll see how we go on that front.
  
  
• I am just not particularly interested in this month's games. Back in February there were a couple of titles that I knew that I'd enjoy and a couple that I was at least intrigued about. A scan through this month's options doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on that front. This is not an unfamiliar story with the Humble Choice for me, which is a clear indication that I need to reduce my subscription.

However, there was one game on the list that had been sitting on my watchlist for a little while. Hammerting sees you manage a small colony of dwarves, exploring a procedurally generated mountain and generally trying to make your fortune. As someone who has tried and failed to get into Dwarf Fortress on multiple occasions, I'd been morbidly interested it this one as a potential way into a DF vibe without the learning curve of difficulty spikes that have made that game utterly incomprehensible to me. There's just something compelling about dwarves, I guess. Sadly, after playing it for almost 18 hours over the last couple of days (there's really nothing else to do but sleep or watch the Olympics, and don't worry, I've been doing plenty of both of those, too), I can confidently say that Hammerting might be lots of things, but it is definitely not anything like the mind-melter that I've found Dwarf Fortress.

The game was released in Steam Early Access back in October 2020, and here in early August 2021, while there's been eight substantial updates, it is still very, very clearly a game that is in early access. After what I very much hope is a placeholder tutorial of the "here is the menu button, press it to get the menu" variety that does very little to prepare you for what's coming, your three dwarves are sent into a mountain and you're left to your own devices (apart from little queue of quests that generate as you go to give you a few targets along the way) in a side-on view of a mostly dark mountain. This isn't completely a bad thing, the learning curve is gentle and the game is simple enough that you're not going to drown in mechanics before you work out what's going on out there, but it's not a good first impression.

Sadly, it turns out mostly what's going out there is a whole lot of empty space (although admittedly it's a very easy on the eyes variety of empty space), which you must explore in order to gain points that can be traded for improved technology. Some of that empty space has different colours, but though the default sized mountain is very large indeed, so far it seems like there's really only a couple of types of challenges that need to be dealt with: There are big holes, that you'll have to dig around, water, that doesn't seem to do anything to phase dwarves at all, and enemy camps, that can easily be blown up by attacking them. Do these obstacles get harder as you go down the mountain? Maybe a little, but not noticeably so. After digging for a couple of days, it's clear that there's more to discover down there, but also that it's probably not going to be meaningfully different to what's come before. Sure, I could keep digging, but there's been no real indication that there's anything in it for me, and it's certainly not going to be worth wrestling with a user interface and lack of control that is constantly frustrating. 

The other part of the game is trading the goodies that you've found or manufactured with other settlements accessed via the world map for money and for trading points, the other currency required to improve your tech. This section has apparently recently had a revamp, but like the delving, once you've gotten the hang of the basics, there doesn't seem to be anything interesting going on, and this bit doesn't have the possibility of building mighty empire-spanning railcart rollercoasters to redeem it. It feels like it's set up to have different nations battling each other, allowing you to influence the fight somehow, but after 18 hours in my game, this aspect seems completely absent, and even if it did affect you as a player, the overworld seems so divorced from the real world underground that it's hard to imagine how anything happening here it could make any substantial effect on your game.

If this were a regular game, it would immediately have been uninstalled and dragged into my 'Timewasters' Steam category, reserved for games that are a perfectly reasonable way to spend a few hours but that I have no particular need to experience again unless a peculiar itch overcomes me. Since it's in active development, I think it'll go off into the 'Rainy Day' category, to be revisited at some point in the future just to see if it's gotten any more interesting. As with the Wild Eight, another Early Access title we visited in this series last time, there's definite potential here, but the difference between what exists and what seems to be envisioned is a vast gulf that will probably never be bridged. It comes with a Team 17 logo, something I've associated with quality work in the past, so I hope I'm wrong, but if I am then it's certain that the finished product is a long way away.

And because I'm feeling a little pent up frustration, in no particular order, here's a list of things that bugged me that I hope they'll get around to fixing before they call the game complete. Some seem more easily fixable that others:

• There are different grades of materials that you can build the same equipment from. Using better materials increases the resale value, but doesn't seem to make any other substantive difference, and you also don't seem to have any control as to which quality materials different producers use. I don't know how many golden railway tracks I've made, wasting huge piles of coin and a limited resource for no additional benefit.
  
