Prodeus

Phasmophobia

 

If you have Ghost, then you have everything...

Pathfinder: Kingmaker (via Pools of Radiance)

 Today I look at Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but not before I drift off into the past with a retrospective review of Pools of Radiance.

Yuppie Psycho

Brian Pasternack is trapped in a cursed building. And it's his first day at work. Which is worse? Guide Brian through the mystery of the witch while enjoying some wicked 90s style pixel art. Tubular.

Caves of QUD review after 4 hours and many deaths

Caves of QUD is an awesomely epic rouge-like open world RPG from Freehold Games. You'll die, a lot. You'll be confused about the controls. You'll squint at the graphics.

But I reckon you'll love it.

Dusk - Episode 1

 Today, a video review/lets play. Check it out!

Monster Prom

Surprise, surprise. It's a dating simulator set in a monstrous high school. No, not high school as depicted in every film about teenager ever, one populated with actual monsters. Pick a teenage monster then go through a short series of situations to woo a potential partner for the monster prom. I guess there's a market for this. One playthrough took me 30 minutes and was fairly painless, though dull. I nailed a date (heh heh) first try, so it's not particularly difficult. I think the idea is to keep playing through as all the characters and try to work out what each of the other characters want. I won't be doing this.

Oh, I forgot to add that it's multiplayer. Perhaps this adds to the amusement level, but reading through other reviews it seems that the positive reviews are mostly from people who appreciate the non-gender role approach to dating (which is fine by me, I ended up landing one of the male characters as my prom date) plus the tumblr style humour.

Not Recommended.

VERDICT: Not recommended

Final Word: The ability to pursue someone of either gender is pretty much standard fare now, or should be in a modern game, and I'm not 15 anymore so the humour definitely wasn't aimed at me.

Monster Prom on Steam

Shenmue

No video or picture, this game doesn't deserve it.

Old. Clunky. Sooooo much stilted dialogue that sounds like it was recorded outside on a windy day, in the middle of a paddock, by a group of lobotomy patients. You seemingly need to talk to EVERYONE, and since that's half the game, it's a terrible half. These chats go on and on with the same inane back and forth a 10 year old might have written for his primary school narrative. It's terrible is what I'm trying to say, and a lot of it is unskippable cut-scene.

The main character walks like he's mired in a river of treacle, slowly shuffling from one poorly recorded exposition to another, pouting about his dead father with all the emotion of an eggplant. You have almost zero agency while this is happening, your part in the game seems to be piloting the avatar through the bland and dated scenery like in one of those old arcade games...Dragon Quest? Dragon's Lair? I never got to the combat, though I hear it sucks and takes a bunch of grinding to improve via pointless mini-games. (I'm sorry, I really didn't put a lot of time into this game, maybe an hour or so? It was distressingly dull and I couldn't go on. I watched a few reviews and gameplay videos instead, and even they were bad for my emotional well-being).

In a bid to learn what makes this game popular I snuck about in the interwebs reading other people's reviews and I learned the following: anyone who owned a Dreamcast (for which this was both the marque game, and a big reason it failed) is still going around in rose tinted glasses and refuses to acknowledge that this is a great big pile of shit. Anyone else thinks it's pointless, endless, garbage.

VERDICT: Some games age like fine wine and still play well, even after 20 years. This is not one of those games.

Final Word: Just noticed the Shenmue 1 and 2 bundle on Steam is $50AUD! You'd have to have hit your head repeatedly before this looked like a good deal. I got them for next to nothing via Humble, and I still consider it a waste of money. Shenmue #2 will forever remain unplayed, and that makes me a better person.

(game link)

Astroneer

A fun miner/builder with cute graphics and an engaging power management system. The first 5 hours were enough fun to encourage another 5 hours of gameplay. After crashing on a planet you begin work on a base of operations by mining for resources, conducting research on "stuff", and building various machines to process/power/construct your way to escape - at which point you fly to another planet/moon and start again with different materials. These new materials then need to be brought together with materials from other location to make even more complicated machinery and it was at this point I lost interest.

