Can't Stop Flippin'

 

When I heard about Unfair Flips I honestly thought it was a joke game, one of those stupid titles that you gift a friend where they play with it for 5 minutes and then it sits in their Steam library unplayed for the rest of time.  For £1.69 on Steam though I had to at least go and give it a look and I was honestly quite surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

 The premise of the game is extremely simple.  You are given a coin that has a base 20% chance to flip heads when you click it.  When you land a heads you are given a few in-game cents to buy upgrades with and the game ends when you flip heads 10 times in a row.  Flipping heads with a 20% chance each click sounds insane, and it is, so the game allows the player to buy an upgrade to heads chance in 5% increments so you can slowly turn things in your favor although the game likes to emphasize that it is entirely possible for a person to never win.  The chance upgrade will cap out before 100% as well so in a way they really aren't kidding.  On top of that you can upgrade the value of the coins heads result so you can get your upgrades faster and, what is probably the most important upgrade, the speed of the flipping animation so you can do more flips in less time.  

What makes this game really funny is that when you hit your 9th heads combo, the UI falls away and your next flip has a fixed chance to get a certain ending.  You can what these probabilties are in the Steam achievements with the chance to hit a full 10 in a row locked at a pitiful 20%.   Thankfully it's not the only ending there is so I suppose its not really a flat 20% to just "win" but the game can end in a number of ways that don't involve the 10th head.  What makes it even funnier is that what ending you get is chosen at random so if you're REALLY intent on getting that 10th flip then multiple playthroughs are going to be required.

What's surprising about this whole thing is how strangely exhilarating the whole thing is.  When I was clicking after a chain of tails flips and then the counter would start building up and up I could feel myself leaning into my monitor.  Then you hit a 7 or 8 chain when you get a heads and all the tension rushes out of you, it's a weirdly enjoyable feeling.  I think maybe this is how gambling addicts are formed.

While Unfair Flips didn't turn me into an addict, I stopped after a single successful run, it is a game interesting enough where it sits prominently in my memory.  It's one of those games I can see myself coming back to every so often to fiddle with and see which ending I can get this time.  One of the few games in my steam account where I might actually give a shit about getting all the achievements since there is one for each ending

It's a tough game to suggest that people should actually go out and play but if you're open minded and enjoy games of nothing but pure chance then Unfair Flips is a great title to pick up.  Put on an album or a podcast or something and get to flipping, enjoy the thrill when you get your 10 piece.  Worth every penny  

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it

Pathetic Imitations

 I've put some real stinkers on this years horror marathon playlist and one of them that really stood out for having a particular odor was FOBIAL: St Dinfna Hotel.  I'm not going to spend this blog post going into the details of just specifically how terrible it was, that's another post for another time, but not only was it a bad game, it was also a pathetic imitation of something much better.

We live in an age where remakes and remasters seem to be all the rage, constantly barraged with updated versions of shit from games past and when those aren't being shoved into our faces by developers and publishers there are constant talks of what "deserves" a remake (whatever that means) and what "needs" a remake.  Pathetic discourse for pathetic people who have buried deep into their comfort zones and built nuclear bunkers so that they don't have to suffer the torment of playing something new or from an unfamiliar IP.

But one thing we don't seem to pay much attention to is the imitators, the weird malformed cousin of the remaster.  Not part of a well established thing but copying the well established thing closely enough that the people will still clap their hands together like seals and fork out the money for it.  It happens a lot in the indie sphere with a great many games cribbing from things like Zelda, Metroid or even just copying whatever big indie game came out in the last six months.  If I had a dollar for every Vampire Survivor clone that exists then I'd probably have enough money to pay off the rest of my mortgage.  Again, a post for another time but I do feel the indie scene does have a bit of a creativity problem going on.  

Not that this ALWAYS results in terrible bullshit.  Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia springs to mind with it being just a straight up, slightly weebier, clone of Shin Megami Tensei 1+2 but clearly done by someone with a lot of love and passion for the older MegaTen games so the imitation feels sincere.  Not a quick way to make a fast dollar off two established franchises with a fan game but someone who clearly likes Touhou a fair bit making a game in a style that we don't get anymore just because they like it so much.  Go check that game out, it's pretty fukken neato.  