  
• There are skill trees but they don't make any sense at all. The high-level skills all require overlapping trees. It feels like this whole aspect needs to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch
  
  
• There are neat little character models and character portraits that give each of your dwarves a distinct character, but they don't match each other. This hurts. General interaction with the character menus is a little haphazard and needs a bit of a revamp sometime, too.
  
  
  
  
  
• Some of the more complicated automation tasks like water pumping and drilling aren't very intuitive and desperately need a detailed tutorial or tooltip.
  
  
• You can control which dwarves do which roles, which works relatively well, although the interface is a little inconsistent. You can't stop any dwarves from fighting, though, which means that your entire colony grinds to a halt whenever any dwarf meets and enemies anywhere in the mountain. It would be nice to be able to set a maximum number of dwarves that will perform a certain task (like fighting or trading) at any given time, as well as just having toggles for each dwarf and some archetype templates.
  
  
• There's not really any danger out there, or any variety in that danger. Every nest of enemies can just be beaten up by clicking on it and waiting. If different enemies required different strategies (these ones need to be drowned, or set on fire, or kept under observation, or you need to use weapons with long reach, these ones can be farmed) and there were a greater range of defensive and military options (the only thing in this category at the moment are doors), that would make the game more tactically interesting.
  
  
• Dwarven priorities are a little strange. You can set certain building and construction tasks to high, medium or low priority, but you can't set the priority of digging, and even if a dwarf is set to only care about digging, sometimes tasks are just ignored for hours at a time, even if there doesn't seem to be any competing priorities. They also love jumping off places and getting themselves stuck in caverns or elevator shafts.
  
  
  
  
  
• The 'overland' trading game doesn't have very much variance at all. There are different types of settlements that provide different goods, but they they all buy more or less the same things, and there's no easy way to compare prices for saleable goods across the world or to set up automated trading. Different capitals all have the same special trading task, right from extremely early, which require you to sell them two resources, on which can't be produced until half-way down the tech tree and one that can only be found extremely rarely somewhere in the mountain. 
  
  
• Some of the other quests are really strange, too. One of them, acquired when you build you cookhouse, extremely early on, requires you to make crab soup. I'm yet to find crab meat, either in the mountain or for trade, so this task is just sitting there unfinished with the endgame goals.
  
  
• Final task is just insane. It requires you to collect 10,000 gold. I have maxed out my population and finished the tech tree and I have 3 gold, the most I've had in the whole game is 12, and tradingl which I've talked about above as an utterly uncompelling part of the game, is the only way to each money. I'm certain that I could give up on exploration and just pump out goods constantly for hundreds of hours in order to tick this off, but I'm equally sure that that wouldn't be remotely interesting for anyone involved.

Verdict? It's still Early Access, let's wait and see. I know I'm sounding a little down about the whole thing, but being able to sink this many hours into a game before I gave up in frustration is a promising start, as long as the team follows through.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 17.8 hours
• Icy caverns explored: 3
• Rats butchered: Somewhere on the far side of 100
• Depths plumbed: Moderate
• Rating: 6 golden railway tracks out of 10

Next up... just as soon as it finishes downloading.. .and play it... and write about it to my satisfaction... Yakuza 3.

XCOM 2 Succession Game: Mission 14 (Parts 1 and 2!)

Screenshots have been eaten by connection problems here in the far North, so I'm afraid this one's going to be just the text. If you'd like an audio-visual experience, watch the video :)

Between bouts of jetlag this morning I found enough time to prop my eyes open to be able to play my next turn in our ongoing succession game of XCOM 2, which very conveniently rolled around to my turn just at the beginning of Blaugust as I was flailing around for that sweet sweet blog content. As has become my wont, this blog takes the form of both a video recording of the game or the traditional AAR.

My turn opened on the Geoscape, showing that our XCOM project has now gained the support of the whole of North America, but that ADVENT has bases in China and North Africa and their nefarious Avatar Project is starting to look very dangerous. After training a couple of new rookies into Grenadiers to help fill the whole in the roster that has opened up since Ramblin' Redshirt bit the dust, and expanding our squad size to allow us to take six soldiers on each mission, I began trying to gather the necessary contacts in Asia to discover and eventually attack the enemy base there. 