Essentially you are restarting the game in a new location, but it's a lot easier since you have access to materials from your original base. The core gameplay doesn't change as you expand and since mining/exploring wasn't that interesting to begin with, simply consisting of walking/driving around and sucking up the stuff you needed from underground, there isn't really a lot more to see and do. The lure of researching new things is deadened when outcomes devolve into "same as last tier, but bigger or faster".

Possibly a game best suited to a younger audience or a more casual one which has grown bored of Minecraft and doesn't like the look of more complex games like Space Engineers or Avorion.


VERDICT: Sci-fi themed building and mining that turns tedious real fast.

Final Word: One for younger or more casual players. Well made but quite shallow.

(game link)

Battletech

Battletech was always going to be my thing. A game system I've owned (though not played a lot) since the early 90s, purchased with money from my first job. When I discovered the digital games, Crescent Hawks Inception/Revenge, I played the hell out of them. Mechwarrior (1,2,3,4) rocked my world, particularly Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries. Turn based tactical games in particular are my jam, going way back to Empire on the C64 (I realise this was a strategy game, but it is the first turn based game I remember playing) and then moving through XCom and on to more modern games like Divinity: Original Sin.

In spite of the above, I waited for a long time to pick it up and play. There are a lot of games on my to-play list and I try not to bump them just to take up the latest thing that grabs my attention. Even after purchasing it sat on my desktop for another month or two before I decided it was time to have a go. I'm not going to lie, it was a bit of a let-down initially. The first four or five hours feel pretty generic and after levelling the pilots for a while I had this feeling that combat wasn't particularly complex. A thought sat in the back of my mind for some time, when I reach the 100T mechs this is just going to turn into a toe-to-toe slugfest. Never fear, it didn't.

I don't want to go over the top in word count so let me summarise the game as I played it. I focused quite heavily on doing non-story mercenary missions to build up my lance tonnage and level my pilots, only recruiting and maintaining 6 mercs. The dropship by the end of the game supported 3x this number and I have no idea why. Perhaps on higher difficulties (I was one notch above normal) you take a lot more casualties. Combat, starting out fairly simple, did eventually flesh out to require some more lateral thinking when I found my 4 mech lance taking on 8 or more mechs coming at me in waves. Using mobility and terrain became imperative to success and rarely did it devolve into the toe-to-toe slugfest I feared. When it was a punch-up, it was only because I loved initiating melee combat (stomping on a ground vehicle never grew old). In general the turn based ruleset worked great, though it is highly recommended you disable most of the combat cinematics and animations to speed things up.

There are enough mechanics away from the combat to keep you occupied. Mechs need to be repaired and refitted and you can modify their weapons, armour and equipment. Pilots need to be trained across 5 (?) attributes which add bonuses and unlock new skills, both active and passive. I trained each to have a particular speciality like indirect fire (using a catapult with many many missiles) or long range with autocannons, or melee. The dropship itself can be upgraded in many different areas such as medical facilities, mech repairs/bays and so on.

I won't go into the story too much as it's fairly generic fare. Someone loses their position of power, you used to work for their clan, now you're a mercenary. That person engages your mercenary group to help take the power back. After a bunch of things™ happen, you come to a bittersweet conclusion involving guns and explosions. Tidy, but unremarkable. When the story ends you can embark on an endless series of randomly generated mercenary missions picked from locations all over the galaxy (or at least the portion the game is set in).


VERDICT: I really enjoyed it. A definite recommendation for lovers of stompy robots, science fiction, or turn based tactical combat games.


Final Word: RECOMMENDED

(game link)

Knights of the Chalice

Take a good look at that screenshot, really lean in there and soak up the 90s aesthetics. Knights of the Chalice plays like a mix of Ultima 6 and Pools of Darkness, both classic games from the <brief internet investigation> very early 90s (1990 and 1991 respectively).

Ultima 6 (via Wikimedia)

Pools of Darkness (via MobyGames)

KotC is a relatively simple game on the surface, a veneer of simplicity layered over a fairly complex implementation of the DnD 3.5 ruleset. On the downside, there are only a handful of classes you can choose from and the party size is limited to 4. The array of weapons, armours, and spells (especially the spells) make up for any lack of classes though.