I suppose you would call it a tribute, rather than an imitation

But then there's FOBIA: St Dinfna Hotel, a pathetic attempt to make money off the fact that Resident Evil 7 exists by a studio of inept, creatively bankrupt morons.  Everything about that game from the graphics to the UI to the gameplay feels like a cheap knockoff of what RE7 was doing.  The very epitome of the "we have Resident Evil 7" at home meme that you see so often around the internet.  Unlike the Touhou game, it seems to have been made by not only cynical idiots out to make a quick buck from the back of another IP, but also a group of people who have ONLY played RE7 and literally nothing else. I will, for now, refrain from going into massive detail but FOBIA is the exact kind of game to cause veins to pop in heads with just how hollow it is and it's just one of many offenders that have popped up thanks to platforms like Steam and Itch.

Another, slightly less (but only slightly) offensive example is one I'm currently playing at time of writing called Hollowbody.  A game that at first glance looks like it might be doing its own thing and then quickly devolves into a particularly shallow Silent Hill clone that isn't so much bad as it is just painfully boring.  Usually I say that boring games are worse than bad games because at least anger is an emotion and art should be there to illicit emotions but there's something especially grating about a developer that copies another games format so closely only to still make the interactive equivalent of wallpaper paste.  A group of people who played Silent Hill 2 exactly once, followed it up with a single viewing of 28 Weeks Later and then churned out a low effort game because those two things made money, so surely that will too.  It's pathetic to see developers engaging in this trash behaviour and its even more pathetic to see consumers giving it the thumbs up in a steam review.

Being inspired by another person or studios work can lead to some really great things.  Some Lost in Vivos, some Okami's, some fuckin Undertale type shit but making those kind of games requires not only love for the thing you're imitating, but love for the medium itself.  The two games I talked about here are just recent examples of a problem that has existed since the dawn of games, but I'm begging just a few more indie devs to maybe try at least a little harder.  Play a little more widely, go experience some things that aren't games, draw from many things to make something cool instead of just copying the flavor of the month to try and line your pockets.  Steam is already full of shit, stop adding to it

The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

Brotato: Fun To Learn, Boring to Master

 

Vampire Survivor clones are generally a genre I stay away from.   Vampire Survivor was a fun little thing to mess around with for a day or two when taking a break from work or whatever but it wasn't exactly some incredible, ground breaking game that changed my life.  It did however, seem to make a metric fuckton of money and therefore has been added to the list of things to copy wholesale by the indie scene and Brotato is a product of that complete lack of creativity from your average indie developer.  The game, however, was gifted to me by a viewer and despite my cynical comments about it, it is pretty good.

The one thing that's interesting about this game, and maybe the whole genre in general is that it's an incredibly fun time for the first handful of runs that you do and then interest dies quickly as you learn what makes the game tick.  When you first fire up Brotato and start a run you are confronted with a ton of shit that you must wrap your head round regarding the characters stats and equipment.  Do you stack HP? Or is it more effective to prioritize dodge and armor?  Is it worth spending your precious level up upgrades on Harvesting and Luck? Or should you be upping your damage instead?  Should you buy that item that ups your speed but tanks your range?  Maybe you should be changing out your weapons for more damage or lifesteal.  It's incredibly fun at first to get your head around this stuff, experiement and work it all out.

But then you do work it out.  What I've found works for me is getting some luck and harvesting early on, then armor, dodge and HP and then focusing on my damage output and doing that has basically guaranteed me a win with every character so far.  I've also found that the Engineering stat along with buy shittons of turrets is an absolutely busted way to play that makes the gameplay trivial even on it's highest setting called Danger 5.  I am, at time of writing, about half way through the large cast of characters and I'm at the point where I'm sort of glazing over as I play.  I'm not thinking anymore and just going through the motions each time.

This doesn't happen with other games though.  Brotato reminds me quite a lot visually of The Binding of Isaac and mastering that games gameplay and RNG didn't result in a boring experience.  I stopped playing Isaac because I had done pretty much everything in it that there was to do and I wasn't on the verge of falling asleep with each run that I did because the better you got and the more you understood about it, the harder it got and more intense challenges were thrown at you.  Brotato doesn't have that kind of scaling and once you learn how to do 20 waves then it's extremely simple to win every time after that.  Maybe you'll lose a run here and there if you don't get good items for the little egg man that you play as but outside of getting buttfucked by randomness the game is extremely easy.  