I didn't quite get through the first part of that process before I was interrupted by the summons to the mission briefing room to complete a Guerilla Ops mission, so it was back to North America for what was labelled as a 'Difficult' task. Reader, they were not kidding. Operation Knife Song was brutal. Since my last turn in the game back in early June I've played through the whole XCOM 2 campaign, so I have a bit more of an idea what I'm doing than I did back then, but that didn't stop me from unwittingly walking my team into a meatgrinder and getting them spat back out.

I opted for a six-man team of two Specialists, two Grenadiers, and one Sniper and Assault, a flexible team that I hope would allow me to deal with any unexpected threats. I quickly found a Muton and Trooper just inside a nearby building, but had left my fireteam too spread out to take them down effectively. Though we were eventually able to take them out without taking any damage, it required far too much effort to clean them up, and left me needing to make up time over the course of the rest of mission.

Next up, in the building that held the target goodies chest, the team uncovered a big pod of mixed Advent troopers, a nearby pod of sectoids and snakemen, as well as a pair of Autoturrets, all in all a significant mass of firepower in a choke point on the map. A couple of poor tactical moves and wasted abilities, triggering both pods of aliens in moves that could and should have been avoided, showed that I'd someone managed to get a little rusty in the couple of months since I last slipped into the skin of the Commander, and put the team in a pretty sticky spot. To make matters worse, ADVENT chose this turn to send in a dropship of reinforcements, leaving our team bad outnumbered and flanked on all sides.

The firefight that ensued saw the team miss a number of critical shots, and a couple more tactical errors left me ending up being forced to decide which of the team members I could afford to have shot in the back. It didn't end up well for Rakuno, who found themselves caught in a deadly crossfire, Naithin, who got himself constricted by a snakeman, or for Geoff Mason, the Squaddie who I have designated as 'UnwiseOwl Jr', whose back was left exposed to the remaining autoturret in a vain attempt to get close enough to the mission target to finish it in the remaining couple of turns. The team ended relying pretty heavily on their newly acquired heavy armour in order to have any chance of survival.

The team all hit their shots in the next turn, but were left with just too much to get done in the time available. Left with the uneviable choice of killing off one of the remaining ADVENT Captains or completing the mission, Bookahs sprints for the case, leaving Naithin to be unceremoniously cut down in his prime.

Rather than leave us with one of our A-team members dead and most of the rest carrying heavy wounds going into an ADVENT base assault an a potential Avenger defence mission, I instead decided to call my mulligan and turn back time to give it another try now that I was forewarned on what was awaiting us on the mission, being pretty sure that with a more careful approach we'd be able to do the whole thing a lot more cleanly. Unfortunately, my autosave settings had been reset to default in my recent reinstallation of the game, meaning that I didn't have a usable save point before the mission has already gone to hell.

This forced me to reload from the beginning, meaning that the mission was reset and I was once again going in blind. So much for that plan. Thus began what I hoped would be the actual mission 14, sending the same fireteam out on Operation Hell Saga.

We quickly found the first pod, consisting of a MEC and an Officer. Though we accidentally alerted them to our presence before we were ready to deal with them, judicious use of a grenade and elevation bonuses made quick work of the MEC and presented an opportunity that was just too good to pass up for Naithin to attempt to skulljack the Officer, completing an additional objective that had already proved disastrous for the team once. 

Naithin took the shot, collecting a good stash of goodies for his trouble, and the team took aim at the Codex. Dealing with it was relatively straight-forward, since the crossfire was well prepared, allowing Rakuno to lay the initial hit before Junior and Magi stepped in to finish the job, but it did result in a significant proportion of my firepower being behind the action, causing Black Widow to be isolated facing a pod of three Snakemen more or less alone.

From this point a comedy of errors ensued, with a long chain of bad RNG and the reptiles high agility combining to mean that clearing them out took a significant amount of time and involved a number of hits that would send Widow to the infirmary for an extended period. Thankfully her poison resistance (I'm not sure if that's from the armour or a PCS) reduced a lot of damage, and the cleanup was eventually managed without too much drama. 

After taking out the objective, the team faced off against a pod of reinforcements as well as another Snakeman and his Stun Trooper buddies. The reinforcements were taken out pretty easily by a combination of Magi's continuing excellence with the sniper rifle and judicious use of the Bookah's GREMLIN, but another chain of missed opportunities meant that Naithin took a couple of shots before the last pod was finally disposed of, so he'll be joining Widow for an extended stay in the infirmary.