I imagine the visuals turn a lot of people away when they come to consider purchasing. Personally, I love way the it looks and feels, though perhaps that's me reveling in nostalgia, The pixel art, isometric viewpoint is a style I really love, so delightfully retro, harking back to Amiga games I owned in the 1990s. The UI is serviceable though clunky (I'll get back to that in a moment). None of this is a problem for me as I've never been one to worry too much about visual or UI, so long as the core game is a cracker. To answer that unstated question, let's consider the real meat and potatoes of the game - combat.

Combat is triggered whenever your party wanders close enough to a trigger-able area or a group of bad guys. Most encounters are tied to a particular area and wandering monsters are few and far between. Once triggered, the game shifts from real-time movement to turn-based. There are a heap of combat options from the ruleset and careful tactical thought must be given to the placement of heroes and the use of their abilities as these do not refresh until the party reaches a camp to rest. Having a spell-less wizard at the end of a dungeon when facing up to the big bad boss guy pretty much forces you to reload an older save. There are a few encounters I had to run through a dozen of times to get right, even with spelled up wizards and healthy fighters. Wands, wands are your friends. Craft them. (I'm not going into weapon, wand, scroll etc crafting, just know that it exists). So you move your heroes around one at a time, using up movement and actions to accomplish something - it's a tried and true system that works here as well as it works in something like Divinity: Original Sin. You'll chop, cast, run, heal, and cackle with glee as your ice storm devastates an entire room of gnolls. One nice touch is loot after battles. If the enemy carried or wore it, it drops for you to collect. Sorting through the cheap junk to choose only the best to keep (or more regularly, sell) is both fun and a bit of chore due to limited inventory sizes.

Quick note about the ruleset, it's all very well documented in-game and easily accessed per item. By this I mean it's only a single click to look up info on a weapon, how a spell works, what an effect or attribute is and how it affects your overall build. This makes a potentially complex and obtuse game very accessible (though you'll spend the first couple of hours reading a lot of info, or perhaps this was just me).

What about the parts that don't work so well? To begin, with let's hit on the mechanic that gets more knickers in a knot than a wave pool set on maximum - camps. I understand the hate, they frustrate me too, but I also get their function. You can only rest and regain spells and hitpoints when you're at a designated camp spot (a little fireplace), and they're few and far between sometimes. Thing is, camps force you to plan ahead and fight smart rather than barreling in, spells a-blazing, letting your tanks take the hits and not giving a shit. They make you think several battles ahead. In the early game they make things REALLY difficult, sure. With just four heroes and a handful of hit points between them, you're going to get pummeled on the regular. Just be liberal with your use of the save option and don't lose heart, things get (slightly) easier. I grew to admire how camps actually enhanced my gameplay rather than limited it, forcing me to re-consider that fireball in case I needed it later, and making me plan ahead with wands and scrolls rather than just the spells I might have memorised.

Back to the UI then. The interface is workable but clunky. You'll go back and forth between various screens to achieve even the simplest tasks. If I'm being honest, the UI is probably the only part of the game I'd scrap and rework. I can't think of any other part of the game that frustrated me as much as having to re-organise inventories. I know I'm doing negatives here, but the breadth of shortcut keys is a real win. The game is completely playable with just a keyboard (I think, I can't recall any part that relied on a mouse to work). For commands. each is nicely highlighted with the key letter being a different colour, and the excellent in-game help provides a nice run-down of some of the more obscure but useful keys.

Finally, quests are generic fantasy stuff. Slavers are bad, go here and fight orcs, kill a dragon, stab your way to glory through an entire army. If you're looking for a compelling story arc, look elsewhere. KotC boils down to choosing a location, going there, killing everything in satisfying ways, looting the place to hell, heading back to the castle to pawn your loot, resting, and talking shit with the wizard. If that gameplay loop sounds like fun, I happen to agree with you. If you're still not convinced, try the demo and make up your own mind.