However, what I'm not saying with any of this is that Brotato is a bad game.  The game has been incredibly useful for me as a new father because it's a perfect game to play when holding a sleeping baby.  I can play it pretty much exclusively with one hand and I can leave it running between ways if I have to run away to do baby stuff.  I'm not going to lose my flow or forget what I'm doing, it's perfect for sqeezing in a quick session in a busy schedule.  I wish it had more music and there was more to the areas than just a square that fills with enemies, maybe some extra levels with obstacles or maybe mazes to have to deal with and navigate would have been a fun addition but for what it is, a shameless Vampire Survivors clone, it's pretty solid.

If you like these kind of games and you need a new one to fiddle with then Brotato is absolutely worth picking up but otherwise your money might be better spent on something a little more involved.

The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game

Lisa: The Painful

 

Last night I finished Lisa: The Painful RPG and if you can't be bothered to read any longer than this first post the the only thing I really want you to know that this game is probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my entire goddamn life.

And you know what? You probably shouldn't read any more than that if you've not played the game for yourself, because similar to games such as Undertale, it really is the kind of thing that you just need to experience for yourself knowing as little as possible.  This game is actually incredibly hard to talk about without spoiling a lot of key moments that make it so great but I'll do my best to give you a fast outline.

The game follows a man called Brad during the post apocalypse.  Only this apocalypse wasn't caused by some kind of viral outbreak or nukes falling on the world, it was caused by all the women just sort of up and vanishing and then things falling apart pretty hard as a result.  Brad however, comes across a baby girl in the desert one day and being a man of many emotional burdens, takes it upon himself to raise and protect the girl.  However, pretty much every other man in the immediate area sees that the discovery of a woman in God knows how long means that maybe there can be some.....relief....along with a chance to save humanity and she is promptly swiped from you and you must embark on a journey to rescue her.

While that's what you get in the opening of the game there's A LOT more to Lisa than that.  Each area that you go to has you encounter various groups and individuals, all with their own stories to tell and experiences to share (in the form of spoken word or baseball bat to the head depending).  A lot of what goes on in Lisa is grim, morbid, disgusting, reprehensible stuff but there's a weird sort of humor going through the whole game so when you come upon this stuff it raises more of a nervous chuckle then a feeling of disdain.  

But enough about the plot that I don't want to spoil because the gameplay is also really good.  It's a standard RPG on the surface.  It's made in RPG Maker for fucks sake so on a surface level you don't really get more standard than that.  But don't let the "made in RPG maker" line turn you away because the engine has been tweaked for some real interesting effects.  For example Brad is a karate master so you input his moves with keyboard strokes like a combo system.  Some characters have MP based moves to do damage or inflict ailments and some characters have TP based moves so you have to spend time either doing or taking damage in order to fill a meter before you can let the big guns go.

One thing to note though is that Lisa is not an easy game.  It's not impossibly difficult either but it will attempt to kick you up and down the garden path if you don't try to spend at least a little time learning what everything is and what it all does.  Combat has a sort of Shin Megami Tensei feel to it where a debuff or an unlucky roll (or a lucky one) can turn the tide of a battle extremely quickly.   For example there was one enemy that was absolutely shitting on my party, one shotting them with most of its attacks so in an act of desperation I decided to inflict "pissed" status to the guy.  Pissed makes him crit more often but also gives him a chance to just smack himself in the face for the damage he was about to do to you.  The fight came right down to the wire but in the last turn he crit himself and died from the attack, letting me live to fight on another day.  

But individual encounter difficulty and decent strategy isn't the only thing you have to worry about.  Lisa throws quite a lot of party members at you over the course of your adventure but I think that's to counter-act the fact that the game has perma-death.  If a characters HP is brought to 0 they are KO'd and can be revived with an item or by resting.  However some enemies have attacks that will just flat out kill a guy and when that happens they are gone from the game forever.  These enemies are few and far between but when you know that you could lose a guy for good in one bad turn of a fight, it makes you think quite differently about your approach to the battle.

The one bone the game does throw at you is a difficulty option at the start.  Normal mode lets you just play the game as standard but Pain mode has some different encounters and save points will just explode upon use.  Save points are frequent and nicely placed but the fact that they are a 1 use commodity on the games harder setting really ramps up the tension.  Personally I recommend the games pain mode because there are a few situations that can leave you feeling a bit helpless but a quick reload sort of sucks the impact away from that.  Being a decent distance away from your last save, only to have the cruelty of the wasteland leaving you in a bad spot sparks a certain tension in the player that you just wouldn't get on normal.