All in all, a successful mission, especially when compared to the nightmare that was the previous attempt, with a lot of goodies picked up and the bonus objective of the disposal of the Codex completed to boot. Magi, surely the MVP as the only member of the unit who consistently remembered how to shoot, got a promotion for their efforts (picking up the incredibly overpowered Kill Zone perk), as did Rakuno (Volatile Mix) and Naithin (Shadowstep). The contribution of Widow, who kept a pod of snakes busy for an extended time, even if she didn't end up seeing too many of them off herself, can't be underestimated either. 

I didn't manage to begin to deal with the looming threat of the Avatar project as I'd hoped, but I'll leave that in the capable hands of Naithin as we begin our third cycle. You'll find the save file here. Good luck, Commander.

Love live the...Humans?: XCOM 2 Blogger Succession Game - Mission 7

Regular readers of the Leaflocker may be wondering what is happening in the communal game of Civilization VI that I've been reporting on every couple of months since May 2020. If that's you, then I'm glad to announce to you the almost two-month-old headline that Her Majesty's English Empire has successfully completed a cultural domination of the world. Yes, everyone is now wearing our blue cardigans and drinking our tea. You can catch up on a summary of the whole endeavour over at the blog of our fearless leader Naithin.

Having learnt absolutely nothing from our year-long attempt to complete a game many folks would have finished in a day or so, no sooner had the dust settled on that the company resolved to set out together on a communal game of infamous unfinished savefile producer XCOM 2, and given my own long history with the series, there was no way that I could sit out, so we all made alien-hunting super-soldier versions of ourselves and some of our buddies and set out to save the world from the aliens. 

Well, the other players made themselves super-soldiers, my own avatar was a bit of a bumbling buffoon who got himself blown up when a nearby truck exploded on his second day-trip out of the cosy home base. Some of us are just not made for the soldiering life, I suppose. If you'd like to catch up on all the good stuff so far (something I heartily recommend rather than just diving in blind like I did this time around!), a summary of the game so far and links to all the other blogs can be found here.

I recorded my game (stuttering graphics card at all), so those of you who prefer the live experience can check out the video above as long as you can deal with a low frame rate, high pixellation, bad audio and all the usual traps that come from a very inexpert streamer just pressing 'record' on their installation of OBS and hoping, but I'll also try to summarise the events here for those who prefer their video game experiences in text and distilled into the medium of the traditional After Action Report. I'm afraid the screenshots aren't much chop either, but at least my computer managed to make it through the mission without overheating and shutting down, which is a better result than last time I tried to play X-COM 2, so as far as I'm concerned we're calling it a win.

I began my stint as the Commander trying to find my feet by assigning a promotion to a newly acquired soldier and distributing weapon modifications, but quickly realised that with our first weapon upgrade just around the corner, using up all the cool loot on our base-level weaponry might not be the best plan and it might be more sensible to save the good stuff to strap onto the bigger guns.

Make sure you get my good side for the screenshot.

The mission, codenamed Gasping Shroud, saw the fireteam dropped into enemy-occupied downtown Chicago to abduct an alien collaborator from their place of business, which if you ask me seems like a questionable call when we're in a battle for the hearts and minds of humanity, but when the council gives an order, it's up the grunts to get the job done. Given that the enemy presence was expected to be light, I elected to blood a couple of new recruits in while keeping a backbone of what is already becoming the core squad.

It's just like shooting snakes in a barrel.

The team quickly met and snuck up on the first pod of enemies, an ADVENT trooper and what my X-COM brain will forever call a Snakeman, which feels like a bit of a misnomer given that the XCOM 2 version, in what seems like an unusual design decision given how reptiles usually work, has prominent breasts. Positioning our sniper Endalia in a position on top of a two-story building with a good overview of the battlefield and guarding the rookie's flanks, the team prepared and then triggered a crossfire. Despite a good first hit by Endalia, the aliens were able to duck immediately behind cover in relative safety when the shooting started, so SilentDeath was forced to resort to a grenade to destroy their position. XCOM 2. Aliens 0.

This wasn't part of the plan.