VERDICT: An excellent turn based fantasy RPG. Light on the story and characters, but heavy on the underlying ruleset, tactical combat, and retro feels.

Final Word: An excellent turn based RPG, well worth the money. Don't let the retro looks or UI put you off.

(game link) (original website)

Battle of the Indie Spaceship Simulators - Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator vs Pulsar: Lost Colony

Flying somewhere important to do important things with important people! (Artemis)

Adrift, in the deepest reaches of space, there is only you, your ship, and a third rate crew who spend the game swearing at each other, running in circles, pressing all the wrong buttons and, ultimately, exploding and/or freezing in vacuum. This is Artemis. It is also Pulsar: Lost Colony (Pulsar from now on). Two games with the same core premise, but very different ways of expressing them.

Set phasers to...actually just wait a minute while I carefully adjust these sliders for 10 minutes (Pulsar)

 

In brief, both games are about flying off into space to meet the challenges of an uncaring galaxy. You'll move from place to place, operate various systems to stay alive, meet and kill various generic enemies, and try to make a difference in this big ol' universe of ours (or at the least the tiny corner the games are set in.) At this point, the two games part ways. Artemis achieves it's premise by giving each player control over a console (navigation, power, weapons etc) and therefore a role to play. Pulsar takes different approach. Each player chooses a role, but the game is played as an avatar - walking around on the ship to interact with things. Any player can control any system, along with other side duties like fire fighting or away team combat, however each system is better controlled by the relevant role. Leftover roles can be taken care of by AI bots.

Did someone order more sliding controls for careful adjustment of things? (Artemis)

Artemis takes a minimalist approach to visuals. Apart from the "main screen", which acts like a bridge viewport into the wider world, a game is played in 2D on consoles and maps. The captain gives orders and the various crew carry them out via their controls, hopefully combining to take out the bad guys, dock for repairs or zip across the map to explore. The main play loop is pretty much; going somewhere on the map, fighting something, going back to the space dock to repair and rearm. It's pretty tight and to the point, and offers a fun bridge crew simulation experience.

Haha! I adjusted my controls more carefully than you did! (Pulsar)

Pulsar in contrast is mostly played as a 3D avatar inside the ship, on an enemy ship, or on a station or planet. Controls are interacted with in the 3D world. Screens have buttons, there are levers and dials to manipulate, and other screens provide feedback and information. The main play loop is a little more complex but boils down to warping into an area and interacting with whatever is there. It might be an enemy ship, a friendly ship in need of help, a merchant prepared to trade, a planet or station to explore, or some other random situation dependent on the areas alignment. It's all very serviceable, though not particularly polished, and there is a lot of empty space everywhere. It's looser than Artemis and you can find yourself wandering around aimlessly.

Navigating the map in Artemis. No pithy remark here.

At the end of the day, both games set out to accomplish something and they do it well. I played Artemis several times with four people and we had a good time. I played Pulsar with one other person and the gameplay was generally free-form and a bit wacky - we never knew what was about to happen to us. Ultimately, regardless of their base ideals, they end up being totally different games. Artemis is the more serious simulation, while Pulsar doesn't take itself so seriously. They may both appeal to you (as I found); Artemis' focus on bridge command might be your thing, or Pulsar's more flexible and open ended paradigm of galactic exploration could float your boat.

A bizarre bazaar in Pulsar (not a slider, knob or button in sight!) 

VERDICT: Two excellent spaceship command simulators. Artemis nails the feel of being a captain or crew member in a dangerous sector, while Pulsar allows you to free-form explore a bunch of different areas and environments while also trying to juggle multiple systems on-board.


Final Word: RECOMMENDED. Wait for a sale and get both if you have enough friends interested. You can generally buy multi-game packs and gift them if you're feeling generous.

(game link - Artemis)

(game link - Pulsar: Lost Colony)

Alien Isolation

Stay in there mate, it's far more entertaining

I remember the first hour or so of this game vividly, it looked and felt like classic Alien. From the old-school technology, to the aesthetics of the corridors, and the mood setting sound, perfect. I berated a couple of friends into watching a (choppy) stream of me playing, and they both agreed it looked and felt like the original movie. So it's a shame about how the game plays out.

Don't get me wrong. Technically it works well, and the first few hours are genuinely entertaining. When the androids came along I loved it, at first, then I was a little frustrated. My atmospheric exploration game had become a sneaky game of crouching under tables and hiding in lockers for REALLY long periods. The punishment for mucking it up was pretty much instant death, Alien Isolation is not a forgiving game.

The fixed save positions suck, I mean really suck, I'm not a man with infinite time to replay whole chunks of game just because I didn't know there was an alien up that vent. It's a cheap, dated game mechanic that belonged on the consoles of the 90s and needs to fuck right off.

So anyway, an alien up a vent dropped on me and I was insta-gibbed, losing all my progress to that point. There was little warning, apparently I needed to know about the alien goo dripping from the roof, though this was never communicated to me in-game. Great, lesson learned. Realistically, this is probably not the end of the world and I could have worked through it had it not been for the fixed save points. I hate repeating myself, but we're not all 15 year olds with infinite time and patience to replay the same part of the game over and again. I want to see new content, not the same room/corridor/underneath of a table for an hour.

So then the titular alien showed up properly and the cat v mouse gameplay it introduced was fun - for about thirty minutes. Thirty minutes was the time it took for me to be killed several times because I failed to get things just right. The alien moved in unpredictable patterns, used vents and pipes and could hear and see you from really far away. It was fast, omniscient at times, and hard to track when it got into the ceiling. If it sighted you, you died. If you moved to fast, you died. If you wanted to get on and keep enjoying the game, too bad - dead.

Let's break out into a little aside here and get a few things straight. I like sneaking mechanics, I often choose to play sneaky characters in RPGs and first person games and whatnot. I like sniping, and sneaking, and backstabbing, and hiding. I played through SOMA (so I don't mind being helpless) and it only caused some mild anger at various stages. It was fair (and excellent). I also like choice, I like to choose my approach. Another game that does this well (and fairly) is Dishonored. If I feel like sneaking, I can. If I mess it up, I have avenues to escape and try again without being killed (unless I'm trapped or incompetent). I'm not forced to hide in a cabinet for several minutes while the alien wanders around aimlessly only to have it suddenly find me in a very unwelcome game of hide and seek.

You get to do a lot of this. Enjoy.

This is what Alien Isolation became for me, and at one point I tried over and over to progress, reloading and reloading, swearing and banging my mouse (gently) on the desk. I looked up a walkthrough, yep, I was doing it right, you just had to time it perfectly. There was no clever solution, just be lucky and time it right. Even if you did time it perfectly, you still had to be lucky. I got past that part through sheer determination, but that was pretty much the end for me. The magic was gone.

Verdict: Technically great. Atmospherically excellent. Mechanically interesting. Gameplay, terrible. I don't play games to be angry and frustrated, that's why I have a job. And on a really specific point, seriously, it's not 1995 anymore, ditch the fixed save points. If anyone wants to call me a savescummer, fine, I'm over 40 years old and don't have any qualms saving as I progress, WHEN AND HOW I WANT TO. If I have to leave the game running because life intercedes, that's BAD. If I have to make up all of my progress again because I forget where I was at and died, you  fail at being a good game. Your game sucks if it leans on this outdated crutch to extend play time. Alien Isolation is a missed opportunity, though it probably appeals to lovers of games like Dark Souls.

Final Word: Get it for five bucks and play it for the first few hours, otherwise - NOT RECOMMENDED

(game link)

3030 Deathwar Redux - A Space Odyssey

3030 Deathwar Redux - A  Space Odyssey, known from here on in as Deathwar, is a game of many parts. Some of these parts are good, like the jam in a sponge cake. Some of these parts are bad, like the rest of a sponge cake. Let's run through what makes Deathwar tick (and I'll ditch the cake analogy - for now).

First up, flying around in space. Here you'll pilot a 2D ship through 2D space, beautifully rendered in 24 caret sci-fi themed pixel art. There's combat, junk busting, cargo collecting, exploring, missions, and possibly a few other things I've forgotten. It works well, runs smoothly and has a few quirks and perks along the way to keep things fresh (pilots randomly offering to help, or to sell you illicit goods).

Then there's the on-station portion of the game. When you need to stop off and stretch your legs, you dock with a space station and get around in a side scrolling, adventure style UI. Pretty much all stations look and play the same (with art changes on the bar area and different styles of background, but fundamentally it's the same makeup every time). You can go to the bar and talk to the patrons; interesting for the first few dozen times but after that you'll start ignoring all but those required to fulfill your current mission. There's also a mission computer and a market/ship/parts computer. Pretty run of the mill, you take various kinds of missions to make money and sometimes advance the story. Ships get bigger, faster, better, have more storage etc, depending on how you want to play. You can play the market and be a trader, but I found the mission route was far more lucrative and only went to the market for fuel and to sell the crap I found on salvage missions (more in a second). Very occasionally you have to fight someone with your pistol while on the station. The shooting part worked about as well as pasting head-shots of your new girlfriend over the face of your old girlfriend on the pics you have hanging over your fireplace. Actually I'm not sure that analogy works, but I spent five minutes dreaming it up so it stays. Stations play a valuable role in the theme and feel of the game, while the shooting part felt shoehorned in, slapped over the top for the hell of it. It was just one more thing they tried to jam into an already crowded game - one thing too far. I mean, now I read that statement and compare it with my girlfriend analogy, it's painfully clear how crap that analogy is. Moving on.

Salvage. When encountering a hulk you have the option of conducting a salvage run. This was pretty cool the first 10 times, zipping about in your space suit, zapping aliens, collecting cool stuff and looting the dead meat popsicles. After that magical 10th time it kind of waned in entertainment value, which is a shame. You weren't forced to salvage but it could be a lucrative income stream. I'm not sure what the developer could do anything to improve things without an overhaul; the mould was cast and each salvage mission played out like like the previous ones. Float, dodge, shoot, grab, escape. Never once did I feel particularly threatened.

Now take these parts, smoosh them into a single game, and what do you have? Is it coherent? Like the proverbial sponge cake, you have some good parts (the jam center), some okay bits you can tolerate (the cake), and some parts you sort of ignore or flick off onto your plate (cream, half priced fruit the baker added in a failed and misguided attempt to jazz things up). I loved the first ten hours of Deathwar. Zipping here and there, zapping this and that, getting into the game loop of making money, exploring a bit more, getting a new ship, upgrading that ship, taking on new missions. Repeat. The story was ok. I could ignore the dull bits and it just sort of progressed on its own time-frame. Then, once more akin to the majestic sponge cake, it all stopped being fun and became a chore. The words "rinse, repeat" spring to mind.

If Deathwar was the only game I owned, I may have persisted. I mean, it's not bad - in fact, it's quite a good game - I just don't love this sort of game enough to persist and push through. Like every gamer these days, my collection is frighteningly large and half of them remain unplayed, or with a play time still shy of the single digit hour mark. Therefore, I dropped it. Right or wrong, fair or not, I felt I'd played though all the cool content, seen what there was to see, and future content was all going to be variations on the same themes. However, I can definitely see that if you do like this sort of game, or love the art style, then that'll be enough for you to plow on and see the end credits.

With all of that said and all of the caveats and the hand wringing and the fact I dropped it after 13 hours, it is with only a tiny amount of hesitation that I recommend 3030 Deathwar. It was a game I loved, then played casually, then dropped like an old sponge cake I just found at the back of the fridge in an orange Tupperware container.

VERDICT: Layered like a sponge cake, no wait...damn it I should have used layer cake as an analogy. Anyway, like a dessert option with more than one component, Deathwar is greater than the sum of its parts and can be enjoyed as one big, messy whole. Definitely worth playing on the cheap, or worth playing anytime if you love this kind of game (Space Pirates and Zombies comes to mind as something similar).

Final Word: It's a decent game with lots of parts. RECOMMENDED

(game link)

(shit, I forgot to say the music was cool. Hey, the music is cool!)