 So play Lisa, it's a damn good game and it's a damn shame that I don't hear more people talking about it.  Saying any more than I've already said would start to get into the spoiler zone so I'm going to end here.  

 

The soundtrack is amazing too, by the way. 

Earth Wars: A Godawful Mess

Earth Wars is by far one of the worst indie games I've ever played and I'm the kind of Steam user that spent 25p buying a game called "Oppai Girl" so that's saying A LOT.

Earth Wars is a game that I played on PS4 after getting it for free as part of my PS+ games one month.  I finished it last week after nearly a solid year of chipping away at it because playing it for any more than about 20 minutes at a time made me want to vomit in my mouth.

The story is set after some aliens show up and make a mess of planet Earth so you and your squad have to get in there and get rid of the aliens.  Truth be told, the story had a lot more going on than that but by the 4th area or so I was so sick of it's technobabble that I just started skipping everything.  Aliens are bad and the power suits used by the Earth forces may or may not also be killing them or something like that, who knows and who cares?

Earth Wars really falls down though in it's gameplay department.  Each major section of the game is bookended by a mission where you'll kill a big boss alien.  After you kill the boss alien you are given a real timer that usually counts down from something absurd like 60 hours.  From there you play sub missions which usually involve finding an item, racing around a zone or killing a certain enemy and you are rewarded with skills for completing these quests.  The missions start to get dull and samey right in the first zone but by the end of the game every missions is basically "hey, go kill this major boss again" and it becomes even more tedious.  Finishing a mission reduces the timer by a handful of hours so clearing a few missions gets you to the next big story beat but you actually have to CLEAR the mission for it to count.  Meaning if you spent 20 minutes on one mission only to fail it near the end, then have fun doing that all over again unless you want to leave the game running for 60 ACTUAL hours.

The gameplay within these missions is even worse.  Imagine a game like Odin Sphere or Muramasa but as if it was designed by a guy who was extremely high on very powerful painkillers for the entire development cycle.  It's wooden, unresponsive, nonsensical, confusing and a whole ton of other adjectives that mean bad things.  Your character controls like your controlling one of those paper puppets with the butterfly pins so that the child who made it can manipulate the joints.  The enemies animate just as atrociously so usually combat is dreadful yet manageable but there's one clawed enemy in particular that is so fast and powerful that you are guaranteed to lose about half your life bar to one EVERY TIME.  Everything is just so janky and difficult to control and for a fast paced action game like this that's very clearly trying to be Odin Sphere or Muramasa but IN SPACE it's a massive letdown.

I do want to end on a positive note so I will say that the backgrounds and nicely drawn and the does use an interesting skill system.  You sort of have this network of nodes where one half is stat boosts and the other half is your movements.  So you can junction +X attack to the first, second or third swing of your sword so you can either spread that damage out or just do what I did and make the first attack hit like a truck and then everything else just be a shitty follow up to try and proc the death effect from my sword.  There is also a crafting system that I expect wanted you to make elemental weapons to exploit weaknesses and stuff but you just make a weapon have a death attribute that you can just smack a normal enemy until it gets the effect and then dash around the field until it dies, rendering all non boss combat trivial.

Clearly the developer of this game had their heart in the right place.  It's a terrible, horrendous, irredeemable shitty mess but a clear effort was made and I can respect that.  However that doesn't excuse the game itself from being as bad as it is.  I got it for free and I want my money back

Five Nights at Freddy's

I couldn't have been more late to this party even if I tried.  A game series that's gathered a massive following and that has tons of sequels but only now am I getting around to actually playing it for myself.  The curse of a large backlog I guess.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game where you play as an after hours security guard in a chuck-e-cheese style pizza restaurant.  On your first night you get a message from the guy who worked there before you warning you that the robot mascots will wander the halls at night and if they see you they will attempt to shove you into one of the suits, killing you violently in the process.  Armed with nothing but some security cameras, light switches and a couple of doors, you must survive from 12am to 6am in the restaurant.  It sounds easy on paper but in practice it really isn't.