Perhaps feeling a little overconfident after that first encounter, rookie "Bookah" Nerk extended a little too far by moving to the window of the target's office building, triggering a second pod consisting of an enemy stun trooper and a scary-looking mech. Though the rest of the team tried to provide covering fire and the team's other recruit "Naithin" Nihilin succeeded in landing a heavy shot on the mech, the choice to send in the team without a unit carrying a medkit was beginning to look like a serious mistake when Bookahnerk took a stun lance to the gut. Thankfully the damage wasn't critical, leaving the team's Grenadier Ramblin' Red to take out the trooper and the rest of the team to set up the defensive positions while giving the previously unspied Autoturret on the roof a wide berth. 

After the mech exploded in a crossfire from Bookah's rifle and Endalia's pistol, and the turret came face-to-face with SilentDeath's shotgun, the rest of the team looked out for any incoming Advent while Naithin entered the building and introduced the target to the butt of his rifle. XCOM 5. Aliens 0.5. Enemy reinforcements were slow to arrive, however, so when they finally landed they were met with a veritable hailstorm of munitions. The poor guys never had a chance. War is hell for alien-human hybrid creatures too, I suppose. The team extracted, Naithin lugging the VIP all the way, leaving Chicago behind them they took to the skies once again, leaving only six alien corpses and two piles of mechanical rubble in their wake as proof that they'd ever been there at all.

Ten days medical leave for a near-electrocution seems pretty reasonable, honestly.

Back at the Avenger, while engineers began excavating another room and SilentDeath rushed the newly appointed Specialist Bookahnerk to the sickbay with a grievous wound that is likely to put them out of action for ten days or so, the rest of the team were busy training their newly acquired skills: Naithin joined the Ranger corps, Ramblin' Red learned Supression, and Endalia, encouraged by that headshot on the mech earlier, became even more deadly with pistols. I spent our hard-earned supplies from the mission on a few Guerilla Training School projects, and then immediately regretted it when our scientists finished their current research project and demanded a bit pile of cash in order to equip our soldiers with their newly-developed Magnetic Weapons, so I set the Avenger to collecting up a few supplies from various sources around our communications network, but only managed to scrounge up enough to equip the squad with Magnetic Rifles before the alarm was sounded for the team to scramble to their next mission.

Humanity's last hope? Or an Auton all along?

That's my cue to sign off, so I'll leave the Avenger to the command of Naithin and will look forward to seeing how those new guns do in his capable hands. The save file is here. Good luck, Commander.

IMHO - Boomerang Fu

This is game number six of games that are part of the February 2021 Humble Choice bundle. The original depressingly naïve version of this opening paragraph crowed that I was on track to finish the February bundle before the March one is due to be released. That's no longer even close to being true, but lets see if we can't get that monkey off our back by finally sitting down and writing about Boomerang Fu.

Boomerang Fu is a cute little three-button party game from a first-time Australian studio in which pieces of food try to slice each other up for fun and profit, causing them to die in various amusing ways (the coffee mug smashes, the milk carton spills, the avacado stone pops out, etc.). As someone who grew up sitting patiently waiting for my turn to play pretty much anything, any game that allows for a bunch of players to jump on the couch and duke it out it okay with me. As far as I'm concerned, couch multiplayer is the peak video gaming experience, nothing quite gets near the emotional rollercoaster of the near misses, drama and wiping the smirk off the face of the guy that's killed you three times in a row. It's practically sports, except that I don't need to go lie down as soon as it's over.

It's just as well that I like couch multiplayer, though, as this little title doesn't have online multiplayer at all, which particularly for a game released in 2020 in the height of a pandemic seems like just a little bit of an oversight. There is also the slight problem that there's no chance in hell of convincing Mrs. Owl to play a game like this, so I guess at the moment the only person that I have to play this with are the bots, who are pretty stupid even on the highest difficulty level, even if they're dead shots with a boomerang. The more I think about it, though, the less this omission it feels like an oversight, because I think the developers could tell that Boomerang Fu just isn't the kind of game that people are going to play online.

Will this powerup be awesome, like telekinesis, or a liability that will cause me to blow myself up?

There are three modes, free-for-all, teams and golden boomerang, but they are all pretty much the same idea. The whole game is extremely simplistic, able to be picked up in a few moments. It's a perfect party game to have on in the corner, letting players jump in and out: each level has different obstacles to overcome and it cycles through levels fast enough that nothing gets boring, and it even has a nice little catch-up mechanic or two, giving trailing players an extra life. It's just not the sort of game that people are going to be raving about so much that they want to play it online with their mates. This game just isn't worth the hassle of jumping into the group chat and herding the cats in order to play it.

