Review: Shelter (PC)

So, as I do with most games nowadays, I got Shelter marked down on Steam on the strength of its RPS review. While I didn't quite experience John Walker's level of enthusiasm about the game, I definitely enjoyed it and found it to be more than worth the few bucks I played.

Basically, Shelter is a game in which you play as a mother badger tasked with leading her cubs to safety through the wilderness. The aesthetic is really unique, and manages to successfully bypass that whole "typical indie game quirky art style" trend by sheer force of originality.

This is badgers in the woods. Neat, huh?

The different, fairly obviously differentiated "levels" of the game range from the forest-like space you see above, to a slightly greener forest-type space, to [SPOILERS] the middle of a forest fire, to a flash flood, and a night under a full moon [END SPOILERS]. So, I found the settings to be pretty varied and the aesthetic able to translate to different levels in interesting ways rather than being a one trick pony.

The core of the game, as I said above, is your quest to lead your babies to safety. There is immediately feedback for your failure, as if a baby dies, he/she is dead, and gone, and the suddenness with which this can happen and the odd poignancy of it really surprised me. It's a point for the argument that long exposition isn't really necessary for a player to be able to build emotional attachments to characters. By the time they were carried away by a hungry eagle or washed away in a flood, I cared more about these baby badgers than I did for some characters in Baldur's Gate.

While the game is really effective at creating a feeling of futility and attrition as you march through its deceivingly beautiful locales, it's also a bit annoying in the lack of agency it gives you to protect your young. For being given such an effective mission, there's really little you can actually do to effect its outcome. You can run fast, you can hunker down and walk slow, you can dig up food and leap onto small prey to kill it...and that's about it. The babies just follow you in a chain and there's literally no other way you can interact with them besides moving and hoping that they follow. The threats to your young are clearly built around this limited model of interaction, and the ways you are expected to avoid those threats are thus surprisingly clever in some instances, but ultimately it all boils down to either a) running, b) walking slowly or c) hiding in place.

With such a beautifully realized environment and a survival-style mission, I sort of expected the game to be a bit more open. It's not. It's basically an on-rails survival simulation, which was also a little frustrating to me. When there's a fire to avoid, there's one way around it. When an eagle is hunting you, you find yourself artificially closed in to a small meadow. It heightens the terror, sure, but it also makes everything feel a little more game-y than maybe it could have had it given the player a few more choices.

"If there's a fire, stop, drop, and roll five paces to the left, then up six paces, then right fifteen paces, and then straight through that conveniently hollowed-out log!"

All that said, the experience was short, (bitter)sweet, and absolutely worth the money. In this case, my complaints about the game are more in the category of "I wish it had been this instead!" than the category of "I didn't like what it was!" For what it is, it's quite good. And its approach to emotional storytelling, such as it is, is effective enough that it's worth buying and playing just to appreciate that the devs managed to do so much with so little. But you'll also likely wish that they'd done more.

SHELTER 2: BADGER'S REVENGE

Review: Rogue Legacy (PC)

At this point, I think I've complained ad nauseum about my feelings regarding the use of "roguelike elements" in games where they don't necessarily improve the game or make it more interesting or engaging. Like throwing "RPG elements" like stat points and leveling up into AAA shoot 'em up games in the mistaken belief that somehow it makes the gameplay deeper, lots of indie devs seem obsessed with the idea that procedural generation and/or permadeath just magically make a game more enticing. According to most of the "roguelike-like" games I've played lately, that's just not true.

However, Rogue Legacy does it right. It does it so right, that about two attempts into the game I literally slapped myself on the forehead with exasperation over how obvious Rogue Legacy's approach to the genre is and how nobody (including me) had thought of it earlier.

It goes like this: 

1. Fun, Castlevania-y platforming and fighting
2. The expectation of eventual death
3. The ability to carry your loot out of the castle upon your death
4. The ability to regenerate as another hero with slightly different skills and disadvantages (the next "generation" of your adventurer family, hence the title Rogue Legacy)
5. The ability to spend your saved loot on boosting your skills/weapons/stats before your next playthough
6. The required forfeiture of all (or nearly all, later on in the game) of your loot before you try playing again (you literally pay a toll to Charon to enter the castle

What the hell does he do with all of that money, anyway?