The game itself consists of not much more than the screen above.  You move the mouse down to the bar to open the camera and click the buttons on the wall to toggle the lights and the doors.  You'd think that you'd just be able to close the doors and just wait it out until 6am but the problem is that pesky little power percentage in the corner.  Turning on a light, closing a door, opening the camera all drain your power supply at an increased rate.  If the power hits zero then the lights go off, the doors fly open and the mascots are free to just walk in and give you a very bad day at work.  The crux of the game is quickly checking the cameras to get the rough positions of the mascots and only closing the doors when absolutely necessary.  Of course, once you get good and know what you're doing there's ways to game the AI to make your life a little easier but the game is pretty heavy on the randomness and sometimes you'll just die because the game wants you to.  It sounds really annoying but considering a night is only about 8 minutes and the restart is pretty much instant it's not so bad.

The horror in FNAF manifests itself almost exclusively as jump scares, which is usually something I hate but here I don't seem to mind it so much.  If a mascot gets into your room the game will leave you unawares for a moment before throwing the 3D model into your face with a loud noise quickly followed by a game over screen.  Kind of like any of those screamer flash games from the early days of the internet.  I think the reason I give it a pass here though is because it's not TRYING to be anything more than a jump scare game and it tells you this in its loading screen before the main menu.  It's not like, let's say, Dead Space, a game claiming to be at atmospheric romp through a derelict ship and then a good deal of it's "horror" coming from having Necromorphs jump out of small holes screaming at you.  While jump scares ARE cheap and I still hate them, at least the developer Scott Cawthon is up front and basically just flat out says to you "I'm going to jump scare you now, have fun!"

The game is cheap on Steam so I'd recommend going to pick it up.  I finished it in a single evening on stream (granted I had some help) but when you finish there's a sort of "hard mode" in the form of 6th Night and when you finish that you get Custom Night which lets you set the AI levels of each mascot to your own liking, so it's got some replayability too.  Even after the jump scares stop making you jump there's something rather compelling about the mechanics of the game that will keep you coming back.  Every afternoon I've been firing it up to attempt to clear a custom night with all the settings turned to max and it really is quite challenging.

If you're looking for a cheap horror experience, Freddy Fazbears Pizzeria is a pretty good place to go.

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight part 10

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 4

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 2

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 1

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.

Nihilumbra

So here's another one of those games I got for free as part of my PS+ subscription.  When I downloaded it and fired it up I had absolutely no idea what to expect but what I got was pleasantly surprising.  At time of writing I'm on the final world and I've not finished it but I was so elated to play this game that I had to talk about it early. 

Nihilumbra is a puzzle platformer developed by BeautiFun Games and was originally released for iOS back in 2012 but later ported to Windows, Vita, WiiU and Android.  The game follows the adventures of a little creature as he tries to run from an all consuming void.  The character itself is mute but bits of story are given to you by a narrator as you travel from screen to screen and I'm dropping that voice actor along side the guy from Bastion in my bag of "sexy narrators".  The game itself revolves around using colors to solve the various puzzles in each world.  For example the first color you get is blue which makes the surfaces slippy allowing for faster movement and increased jumping to scale large gaps.  As you get further and further you have to use all these colors together to defeat enemies and make it through the traps that stand in your way.  At the end of each stage you get a sequence where the void chases you.  In game play terms this is a auto scrolling section which tasks you with solving puzzles on a strict time limit.  These sections are probably my personal favorite parts of the game since they create a sort of intensity and pressure that I really enjoy.  It's also got a really nice soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente which is worth going and looking up even if you haven't played the game.  It's ambient and I can see myself using the tracks from this game to accompany my study or writing.

My only real complaint about Nihilumbra is that it's WAY too easy.  I don't want to toot my own horn and say that I'm some kind of big brain Mensa bad ass (because I'm not) but none of the puzzles in Nihilumbra really taxed me.  The solutions all seem extremely obvious and when it does throw a difficult section at you the checkpoints are disgustingly nice and will never set you too far back.  There was an extra mode which I've not tried out yet so I'm hoping that there will be some more challenge there but the main story is VERY easy.  The game is also quite short which may be a put off for some but considering it's only £5 on Steam it's a reasonable length for the price.

If you're into your dark indie platformers and you're looking for something new then absolutely give Nihilumbra a try.  It's a short, sweet and satisfying experience and given you can get it for a series of portable systems it suits short commutes perfectly.  Pick it up and give it ago, jump into the void.  