 There's also the small matter of the price: Boomerang Fu, a party game that feels like a souped-up early 00's flash game, retails for £11.93 in a world where the big games that everyone is playing right now are Valheim (£15.49) and Loop Hero (£12.49). Are all your friends really going to shell out for it? If I were a cynic I'd wonder if this game wasn't picked for the bundle just so that the Humble Choice could have a retail value of £201.38.

Extra points for including my personal killer feature, the .GIF capture button.

I'm also in two minds about the name. On one hand, the name instantly told me exactly what this game was going to be, a dumb fighting game with projectiles. On the other hand, it frustrates me a lot that the phrase Boomerang Fu doesn't...mean anything. Big opportunity missed to at least call this Boomerang Fu'd (because they're food, get it?), that's all I'm saying. 

Some quick numbers 

• Time played: 1.35 hours (7 or 8 games)
• Maniacal laughs when flipping the switch squished all my opponents: 2
• Times I blew myself up with explosive boomerangs: 9
• Bots required to make it a fair fight: 4
• Rating: 5 diced doughnuts out of ten

The rankings so far

It's not that Boomerang Fu is a bad game. It's not. It's well executed, everything works, and it feels good to play. It's a good addition to my collection that I'm glad I own, but I definitely wouldn't have bought it, because it feels like every one of these party-style brawl games I've ever played. Which is strange, because when I stop and try to name a game that it's like, my mind has been drawing a blank all week. I guess it feels like...Bomberman? Multiplayer Nidhogg? There's nothing in my memory just like this title, and yet somehow every part of me is yelling out that I've seen everything Boomerang Fu has to offer before, and that's not in it's favour.

Let's try it with humans instead of bots some time

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Boomerang Fu
4. Valfaris
5. Werewolf: The Apocalyse - Heart of the Forest
6. Train Station Renovation

Six down. Six to go. Seven if I mean to intend the Humble Trove title, which I totally do. Next up the dice have declared that we must play game number 9, Valkyria Chronicles 4.

IMHO - Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest

Next up in our quest to play all of last month's Humble Choice bundle, we have the visual novel that you can tell is going to be a visual novel because the name has a colon AND a dash, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest.

Ah, the visual novel, the 21st century answer to the Choose Your Own Adventure story, where instead of 30 Different Endings! you have an unspecified number, but they're probably all pretty much the same. It's hard to quantify exactly how many of these there's been in the Humble Choice lately, as what counts as an adventure game and what is just a straight up VN is a bit of a grey area, but having a game in the same series, Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York just last month after also having Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York back in September is honestly just a little on the nose. Truly the Paradox Interactive promotional department is earning their paycheques.

As you might have guessed from the glowing introduction, I'm not much for the visual novel as a genre, which might seem a little odd as I grew up devouring CYOAs, and have played my fair share of MUDs and text adventures. I don't think I want that much, my criteria for what makes a decent visual novel is pretty basic: it has to tell an engaging story, it has to be enhanced by the medium, and the player needs to be able to make choices that matter.  Maybe it's a symptom of being a basic format with a low barrier to entry, making them essentially the fanfiction of the gaming world, but for my money most VNs just seem to fall short of these goals. Or maybe I'm just an old man, not ready to deal with all these new-fangled computermagadjets. Could go either way.

Surprise!

Anyways, how does W:TA-HotF measure up against the aforementioned criteria? I gotta say that the mystery of the protagonist finding out about their family history is kinda spoiled with the word Werewolf in big letters in the title. In the storyline I clicked through the characters felt like they made sense and most of the pieces hung together okay, but I didn't feel like there was a enough narrative drive other than the whole werewolf thing to properly hook me. The pacing was weird too, even more than the usual that you might expect to be brought about by branching storylines, and for a game allegedly about being a werewolf, the whole actually being a werewolf thing was...pretty much irrelevant. By the time I reached an ending I felt like I'd used a character creator, wikied an environmental protest in regional Poland, and read the lore page in the guidebook for an role-playing game rather than actually enjoyed a story, which given that Werewolf: The Apocalypse is mostly a tabletop RPG and that this is a spin-off more geared at building enthusiasm for the main game, actually makes a lot of sense. I'd wonder if this was intended as the first part of an episodic release game, but the whole business model of squeezing these titles out every few months seems to suggest that's not the case.