It's bloody brilliant. It captures the essence of what's great about procedural generation (the thrill of learning the layout of a map so that you can survive better and then the challenge of having that advantage wiped away in an instant) and about sudden, frequent death (you're always working your way through the castle a little bit on tenterhooks) while allowing you to have the satisfaction of knowing that every playthrough is going to be worth something. Unless, I guess, you get whacked within seconds of entering the castle and exit with 20 gold pieces. I had playthroughs where I absolutely ripped through two entire zones of the castle and came out ready to buy ten new upgrades for my character, but those were few and far between. Yet, most playthroughs I gathered at least enough gold to buy one upgrade after my sudden and violent death, and that was enough of a sense of moving forward to keep me motivated to keep playing for the occasionally big reward of those longer runs. And that's the beauty of the game. Though you play through the same four dungeon "levels" over and over again, they're always different enough that you're forced to pay attention, and they're always going to give you some sort of reward, provided you don't absolutely biff it. 

In one fell swoop, the game does away with basically all my complaints about the roguelike genre.

But there's more. Each of your character's iterations has some randomly-assigned quirks that seem sort of goofy at first but prove to be important as you get more and more used to the game.* For example, dwarfism seems to just make your character funny-looking and small, but eventually you might realize that [SPOILER] your size allows you to access many secret rooms you couldn't otherwise reach, but that your weapon's attack range is much smaller, forcing you to get closer to enemies to attack [END SPOILER]. Each of your character is also assigned a class randomly, and the pool of available classes expands as you buy more upgrades.

Oh, and most of the in-game text is hilarious.

Each time you die, you get to choose from one of three possible successors. Oftentimes this choice allows you to choose a hero that best suits your needs for the next playthrough, but sometimes this choice gives you three terrible options and forces you to face the castle with whomever you deem the least bad option. This can make for some really interesting playthroughs. For instance, once I got stuck with a Spelunker and assumed his weak ass was going to get splattered all some spike traps by the second room of the castle. I gave it my best shot, though, and about a half hour later I died with an absurd amount of money in my wallet (?). Later on, as you unlock more classes, equipment, and things like the Architect, you can put a lot more forethought into your runs, not just choosing a character with the best abilities for what you want to accomplish, but also outfitting them with the best equipment and abilities. 

I ran into a few small annoyances later on in the game in the sense that at times it seemed like I was expected to grind for gold a bit longer than I would have liked. The castle itself is small enough and the enemies predictable enough that you can run through most of it after playing and upgrading for a few hours. But you have to beat a boss in each of the four interconnected "levels" before you can progress to the endgame, and this you cannot do without some serious leveling up. So there's a point at which the game's greatest strength becomes a sort of weakness as well, as you spend hour after hour running through nearly identical halls, slaying identical monsters for gold and slowly building stats from, say, level 2 to level 15 (out of a possible 75, for the truly masochistic). I managed to beat a few of the bosses on a lower level than I apparently should have been able to, just due to still having old-school Contra reflexes, and it was nice in a way to occasionally overcome the grind through what felt like sheer playing skill, but then there was one boss in particular that I had to spend 2-3 hours leveling before I could defeat it, so there's going to be a bit of grinding mid-game regardless of how good you are. 

It was him. This motherfucker.

And it's a little annoying once you realize that many of the rooms and traps are identical and the enemies in the harder levels are just bigger, stronger, faster versions of the enemies in the early levels. One of the early thrills in the game was learning enemy types, their patterns, and their weaknesses, so this bummed me out a little.

This wizard is just like the others, but the sprite it bigger and it's more killy!

That said, Rogue Legacy was awesome, and if I didn't have so many games in my queue right now, I'd be going back for New Game+ right away. The platforming and fighting itself feels almost perfect (moving horizontally always feels a little slidey to me for some reason), and so even when you're grinding at length the basic gameplay always stays fun in that repetitive-mindless-but-good way. And strategizing your character's build in the later game really adds a surprisingly deep layer of planning that I didn't expect from the game at first. Good times! 

The end!

* This isn't true of all the traits; for example, the one that makes you constantly fart loudly really has no point aside from FARTS which are FUNNY.

(Cold) Walking

I had to get up extra early this morning to get to work before a breakfast with the Provost that started at 7am. Since September, I've been riding my bike to work, but this has been getting harder and harder because of the weather. Leaving the house today at 630 instead of my usual 800, coupled with the fact that it was three degrees outside made the decision to walk instead of riding justifiable.

Living in the Pacific Northwest for almost nine years now, one of the things I've come to really love is the dry, clear cold that accompanies most winter days. Unlike back in the Midwest, where winter involves a cloudy, grey sky and general soddenness 80% of the time, here the desert climate keeps the sky clear the majority of the time and gives you a strikingly crystalline view of the stars at night if you're anywhere that's not a Walmart parking lot.

So despite my initial griping about not being able to get a ride to work with Lindsey, I was actually really excited about freezing my ass off on a walk when I realized it was going to still be dark outside while I was walking. Our neighborhood couldn't be described as "busy" at the busiest of times, let alone at 625 in the morning, and though the sun hadn't yet risen up from behind the hills to the east, it was high enough that the newly snow-encrusted mountains to the west and across the lake were barely visible, while the stars were still out in a sky just a little more blue than black.

Though I'm typically loathe to get up this early on purpose, the half hour or so before sunrise is one of my favorite times of day, especially in the winter. Where, on good days at least, sunset often instills me with a sense of "job well done" at the end of the day (whether that job be my actual job, or just hiking or watching TV), sunrise makes me feel like I'm getting to see the world before anything's really started. It's sort of like the time I was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as a kid and the ride broke down, and we had to exit by going back behind the scenery and through the employees' area. In terms of the coming day, nothing's happened yet, but nothing can happen yet. It's a weird sort of liminal space, made more so by the cold: nobody wants to be out in the world because there's nothing to do yet, and it's cold, but the world's still there. In 30 minutes or so it'll be business as usual. But not yet.

Usually, I leave for work about 90 minutes later, and when I do, the day's already in full swing. But not today. Not yet.

Review: Don't Starve, and Some Other Stuff

I've played a number of games recently that I just haven't been able to get into, despite their scads of glowing reviews and my relative dearth of meaningful hobbies to get up to between the hours of 11pm and 2am. I didn't actually play most of these (Antichamber, Knock-knock, Monaco) long enough to have a real opinion on them other than "I don't like this." Or, perhaps more correctly, I didn't play long enough to have an informed dislike. My dislike was mostly gut-level dislike:

Antichamber: Bends the rules of 3D games and (virtual) reality in interesting ways, but bends them so far that figuring out what the hell means what seems more like an exercise in trial-and-error than anything that rewards player diligence, intelligence, etc. Frustrating but pretty to look at. A lot like your mom.

YOUR MOM IS SEX

Knock-knock: Similar to Antichamber in the sense that I "get it," but don't really care for it. I get that Ice Pick Lodge is fucking with me, and trying to do it in an artsy and interesting way, but when I make the same mistake seventeen times and receive no useful input any of those times to help me better understand how to succeed in the future, I get frustrated. My real life is already exactly like this. I want to play a game to come to understand a system and master it, typically. Even if that system is sometimes loathe to give up its inner workings, there's an understanding that it eventually will. In the case of Knock-knock, it could care less if I figure it out. And that makes me just want to move on to another game.

No, in this case it really doesn't.

Monaco: Probably missing the real point of this game by not playing in co-op, but in single player it's either just a 2D version of one of the more boring Splinter Cell iterations or Stealth Bastard without the jumping or the neat aesthetic. Bleh.

What's mine is bored.

BUT ANYWAY...I was writing about Don't Starve at some point. Or at least I will be at some point in the future.

This is what my dog looks like in the dark.

So, Don't Starve is a thing. One of those things everyone likes. I get it. I like the aesthetic. I like the idea of the point of a game being just to not starve. Like Minecraft, but more immediate. I like the idea of a survival simulator, especially one as cleverly made and as darkly funny as this one. However, it loses me when it tosses roguelike-ness into the mix.

As I've ranted about at length before, not every single game is actually improved by adding "roguelike elements." In the case of Don't Starve, for instance, the game is really compelling and surprisingly tense and creepy as a survival simulation. The feeling of night encroaching is just as effective, if not more so than it was in Minecraft the first time the creepers came out, and just thinking about the way the light slowly dies as your fire burns down makes me want to go back and play the game more because it captures the feeling of actually being out in the wilderness at night so well it's uncanny.

But I will not go back and play Don't Starve any more because for some reason the developers deemed it necessary to include permadeath, and that, for me, runs absolutely counter to what makes a survival simulation good in the first place.

Permadeath also happens to take the fun out of actual survival.

One of my favorite things about Minecraft when I started playing it, and about Terraria when I started playing that, and so on, was the fact that the game didn't bother to tell you how to survive. It gave you no goals other than to not die, but it didn't even bother to explain to you how to stay alive. And that, at the time, was a new thing in gaming for me. It was exciting to run around in a panic, trying to figure out how to build a shelter, or a stove, or how to make armor, or a better weapon. Sure, you could look these things up online if you wanted, but for me at least, figuring them out on my own was a major part of the game itself, so spoiling crafting recipes would have been breaking the game, in a sense.

The thing that separates those other games from Don't Starve for me is the fact that once you learn how to do something in those games, once you've climbed to a new rung on the survival ladder, as it were, the game mirrors your new knowledge by allowing you to preserve your accomplishments. Don't Starve, on the other hand, forces you to artificially "forget" everything you've learned about survival by starting you at square one after every death. Have a fire pit? Not anymore, you don't! Have a farm? Now it's gone! Know the layout of the land around you? Fuck you, now things are totally different (but really just a slight rearrangement of various trees and stones)!

This is annoying in the sense that you don't have your cool things anymore after you die, but it becomes really goddamn infuriating when you realize the other side of that equation: remember the first time you played and you spent a half hour or two hours or five hours building up to the level you were at just before you died? Yeah, you have to do that again before  you can experience anything new. And you have to do it again by doing the exact same things you did the first time. It's like running out of lives in Super Mario Bros.

Why the game makes you do this is beyond me. I don't see how Don't Starve would be any less challenging, interesting, enjoyable, or creepy if you were allowed to save your progress and reload if you died. Instead, no matter how good, careful, or lucky you are, 80% of your time with this game will be spent doing the exact same few things over and over again, just so you can (maybe) discover a new trick or a different resource five hours into your latest playthrough before getting killed again.

And to me, that's silly. I'm glad there are a lot of people out there who like this game, because in a lot of ways it's extremely clever and at times it was absolutely gripping in its portrayal of bare, desperate survival. But ultimately it was too frustratingly stupid in terms of the permadeath system for me to continue with it.

Review: Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers (PC)

I loved pretty much everything about this game. First of all, while a lot of the games I've played lately (Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Shelter, Don't Starve, 140) have had a really interesting aesthetic dimension, there hasn't been one that I've flat-out enjoyed as much as Tiny and Big's. Most of the abovementioned games, while being (mostly) good games that I've (mostly) enjoyed playing, have a look that, to me, elicits a response like "Oh neat! That's clever!" Tiny and Big, on the other hand, has a look that elicits a response like "Wow, this is the coolest fucking thing ajdklajeiopaj."

That video gives you a little sense of what the game's about and what it looks like. For some reason, the style just absolutely jives with me in a way that makes me feel not just like I'm playing a fun game, but also a cool game. It seems like the sort of game you would have gone to a 50s-era sci-fi themed speakeasy to play. Or something.

Anyway, the video also shows you pretty much the entirety of the gameplay: you move through huge, open levels, using your laser to cut things, your rope to drag things, and your rocket to push things. It's really satisfying and kinetic, especially when you slice through the base of an obelisk, then pull it over with your rope and scramble out from underneath it as it tips over and crashes to the ground. The game actually mostly succeeds in creating the sense that you can do anything to the world using these three mechanisms (slice, pull, push), though of course you can't. But making you feel like you can is quite an achievement. This hit me especially hard when I was playing one of the later levels, trying to climb a tall structure, and I realized that I was allowed to stop thinking in terms of what to jump up to next because I could literally carve a huge staircase in the side of the rock wall if I wanted to. And I wanted to. It succeeds in making you feel powerful in a way a lot of games try and fail at.

No mean feat when you consider the objective of the game is to get your underwear back.

In a way, actually, this is sort of the game's greatest weakness as well. Because at times it feels like anything is possible, it becomes disappointing that the game is really about doing the same three or four things over and over again. Most of the levels involve, primarily, making bridges by cutting down towers, or making bridges by cutting down conveniently-placed ceiling beams. There's some excellent variation, though, in the form of one sort-of free climbing level that gave me the strongest sense of vertigo I can remember ever having gotten playing a game since Mario 64, and an epic boss battle (the first one) that plays with the game's physics system in really interesting and pulse-pounding ways.

Unless you're one of those people who must explore absolutely every nook an cranny in a virtual world, though, the majority of the game is going to involve slicing and dragging things, and eventually the feeling of being a god is going to fade and be replaced by the feeling of being a...bricklayer, I guess? Something bad as compared to a god, for sure.

Pictured: Not Iron Man.

Tiny and Big is a short game, and by the end I couldn't decide if I should be happy it ended when it did because it was running out of Cool New Ideas, or if I should be disappointed that it didn't find more to do with its slice, pull, and push mechanics. It seems like there could have been so much more to this game, but yet it's also nearly perfect as it is. I suppose this isn't a bad conundrum to have to face after playing a game. I think it means that the game was pretty awesome.

Oh, and you know what else is fucking awesome?! The soundtrack! Not only is it a totally badass, weird mishmash of electronica and accordion music (klezmer?), the tracks are also doled out in-game for intrepid explorers who seek out hidden rooms and such. Now that's a neat idea that also takes some serious confidence in the awesomeness of your soundtrack from a developer's perspective. But in this case, that confidence is well-founded. I definitely found myself exploring the game's levels more hoping to find more tracks, and when I finished the game and was still missing a few tracks, I immediately bought the soundtrack just so I could hear them.

And that's the icing on the cell-shaded cake for Tiny and Big. A great game that might leave you wishing there was more, but mostly because what's there is phenomenally well-presented, cool-looking (and sounding), and, most importantly, fun to play.