Slay The Spire First Impressions

While I was drinking in a video game bar near my house, a friend of mine fired up this game on a laptop he brought on down and we had a merry old time playing this over a few drinks.  Granted I was a bit drunk when I tried it so if any details I mention now are off a little, forgive me, but I only did one run so it's not like I went that deep into it anyway.

Slay the Spire is a sort of Roguelike deck building game and if there is a story involved then I sure as fuck wasn't paying attention to it.  Basically there's a big spire and you gotta go fuck up all the demons inside it.  When you fire up the game you get a choice of either a warrior guy or a sort of thief type guy and for the one run I did with my buddy we played as the warrior.  From there you are given a map of levels and each level will have a battle or some kind of event that could either help or hinder you.  You fight your way through each map until you either are killed or you make it to the end which sounds easy but if you didn't know what I meant by "Roguelike" before, that means that death means you have to start all over again, no saves.

Anyway the big pull of the game is the whole deck building things.  At the start you're given a bunch of basic shit like attacks, blocks and a skill or two and as you progress you get more and more cards for your deck.  However just putting cards willy nilly is a sure fire way to get killed pretty quickly as you have to juggle things such as cost, synergy and deck size.  For example, if you clear a fight and are presented two cards that don't really fit well with your deck it might be better to pass so that you aren't drawing shit from a bloated deck later on.  Cards aren't gone once you use them either (unless it says "exhaust" on it), you just get 5 randomly each turn so keeping your deck well focused is pretty key.  You can also level up cards so they have greater effect and there are also non card relics (or artifacts or something like that, I forget the exact term) which you can equip for various buffs and effects.

While I did have great fun with the game, and the core deck building element is extremely solid, I have two big problems with Slay the Spire.  One is the fact it's early access, but only because I fucking hate early access with every inch of my being.  Granted, the developers are being very good with it and clearly are putting the effort in but I still can't bring myself to buy a game with that label on it.  If you stumble across this post AFTER the full release then disregard this point, obviously.  The other problem I have is the art style and general look of the game.  Now I'm no artist, I struggle to do stick figures in MS Paint but Slay the Spire just doesn't look like a game you'd spend money on.  It looks like the kind of game you would have found on Newgrounds back in the day, like the whole thing has been made in Flash or some shit.

However don't let that deter you from picking it up if you don't mind the early access because it's a pretty incredible game.  I didn't finish the one run I tried, I died somewhere fairly late in game so I'll be watching the updates carefully for the full release so I can have my revenge.

Eggggg and Illi

Every week a paid app on the app store goes free for a while and I always take the chance to grab that shit because fuck paying money for app games.  However sometimes I download a title that makes me feel a little guilty for not directly supporting the creator and while I'm not about to go and pay for a game I already own, I want to highlight a couple of titles I got for free so many you can go and support the better side of the mobile game spectrum.

The first game is Egggg, I'm not sure exactly how many Gs are in there but it's more than usual.  Egggg is a two button platform game and the aim is just to get from one end of the stage to the other without dying.  The thing is though that once you press a direction button, you can't stop.  If you push the way you're running you jump and the other button will make you turn around.  While you're running from one end of the stage to the other there are things to collect and little hidden areas of each stage for you to explore which net you stars at the end.  Simply finishing a level isn't too much of a challenge but getting 3 stars on a stage will require some strategising.  The game also mixes things up every so often by giving you a stage specific mechanic or having you fight a boss but generally just reaching the end of the stage is your only worry.  Still, it's a nice, pure little platforming experience and it's the kind of thing you'd easily find on something like Steam for a few pounds but instead its phone exclusive.

EDIT: As soon as I posted this thing I googled Egg and found a Steam page for it and it's "coming soon", so worth buying there if you don't like playing games on a shitty phone screen.  Seriously, it's a goodun

The second game I want to talk about briefly is Illi.  It's a very simple, cute little platform puzzle game that will eat through your commutes like nothing else.  The game play is super simple with each stage being made up of a number of squares or rectangles and you must jump your way to the exit by tapping the screen.  Illy moves around each square by himself and which way he falls depends on which side of the cube you're on when you press jump.  So press jump on the top and you'll fall down but press it on the right hand side and you'll fall to the left.  Illi does not respect the laws of physics.  Each stage comes with a number of "quests" which involve collecting a thing, getting to the exit in a certain number of jumps or beating a stage in a certain time and finishing these quests unlocks more levels.

The good thing about Illi compared to other puzzle games I've played is that it's not bullshit difficult like other shitty iPhone games like Cut the Rope.  The solutions to certain levels in things like Cut the Rope where there's no way you'd figure that shit out without spending money on a solution fairy or whatever piss me off but Illi has that nice level of challenge sort of similar to Portal.  Things that look hard but if you take a moment to think about them carefully are actually quite simple.

I got these games for free but if it wasn't such a stingy piece of shit and someone had told me about them beforehand, I would have easily dropped a few pounds on these titles.  So go check them out because instead of complaining about the sorry state of mobile gaming we should be supporting the people who are actually at least TRYING to do a good job.

Pixeljunk Monsters

I've had this game on my PS3 since my second year of University and I've never fucking beaten it.

Pixeljunk Monsters is a tower defense game that came back in 2007.  The game play is simple, you control a little man who goes around building towers on trees.  Monsters come out of one end of the map and walk towards a little house on the other end of the map.  If the towers fail to kill a monster by the time it reaches the house it kills a little thing inside and if this happens 20 times then it's game over.

The game itself isn't too hard but it makes a big deal out of perfectly clearing a stage.  To perfectly clear a stage you have to complete all waves within a level without losing any of the little guys from your house and maybe I'm just shit but this is a really difficult task.  What will usually happen is the game will throw one type of enemy at you for a whole bunch of waves so you end up with a large amount of towers that counter that specific type.  You spend ages thinking everything is just fine and then BAM out of nowhere a different type comes out late in the level with tons of health that you're just not ready for.  Then you restart because you lost a guy and you start trying to prepare for the thing that you know is coming but you find yourself under prepared for the shit the comes before so you end up losing guys and restarting again.  Rinse and repeat this process for fucking HOURS and eventually you strike the right balance and beat the stage with a perfect and all you get for the trouble is a stupid fucking rainbow above the level tile on the map.

Beating the game itself isn't actually that hard but because I'm a perfectionist I feel obliged to try and perfect every level on the map.  If you aren't like that you'll probably have a lot of fun with Pixeljunk Monsters but if you want those fucking rainbows this game will drive you absolutely mental.

Bloodbath Kavkaz

Good lord what the hell is this game?  If you go on Steam and have a look at the store page you may be led into believing that this is some kind of Hotline Miami clone and while you'd be right from a game play perspective the content of this game is so unhinged that it feels like it was created during some kind of acid trip.

Developed and published by Dagestan Technology and released on Steam in 2015, Bloodbath Kavkaz is essentially a Hotline Miami clone of the most shameless variety.  You play from a top down perspective and control aiming with the mouse as you shoot your way through a bunch of retro looking levels.  The difference between this and Hotline, at least on a surface level is that while in Hotline EVERYTHING is sprites, the enemies and characters in this game either look like they were drawn in MS Paint or they have weirdly realistic faces as if someone took a photo of their corner shop owner and slapped it on every bad guy.

Where the game starts to differ though is in the story.  I would love to tell you what the story is but it's so fucking insane and the translation so badly done that I can't even really describe it.  You start the game being told that you need to go and kill a guy called Jafar and then from their you embark on acid trips and take orders from sentient pineapples and all sorts of other weirdness.  I imagine during development they just locked the writer in a closet with a large pile of hard drugs and told him that he wasn't allowed to leave until A) He'd written the entire game and B) taken all the drugs

While the game has certain points of being so bad that it's funny, for the most part Bloodbath Kavkaz is painful to play.  The collision on levels is atrocious, hit detection can be strange the sound and music design assaults your senses and sort of leaves you dazed and upset when you finish a session.  Occasionally a level will just break and become unbeatable but on the other hand I had one occasion where my death resulted in a level clear and took me to the results screen so it seems as if the game doesn't even understand its own rules.

Bloodbath Kavkaz also has some DLC called Khovan Revenge but I've heard it's short and doesn't have any English text.  Although while Kavkaz has a "mixed" rating on Steam while Khovan Revenge has a "mostly positive" so either people are trolling hard or they actually made the follow up game a little better.

Either way, there are plenty of short, cheap, not shit games you could get your hands on without wasting your time with this tripe.  I don't even remember how I came to own this game but you could do yourself a favor by keeping it out of your library.