I also have a small nitpick about how a game that is all about the text probably needs some better copyediting. It wasn't plagued by the google translate problem that so much of the cheap end of Steam is, but it do things like use 'draught' instead of 'drought' throughout, which makes me crazy. I was unsurprised to see the usual suspects in the steam reviews complaining that the protagonist is a woman and the game won't let you play as a proper fascist werewolf, so it at least gets points for that, I guess.

Extremely memeworthy names for varieties of wolf people

The soundscape is unobtrusive but suitably moody, and the distinctive sketch/photo hybrid art style works well to enhance the story without detracting or distracting from it and isn't quite as reliant on various shades of blood red as the screenshots I've grabbed here might indicate, so the sensory elements of this one work well. The RPG-style character sheet functions well enough to help you track things and give hints about what routes you might want to explore, too. I kind of wish there was a way to keep that info on the screen all the time instead of having to click into it, but I don't know it's worth sacrificing the space devoted to artwork to get there. All in all, the VN format suits the story well, and is well executed, so it gets marks in that category.

Having only played through this once, it's hard to judge how much the player choices really matter. Certainly in the storyline I played through I made some pretty suboptimal choices and there didn't really seem to be any consequences in meandering towards a vaguely positive ending. I got my character 'killed' twice, once on purpose to see what would happen, which I would have thought would have some kind of bad outcome, but that didn't seem to put the brakes on either. You are given a couple of status bars to maintain and are told when you're given choices that are due to your character status or relationship with particular groups, which is a good feature that helps helps to make the choices feel less arbitrary, but I can't help the feeling that the game would have ended up pretty much where it ended up if regardless of most of my decisions, and that's a frustrating feeling. 

The art grows on you. The story...

Story: nope. Format: sure. Choices: not so much. I guess one out three ain't bad? Like in The Wild Eight, I'm sure there's more good stuff to discover here, but what I've met so far doesn't encourage me to look any further and I've already spent a bunch more time on this post than I did playing the game.

Some quick numbers 

• Time played: 1.75 hours
• Named characters met that didn't turn out to be werewolves all along: 2
• Times I was told I was the chosen one: 3
• Friends murdered and dismembered: 1
• Rating: 4 trippy dream sequences out of 10

The rankings so far

I can imagine that folks that love the Werewolf: The Apocalypse RPG could be super into this in the way of fans the world over, and it doesn't do all that much wrong; it's a perfectly serviceable visual novel. I guess I still don't like visual novels that much, though.

And then I woke up and found it was all a dream... Or was it?

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Valfaris
4. Werewolf: The Apocalyse - Heart of the Forest
5. Train Station Renovation

We have played five games and it does not bode well that Valfaris is still number 3 on this list. Next up, the dice have decreed that we will play game number 1...Boomerang Fu.

IMHO - Trine 4

Forget the metrovanias, survival games and simulators that have made up this series so far, it's puzzle platformer time! When I cut my gaming teeth on Super Mario Bros. and Commander Keen, then refined my palate on Oddworld and Heart of Darkness, is it really surprise to anybody when I say that a physics-based puzzle platformer like Trine 4 is very much my jam?

In Trine 4, the player takes the role of three fantasy heroes, the object-summoning wizard, grappling-hook-wielding thief and good-for-hitting-things knight, and must switch between them to progress through various obstacles in a generic fantasy world, searching for a missing generic fantasy prince. Sure, the storyline isn't going to win any awards for originality, the writers were fine with hanging that lampshade and just letting the gameplay, the characters and the art speak for themselves, but when the game looks and feels this good, I'm more than willing to cut them some slack in that department.

How much desktop wallpaper bait can one game feature?

The art is definitely the first thing to mention. I'm not so used to this blogging thing, and normally screenshots for the posts are a bit of an afterthought, but while playing through this game my screenshot folder quickly filled up as I encountered new areas and took the time to soak in the lovingly-rendered 3D backgrounds to this otherwise 2D game. The world feels fun, not realistic but definitely inhabited, and despite so much attention being given to the art it doesn't detract from or confuse the gameplay at all, which is an impressive feat and shows that the art directors at Frozenbyte seriously know their stuff.

Give me more puzzles like this one where I have to use all my characters

The artists are definitely the stars of the show, though. The puzzles which are the meat of the game feel good, the characters react well, the mouse and keyboard control scheme is perfect and the physics system just works, but I can't help feeling just slightly underwhelmed by the challenge provided. In some ways the progression works well, the characters receive a new ability in most levels to put a new spin on the gameplay and the complexity slowly ramps up, but it all feels just a little bit stretched out and a little bit repetitive. This could have been due to the need to make a noticeably longer game after Trine 3, a game that was universally panned for being too short, but I haven't played any of the series before, so to me it just felt like the game started with extremely trivial puzzles and that ones that actually caused me have to stop and think rather than instantly knowing the solution (even if the execution took me a few goes and a few unnecessary deaths) were few and far between. That's possibly even more of a concern given that I didn't already have a couple of essentially identical games under my belt, and I can't help but feel like as well as much as this is a polished title that just works, maybe this series has pretty much shown us everything that it's got in the warehouse and deserves a well-earned retirement. That's a real pity, because the puzzles that do require a new and interesting combination of the character abilities to complete are really very satisfying indeed, I just wish there were more of them.

Now just to work out this last step...

That said, the nature of the linear progression storyline means that getting that balance right is admittedly a difficult problem, and I think Frozenbyte have landed on the right side of it by letting me  finish the campaign without completely grokking the fine details of how all of my abilities worked (the dream rope is weird, man) ,as if a player runs into a puzzle that they cannot solve, they're locked out of the rest of the game. Perhaps in this age of easily accessible Lets Plays and walk-throughs that's not such a bad thing as it used to be, but as a player that steadfastly refuses to use such crutches, my Trine 4 experience could easily have been cut short by any puzzle room too opaque for me to be able to solve just by throwing all my tools at the wall and seeing what sticks.  The designers have made the right choice by putting most of the harder puzzles in optional extra areas, gating bonus goodies rather than quest progression, even if it means many players will miss out on them.

Experience already grabbed shows up as blue drops, so you can tell where you've already been

To encourage players to return an revisit areas they missed, Trine 4 features a handy tracking system that lets you see where you missed the bonus areas and return there instantly later on to collect the goodies, which is super handy. Unfortunately, if you return after collecting the abilities gained during the game, many of these once challenging puzzles become trivial, so even then it's hard to present truly challenging puzzles, except right towards the closing stages of the game. Still, it's enough to make me want to return to this title (maybe after I've gotten a little further ahead in this monthly blogging thing), try to get that elusive 100% and unlock that tempting door in the starting screen, that I hope hides a final set of more difficult levels.

Of course, it's not completely fair to criticise the puzzles just yet, as I'm not playing the game as it's meant to be played. Though single player like I've played through it is an option, Trine 4 is truly designed to be played by a team of two or preferably three, with each player acting as one character and each of them having to be able to support each other to traverse through each level. Apparently the multiplayer version of each level is slightly trickier and the puzzles are inherently more challenging when you can't just cheese them with lucky timing, so I'd love to try it out as it was intended some time. If you've got the game in the bundle this month as well (or if you bought it, I guess) and are interested in giving multiplayer a try, do drop me a line. There's also an 'unlimited' mode for up to 4 players where everyone can be any player at any time, and that just sounds like giggles all round.

I guess it's been a couple of minutes. Time to fight some more...goat people?

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the combat, which serves its function of breaking up the puzzles and giving poor Pontius the knight something to do other than stand by while Amadeus and Zora do most of the heavy lifting puzzlewise, but isn't otherwise anything to write home about. It works, but it's definitely the ugly cousin. The first main boss fight of the game was just a puzzle challenge, and while the later ones had some puzzling elements, I can't help but wish that they all had a little more of the platforming and ability interaction and a little less of the 'hit things with your sword' stuff going on.

Some quick numbers

Plenty more where that came from

• Time to finish the main campaign: 9.2 hours
• Completion bar percentage: 61.2%
• Chasms dropped into: A multitude. Some many times.
• Walruses rescued: 1
• Rating: 8 solid 7's out of 10.

The rankings so far

See you next time, heroes of Trine

Another easy one to rank, at least against the competition so far. Even after finishing the game I still feel a compulsion to go back and 100% it, which is a good sign. Perhaps not an all-time favourite, but definitely a solid title worth a few hours of your time.

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Valfaris
4. Train Station Renovation

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. The dice roll came up with 2, so next up we're playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest.