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Gut Check: Foregone

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Foregone is an early access, side-scrolling, pixelated action game, akin to something like a Metroid or Castlevainia. In my short time playing it I can safely say that it never reaches the highs or lows of the genre, but just ends up feeling like yet another one of “those” kinds of games, that’s totally serviceable.

Foregone wastes no time before hurling you into the action, giving you mere sentences of story before letting you loose in the world. The first thing that struck me was how good the game looks. From character and world design, down to individual animations, Foregone is a good looking game. It reminds me of Dead Cells a lot in its visual design, and might even look better in some spots in my opinion.

Not seconds after being impressed by its quick start and stunning visuals, I was confronted with what might be the biggest flaw that’s persistent throughout Foregone – playing it. Foregone isn’t a bad game by any stretch, but everything feels mushier and less responsive than I’d like out of a game like this. Everything in Foregone feels like it lacks any impact whatsoever.

Like I said, none of it feels outright bad, but the sheer act of attacking an enemy just feels hollow. You can’t stagger enemies in the early stages, which leads to a lot of you just mashing the attack button until your enemy either dies or counterattacks you. The core combat loop doesn’t just lack tactile feedback, but it’s kind of boring. Every one on one encounter boils down to you just dodging behind an enemy that’s winding up an attack, and just mashing the attack button behind them until it’s over.

What does help break that monotony up though is your secondary attacks, constant weapon drops and special abilities. Along with your basic melee attack, you have a ranged weapon that starts off as a pistol, but in my short time with Foregone I ended up with a bow, pistol, shotgun and assault rifle that I could choose from. These all have ammo restrictions that are pretty interestingly implemented too. Every melee hit you land, grants you one bullet for your ranged weapon that maxes out at whatever the weapon dictates as its max. So I can bank 13 bullets and expend them all on one enemy, but that means I’ll have to get in close to get my ranged abilities recharged. It’s a smart system that encourages diversifying your play style.

You also have some magic abilities that I assume get more wild as you play more of the game. In the first few minutes, you get both a dash that hurts enemies, as well as a manual healing ability. The dash seemed to recharge on its own, but I couldn’t tell if the healing one did as well or if they were tied to certain health pickups. Either way, I failed a lot before implementing these moves into my repertoire.

What was also a pleasant surprise was the amount of loot drops I got within my first hour of play. I got to snag a variety of melee weapons from daggers, claymores and shortswords, to various sets of armor, trinkets and the ranged weapons I mentioned earlier. It allowed me to find a play style that suited me best, as early as possible in the game.

But all of these bits of praise don’t cover up the sudden difficulty spikes, lack of checkpoints, mushy controls and my biggest gripe with Foregone, the lack of feedback. Now, when I say feedback, I don’t mean that I want the game to let me know how I’m doing or make me do a bunch of tutorials. What I actually mean is that in Foregone, it’s incredibly easy to die to some bullshit.

There are certain ranged enemies who utilize their own guns, who under normal circumstances can be dodged fairly easily. The problem is when you come across an enemy with a minigun or some sort of turret. They can hit you multiple times very quickly, draining your health in an instant. In other games you would be very aware of these events, but in Foregone, there are very little indicators that you’re being peppered to death by some off screen enemy until the screen goes red and it’s too late. In addition to that, there aren’t any invincibility frames that you might get in other games, so each bullet is hitting you and giving you no opportunity to escape.

And that’s kind of the underlying theme of Foregone. You will die to things you can’t even see sometimes, and your only path of recourse is to trial and error your way through levels, memorizing enemy placements. A lot of people might find this loop rewarding in other games like Dark Souls, but at least in that series the combat feels good and responsive.

Take note of the enemy with a minigun, hidden behind a wall, actively killing me.

Most of my complaints with Foregone comes down to mechanical and control issues that could be ironed out over the course of early access. But it’s still lacking some basic functions like being able to do an upward slash to attack enemies on the ceiling, or downward attacks for those below you. Combat doesn’t feel great as is, and on top of that, your moves are limited.

There’s a lot to like about Foregone, but there’s a ton of room for improvement too. I like that it’s a visually striking game that doesn’t waste your time, and is constantly feeding you new items and abilities. I just think it’s mechanically flawed, making it pretty laborious to play, especially when there are so many other games that are doing what Foregone does, but better. Hopefully these issues are ironed out before Foregone makes it’s full release in the future.

The Master of Disaster: Maps – 11

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Welcome to another installment of The Master of Disaster, a feature where I outline some of my preferences, tactics and stories that have come out of both playing, but mostly from running various tabletop role-playing games. This time around I’d like to talk about something fairly obvious, but easily one of the more labor intensive parts of being a GM. Of course I’m talking about maps.

To preface, considering all of my GM/DM experiences revolve around playing a game online, this article is going to exclusively be about online resources and tools I use to make maps.

MAP PURPOSES

First thing I want to touch on before we get into any specific tools is the mentality I have when I decide it’s time to make a map. It’s an alluring prospect to have a map ready for every location your players might visit, but that’s a fool’s errand as well as the quickest way to lose your mind.

In my previous campaign where we ran a custom story in a custom world using the D&D rule-set, I wanted to create an entire continent with interesting topography, plenty of hidden areas with quests attached to them, and unique cities that all had a different feel. While that sounds like a lot (and it was), I went ahead and pushed on, creating roughly 30 different maps that my players might stumble upon, not including bespoke dungeons.

I essentially wanted them to approach my world like they would have if they were playing something like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I had random encounters ready to go, caves and dungeons they could stumble upon and of course, cities for them to explore. The problem was that I was approaching running a campaign along with map making, as if it were a video game. Some video game concepts might translate better than others, but the way I went about crafting a world didn’t 100% work out. Ultimately, I only ended up using a third of the maps I made before we ended the campaign.

Fast forward to the current campaign I run using the Monster of the Week rule-set, and instead of a massive world that’s been hand crafted, I went went with a city that had only a handful of notable landmarks. Some of these landmarks do have maps associated with them, but for the most part I now rely on my players to tell me where it is they want to go, and flesh it out on the fly by painting a “word picture.” This approach is easier on me, but far less visually appealing for the players. So it’s good to brush up on your improvisation and narration skills before attempting this.

The point I’m trying to make here is about over preparation. I went insane and made 30+ maps, most of which that were never seen before, because I had these grand ideas about where my players would go, and what they’d do. As we all know though, you can’t assume that your players will do anything you plan for. My strategy now is to build each session, maps and all, based off of what happened in the previous one. It lightens the workload a lot and let’s you get particularly detailed with descriptions if you know your players are going to be there for a while.

Being that all of my sessions are run through the Roll20 service, I rely exclusively on online tools and resources to aid me in my map making endeavors. These tools range in quality and scope, but all of them are good for different facets of running a game. So here are a few of my favorite tools and resources for you to use.

INKARNATE

Inkarnate is a really accessible “free” tool that you can use to make all manner of visually striking maps. It has a robust editing suite that has a lot of custom art for you to plop down and create with. Within minutes you can generate a world, regional, or city map with various terrains, buildings and landscapes. The tool is great whether you want to only spend 5 minutes in it, or an hour.

The only thing that could be a drawback is that the free version of Inkarnate, is severely limited in what you can actually use. In the paid version, I have access to hundreds of different objects from different kinds of trees, mountains, buildings, walls, gates and so on and so forth. The free version only had a fraction of that stuff to use, but still enough to pump out a couple of maps.

The free version also limits the export quality of your maps in some regards, although while I have the option to export my maps in 4K, I don’t know why I ever would. The silver lining here is that if you did want to shell out cash for the full suite, it’s only 5 dollars a month or 25 for a year upfront. I think it’s worth the price if you need good fantasy themed maps, but if you’re running anything other than fantasy, Inkarnate has basically nothing for you.

MEDIEVAL FANTASY CITY GENERATOR

This one is kind of self explanatory, but it’s worth talking about briefly. The Medieval Fantasy City Generator is super easy to use, but fairly limited as well. With only a few clicks, you can generate a top-down view of a city and determine if there are farms, roads, coastlines, and other things like that. It’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s free.

What this tool isn’t however, is super customizable. You can choose different color and object options to toggle on and off, but you can’t really get granular with it. You can edit the dimensions of certain objects in the city, but that’s about the extent of it. I actually used this tool to make my modern day, Monster of the Week city, and it’s worked out pretty well.

DUNGEN

Want to generate a dungeon really quickly? Well DunGen has got you covered, although not completely unless you back the maker’s Patreon, which you should consider if you like this tool.

With DunGen, you select a few options, size, theme and levels, and in seconds you’ll get a pretty awesome looking dungeon. As I’m writing this in early April of 2020, the creator has unlocked some Patreon exclusive features for everyone to use during the pandemic, such as higher resolution downloads, and automatic dynamic lighting integration for Roll20 users.

Since the tool is using pre-generated assets which it stitches together, the maps can feel a little “samey” in spots. But despite that, it’s one hell of a tool that I’ve used several times in conjunction with the art assets I have on Roll20. Just drag a couple of boxes and torches or whatever on to one of these dungeons, and you’ve got something people will think took you hours.

DONJON

Finally, I’d like to highlight something that isn’t just a map making tool, but something all GMs should explore. Donjon is a massive resource that includes, various map generators with annotations for doors, traps, and stairs, as well as a generator for just about anything you can think of.

In a matter of clicks, not only can you make dungeons, but you can just generate full quests and locations. For instance, the image below this paragraph was just the first thing that came up when I clicked on “inn generator.” I now have this one page that not only gives me a quest to give my players, but menu items, NPCs, rumors and a description of the place itself. In one click, I am able to describe a scene that might take me a while to write, and even longer to illustrate.

Donjon is an amazing set of tools that everyone should check out. If you just need a dungeon, click here, but I strongly suggest you check out the entire suite of tools they have available.

This feature has already run pretty long, but I just have one or two more things to touch on really quickly. Firstly, make sure your maps are clear and legible. What is just a stack of useless boxes you plopped in the corner for flavor, might turn into a 20 minute conversation about looting the boxes because your players don’t know any better. Not to say that those conversations aren’t useful or fun, but if you’re on a time crunch like we usually are, minimize the amount of confusing imagery on your maps.

Finally, and this one is pretty obvious, but make sure each room has a purpose. I know there’s only so many goblin sleeping quarters and dining halls you can stuff into one dungeon, but there is nothing more deflating to a player than the feeling that exploring is a futile effort. These aren’t just maps, they’re supposed to be visual representations of “real” places. Not many people just have an empty room in their homes that exists for no reason.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with this one for as long as you did. I could go on and on about making maps and easily double the word count on this feature, but my fingers are starting to cramp. So for all of you DMs out there who suddenly have to migrate to online sessions, I hope these tools helped a little.

Review: The Escaper

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Without fail, every time I find myself in a mall and pass by some slapped together, hastily assembled “escape the room” experience, I feel this unnatural draw to throw my money at it in the hopes it isn’t completely obtuse and nonsensical. Usually they are and I find myself wishing I didn’t blow nearly $30 dollars on an hour of bad puzzles. That’s where The Escaper comes in. The The Escaper takes that rinky-dink mall escape room scenario, and let’s you enjoy it from the comfort of your own home.

I usually enjoy a nice puzzle game in this vein, whether it be a series like The Room or a game like The House of Da Vinci, but unfortunately The Escaper trades in too many of the tropes that puzzle and adventure games did in the past, usually requiring some obtuse or inane solution to progress. The puzzles nor their solutions are rarely ever clever or satisfying in a way where it doesn’t feel like you’re just bashing your head against a wall until the answer comes out.

There are currently 4 rooms to escape from in The Escaper. You progress through them one by one, with the exit to a room leading to the next one. The rooms initially appear to be fairly straightforward, with you starting in some vintage study with a locked door. Escaping this room is pretty easy for the most part, but just like every room in the game, there’s at least one extremely obtuse and vague puzzle to be solved.

I initially thought that maybe I was at fault here, considering that while I love puzzle games but am notoriously terrible at them. Then I reached the second level which was a boiler room. This is where it became apparent that some puzzles are just broken. For instance, there was a keypad on a door with 8 numbers that it needed to unlock it. These numbers are found together and presented in a certain order, something to the effect of 20, 35, 40 and 60. I punched the numbers in, and got nothing. I punched them in backwards and also was met with failure. The actual solution was just randomly punching in these groups of numbers until it opened.

There was nothing in the room that indicated that the numbers had to be punched in that specific way. And that’s the biggest shortcoming with The Escaper. It’s painfully vague and expects you to engage in a lot of trial and error in each level. Sometimes the technical aspects of the game can even hinder your progress. Early on in the first level, you need to find the right time to wind a clock to so some classic adventure game nonsense can take place. The problem I ran into was that the thing you have to read to find the time was in such a low resolution that I just assumed it was just part of the scenery.

There was even an instance where I had to punch in 1 of 6 solutions to a puzzle based off some markings on a wall. The game wanted me to just try them all, but thanks to a fun graphical glitch, I was able to see that a secret compartment was behind one of the markings. Wouldn’t you know it, that was the solution to the puzzle.

But despite all of this, I still pushed through and beat the game. Despite its many shortcomings, The Escaper did scratch an itch of mine, and being priced at 4 dollars certainly helped. But unless you’re really desperate for one of these games and you don’t want to play other, and frankly better options out there, I can’t say it was worth the 2 hours it took to beat.

Gut Check: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

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The Mount & Blade series has a long and storied history among the PC gaming community, with the first game releasing back in 2008. Since then, there have been a few expansions but never a true sequel until recently in the form of the early access release of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

For those of you who might also be in the same situation as me, particularly not knowing anything about the series, let me do my best to explain what the game actually is. In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, you start off by creating your own medieval warrior and filling out their history to determine different buffs and abilities you’ll inherently have. From there you’re tossed into a combat tutorial that teaches you the basics of ranged, close-range, and mounted combat.

Combat so far has felt unwieldy and difficult to control. If you’ve played games like Chivalry or Mordhau, combat generally feels the same albeit less impactful overall. By aiming in a direction and clicking the left or right mouse button, you’ll attack or guard respectively, in that direction. It’s a lot of wiggling the camera around in the hopes that you land a clean shot on an enemy. In my opinion it’s serviceable, but never actually felt like I was in control of combat, but I’m sure with time you can get a good feel for that.

After the combat tutorial is completed, you’re launched into the tutorial for the other part of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the RPG and strategy stuff. I arrived at a small town in the hopes of tracking down the people who kidnapped my younger siblings (I think?). There are a couple of layers here, so let’s start from the top.

On the world map was the village my brother and I were heading to in an effort to find answers. I clicked on the village and was presented with a menu that prompted me to either walk around, buy supplies, or recruit soldiers. Being the tutorial, I chose walk around, which hit me with a quick loading screen and then I was into this pleasant little village where I had to find someone who could help me. After finding the right NPC and talking to them, I was told to buy supplies and recruit mercenaries. So I had to back out of the village, hit a loading screen, and buy buy the supplies and soldiers from the world map. Then I had to go back and talk to the same NPC to further the quest. You see where this is going, right?

It was truly wild to me that I couldn’t complete these tasks while still in the village. Instead, I had to ping-pong between loading screens and menus to complete objectives that should have just taken moments. But whatever, it’s early access and I’m sure these things will be addressed over the course of development.

After fumbling through this portion of the game, it was finally time for me to get out there and do some hacking, slashing and looting. I was tasked with tracking down three raiding parties that might have a lead on my missing siblings. On the world map, I saw a raider running away from the village and I pounced upon them. Once my character finally reached the enemy on the world map, we were bounced into a skirmish in an open field. I had all of my mercenaries on horseback with me and charged the small group of soldiers on the ground. It was only after I had charged in that I realized that my soldiers were not following me.

Thus, another layer of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was uncovered. In the midst of combat, you can open a menu with several troop actions on it. From basic commands like telling the party to stay, follow or go to a position, to more in-depth strategies like defensive formations were all available. Unfortunately, time was less abundant and I just kited the enemies back to my troops where we utterly demolished them. A victory screen showed up, and I was prompted to take prisoners. I took all of them cause I literally don’t know why I wouldn’t.

Upon the third and final cycle of this, one of my prisoners approached and had a conversation with me. He said he was a doctor and that raiding was not something he wanted to do, but was forced into. He gave me the lead on a bigger bad guy who might know something about my siblings, and went on his way. It was around here that I decided to stop playing for the time being.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is an awfully ambitious game that tries to blend all of these mechanics into one cohesive package. I think it’s still very rough around the edges, but that’s to be expected from an early access title. I’m extremely curious to see how the story progresses, not because it’s a great narrative, but because I’m interested in seeing how player choice plays into the game. I’m eager to see what situations I can put myself in, and what choices the game offers me in return.

But there’s a lot of things that I haven’t seen in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. My understanding is that battles can get massive, with dozens and dozens of troops clashing as you grow your army. There’s also the multiplayer component, which I have no clue about, but I think it allows players to build their armies with other players, putting them in specific roles and positions, pitting them against other player run armies. All I know about Mount & Blade multiplayer is that it’s utterly wild, and primarily the reason that people have stuck with the series for so long.

I am super interested to see where the development of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord goes, but in the state it’s currently in, I might step back from it until it gets a few more layers of polish on it, as well as some better tutorialization. Full controller support wouldn’t hurt either.

Curiosity isn’t Enough

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I’ve often talked about upcoming games by expressing my interest and curiosity in them, as if I was some sort of scientist or detective trying to deduce something. While I’ve played a lot of games that fell in that bucket, there are some that I just never got around to and probably never will. So here are a few games that I’ve been curious about for a while that I’ll probably never play.

PRAEY FOR THE GODS

There are few games that have ever come close to capturing the scale and drama involved in fighting a boss that Shadow of the Colossus did back in 2005, and once more in 2018 with its remake on PlayStation 4. With its core conceit being, “go kill that gigantic monster” and nothing else, it set out to do one thing and nailed it spectacularly.

Praey for the Gods is a game that was Kickstarted back in 2016 that raised upwards of $500,000 on the promise of being a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus. I have no way of proving this, but I suspect the actual remake of Shadow of the Colossus killed a lot of the momentum for Praey for the Gods, but that might just be me projecting.

I don’t know why I never gave it a shot, but I suspect my personal motivations were undercut by the actual remake of Shadow of the Colossus. Also, I believe there are some survival mechanics in the game that turned me off on a product that I was already lukewarm on. It’s a shame, cause it looks like a cool game, but I’ll probably never play it.

BLACKSAD: UNDER THE SKIN

Blacksad: Under the Skin is an adventure game that whether it aims to or doesn’t, reminds me a lot of the tone and style of The Wolf Among Us, a game which I love. In a world filled with anthropomorphic animals, with you taking up the role of Blacksad, a gruff detective kitty who has a gun. Something I didn’t know but suspected to be the case, is that Blacksad is an existing character in graphic novels and comics dating back to the year 2000.

I’ll be completely honest, I still want to play this game. But it’s just a little out of my price range and never seems to dip down far enough for me to take the plunge. I’m curious about it, but not that curious.

GREEDFALL

For a game that got hyped up pretty heavily before it released, it sure did fizzle out quickly. Greedfall is an action RPG that leaned hard into the colonialism aesthetic, boasting muskets and tricorner hats along with a bunch of monsters to fight. It looked a lot like a Dragon Age game, another series that I don’t really have much familiarity with.

I wanted to play this game because I felt like I was missing a good meaty RPG in my life. One of my good friends had bought in hard to the hype and was my basically my informant on this game. His reaction was tepid at best, and I don’t think he ever played more than a few hours of the game. That was troubling because if he, a person notorious for loving these kinds of games didn’t like it, what chance did I have?

Ultimately, thanks to media coverage and word of mouth, I backed away from Greedfall, and even if it suddenly appeared in my Steam library I doubt I’d ever even boot it up.

It’s still infinitely confounding how someone could go from super interested and excited for a game, to not even knowing if they’d play it even if it were given to them. Even if you put money and time aside, something changed from then till now. In most cases, I still actively enjoy these genres and will continue to seek out these kinds of experiences in the future, but when something has been sitting on the shelf for so long, you learn to live without it.

I Hate Bunny Day

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UPDATE: Since writing this article, a patch was released for Animal Crossing: New Horizons that turned down the spawn rate on all Bunny Day eggs. This article is representative of the six days of the event before the patch was rolled out.

Like most of the world, I’m dedicating a lot of time to the recently released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game which I absolutely adore. The simple pleasure of just building and maintaining my own island has been, among other things, therapeutic. That is until April 1st rolled around and every Animal Crossing: New Horizons player got pranked at the same time by a giant asshole dressed up like a bunny, making it the worst April Fools joke of all time.

If you don’t know, Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced their first seasonal event that is some vague celebration of Easter, focusing more on the eggs and less on the whole Jesus thing. It’s supposed to be a light and happy event to shake up the routines of a standard day in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, tasking players with collecting various eggs to make Bunny Day themed furniture.

It was supposed to be cute and happy, but it very quickly went from charming to annoying and then to frustrating. So how could something designed to be so lighthearted become so despised by many Animal Crossing: New Horizons players? Well there are a few reasons.

Firstly, the entire event runs from April 1st to April 12th. That’s twelve whole days of the bullshit that I’m going to explain a little later in this article. Twelve days of having to deal with this event whether you want to participate or not. It’s maddening.

The second and possibly biggest reason has to do with one of the core mechanical changes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, crafting. In New Horizons a focus has been put on crafting furniture and tools through the use of raw materials that you find throughout the world. Chop a tree for would, hit a rock for iron and so on and so forth. The problem is that while you could whack a tree reliably for three pieces of wood, now there’s a high chance that at least one of them will actually be an egg. How an egg was hidden inside the bark of a tree, I’ll never know.

But it isn’t just some minor inconvenience, as everything that you would do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons now has a fucking egg attached to it. Mining for iron? Egg. Chopping wood? Egg. Going fishing? Oh that wasn’t actually a fish, somehow you caught yet another fucking egg. These little bastards are everywhere, and even though you can just sell them or give them to villagers, they still waste your time and resources.

This leads to my third issue with Bunny Day. Even though I’m actively not participating, I’m still wasting my time getting bamboozled by what looks like fish in the water, but are actually sentient, swimming eggs. I’ll go to dig up what should be a fossil, and instead it’ll be a special subterranean egg. Not only does it waste my time, but it wears on my tools. My fishing rod will break because I wasted it’s good fishing energy on a stupid egg, which leads to me having to march over to a tree to get wood (and more eggs), head to a crafting table to make another fishing rod, and then head back to do this stupid cycle over again.

You can’t even escape from this shit because the being behind this holiday, Zipper, who is most definitely a man in a bunny suit and not a bunny, is a criminal. Single-handedly, this monster managed to not only pollute my oceans, ground and skies with his shitty eggs, but did it on every island I might visit. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons there’s a mechanic that allows you to fly to a procedurally generated island to mine for resources and possibly catch exotic bugs or fish. But somehow this fugitive of the law in a bunny costume, filthed up every island I might find a temporary escape in.

For those keeping score at home, this holiday was forced upon me, even if I don’t participate in it I have to suffer through its dumb mechanics, and it’s a colossal waste of time and resources that I cannot escape from and must endure. Bunny Day sucks shit and it goes on too long. I don’t want your heinous egg-themed furniture, I don’t care about any of it, I just want it to go away.

Lastly, it’s wild to me that only 11 days into Animal Crossing: New Horizons being out publicly, with people still settling into their rhythms and routines in the game, this event has basically thrown a wrench into any plans they had. I’m still actively developing my island, and when I get 7 eggs that are worth a few pennies each versus 7 fish that would fetch a far better price, I’m being actively thwarted in my attempts to make a kick-ass island.

I really love Animal Crossing: New Horizons and check in on it several times a day. It’s been the bright spot in what’s been a pretty dreary time in all of our lives, which is why it sucks even more that a stupid event that was made to be fun and happy is actively draining my enjoyment and desire to pop in from time to time. I can’t wait until this event is over and I can go back to not seeing 8 balloons with eggs in them floating around my island like a bunch of derelict satellites and space trash. Till then, fuck Bunny Day.

Walkabout in Walking Simulator

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As someone who hasn’t played nor has no intention to play Death Stranding, it’s been fascinating to experience what essentially is a gigantic parody of it. If you haven’t seen it, there’s currently a free game on Steam called Walking Simulator that’s basically one giant joke at Hideo Kojima’s expense. It’s shallow, it’s stupid, and it isn’t fun, but it made me laugh and that’s gotta count for something.

With that being said, I’d like to take you on a journey. Walk with with me through the frozen tundra of Walking Simulator.

We start with a quote, as all good video games do. This is a powerful metaphor for sure, but in Walking Simulator, it’s a little more literal.

Welcome to Antarctica. You’re first task, go deliver fuel and definitely don’t get distracted and accidentally spawn a bunch of enemies. That would be tragic.

Dang.

Not a problem though. Those fools can’t run and I totally can. Time to take my Jenga tower of boxes on a trek through this frozen wasteland.

There are two very important things to know about Walking Simulator. The first is that random packages and enemies will spawn around you if you’re moving slow enough. You’re gonna wanna pick as many of these up as possible.

The second is that I don’t think there’s a limit to how much stuff you can carry.

The people in this building are gonna be so impressed with my very good package tower.

This custodian is not impressed by my objectively good tower, nor are they phased by the cold weather at all. They should send this guy out there instead of me.

After dropping off my very important packages, not only did I get more, but I got the chance to buy energy drinks. I tried one and I’m pleased to report that they give you superhuman running powers for a limited time.

Is it cool if I take this? I’m just gonna take this.

This is so much better than running.

This bad boy is a little squirrelly on the controls front, but I can handle it.

Ah shoot.

Stuck the landing though. Pretty sweet if I do say so myself.

Yo, it’s Greg with Postmates. You want me to leave this outside or what?

Not gonna lie, this is simultaneously the coolest and lamest office I’ve ever seen.

But hey, any office where I can get a jet-pack is worth visiting, if you ask me.

Oh this mountain doesn’t stand a chance now that I have this drone strapped to my back.

He’s doing it!

Fuck.

Ouch.

Dammit. I just want to get to the top of this horrible mountain.

Hell yeah baby, it’s happening!

Good enough.

I really should have listened to this. I really, REALLY should have. It didn’t get better and they tried to warn me about it.

I’m too far in though, I need to see this stupid game through.

Really wish I could use my jet-pack while riding this snowmobile and turn myself into the worst plane that’s ever existed.

If the snowmobile controls this terribly, I can only imagine how poorly the truck I’m going to pickup is going to be.

More cargo. Love it, love it. Absolutely loving how the cargo is also definitely tied down and won’t become an issue while I’m driving nearly 4000 Walking Simulator miles.

This isn’t me being fancy with the camera. This is me spinning in circles while going 60 miles per hour in the snow.

God dammit.

Can you guys not? I’m trying to pick up the things I dropped.

I could have sworn I had two of these in the truck.

Turns out, these containers just explode. Good thing two of them are strapped to my back inside the truck.

Another flawless delivery in the books. Now to… go back to where I started? Okay…

Buddy, really? I don’t even have anything except this terrible truck. And no, even though I called it terrible, you can’t have it.

I wonder what they’re gonna have me do next.

Trucks can survive a couple of barrel rolls, right?

Oh… you just want me to do the first mission again, huh? I think I’m gonna follow the advice you gave me a while ago and just not play this thing anymore.

Walking Simulator isn’t a game of substance in any way, shape or form. It purely exists as a method to dunk on the tepidly received Death Stranding that came out last year, and by that metric, it succeeds. As someone who hasn’t played Death Stranding, I can confirm that this is exactly what it’s like.

In all honesty though, Walking Simulator is genuinely not worth your time, even at the low price of zero dollars. I’m kind of angry with myself for playing it for the hour I did, but I got a couple of laughs out of it so I guess I can’t be too upset.

If you like Death Stranding, good for you. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’m not here to cast judgements on your gaming preferences at all. But there’s one last thing that I do want to show you that might just be the scariest and most sinister part of this whole silly game.

They’re going to put out more content for this ridiculous game.

What are the odds that this game goes from a complete parody, to a more full fledged product that people actually end up enjoying? Like, I could definitely see the joke going so far that it wraps around to being something sincere. Part of me thinks that with a little more polish and slightly more to do, Walking Simulator could be fun in a weird way. Then there’s the other part of me that hopes I never have to boot this game up ever again.

Review – The White Door

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There are games out there that are so well crafted that they’re capable of eliciting a genuine emotion out of the player, providing proper motivations or worthy payoffs. The White Door is not one of those games. The White Door desperately wants to be one of those games, but unfortunately falls short.The broad pitch for The White Door is that it’s a psychological mystery game about a man who is in some sort of medical facility. His memory is fractured which requires his doctors to frequently quiz him on details about his life. The whole game sets up this idea that this man had a mental break after a series of failures and missteps in his personal life.

The story itself isn’t bad or anything, it’s just nothing of note. It’s predictable and kind of dull in spots, and tries so hard to be mysterious but often ends up feeling as if it’s trying too hard. It’s a shame too considering that on paper, The White Door sounds like it could be something interesting that shows a unique perspective on the issues it’s trying to raise. It just never seems to nail the tone or atmosphere that it’s shooting for, however.While the story itself is mediocre, the gameplay is somewhere between dull and bad. It’s a point and click style adventure game that has you interacting with the environment along with playing a few mini-games, but the collection of puzzles included range from painfully easy to unbelievably obtuse. Memorizing patterns and answering the questions your doctors give you are pretty straightforward, but later in the game you’re tasked with identifying symbols and numbers that in some cases, are almost impossible to figure out without some outside help.I don’t mean to sound so hard on The White Door because I genuinely think there are some good ideas on display here. The presentation and storytelling methods are neat and deserve to be fleshed out more, while the puzzles could certainly use some refining. It isn’t a bad game, hell, you might even enjoy it. It’s only about two hours long which is nice, but even in that short window I started to feel as if it was overstaying its welcome. I’d be curious to see what a second pass at The White Door looks like, but I can’t say that I’m impressed with the game as is.

Gut Check: Ori and the Will of the Wisps

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Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a phenomenal follow up to the 2015 metroidvainia, Ori and the Blind Forest that manages to build upon and refine every aspect of its predecessor.

In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, you play as titular glowing rabbit creature, Ori, who embarks on on journey to find their missing owl friend. Through a mix of platforming, combat, puzzle solving and exploration, you’ll venture across the beautifully rendered landscape, aiding friends and defeating foes alike, all in service of finding your friend.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a phenomenally fun game to play. Every aspect of the mechanics are finely tuned to make sure you’re in complete control of Ori and their suite of ever expanding moves. Early in the adventure you’re limited in terms of what you can do, but within the first hour of play Ori will become competent at not only traversal, but combat too.

Your abilities in combat start out with a glowing sword of light that allows you to hack and slash your way through enemies. Combat feels great, mixing in standard light and heavy attacks along with air juggles and downward strikes. Slightly farther into the game, you’ll come across the extensive shard system that allows you to map new attacks and abilities to your controller as you please, as well as offering opportunities to level up shards to make them more viable and grant additional effects.

Along with unlocking and equipping shards, you’ll come across these trees that grant you new traversal abilities from double jumping to warping to climbable terrain. The pace at which you’re confronted with new shards and abilities is staggeringly fast and constantly encourages you to shake things up.

But even when you’re not in the midst of combat or platforming, you’re surrounded by the beautifully desolate world in Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Everything is gorgeous and lovingly crafted, from level design to aesthetics and music. Despite its beauty and soft glowing art, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is still a hard game that doesn’t punish you too hard for failure thanks to its generous check-pointing system.

The only negative thing I can say about Ori and the Will of the Wisps comes at the fault of the beautiful art. I never thought something could be too pretty, but Ori and the Will of the Wisps has proven me wrong. The problem is that Ori is this bright white glowing creature that is luminous in a way that can be difficult to track when there’s a lot on screen. Every enemy pumps out a lot of particle effects and light bloom to make them pretty noticeable, and while the random enemies aren’t usually an issue, certain bosses can devolve into a mess of particle effects that make it hard to keep track of your positioning in a battle.

It’s a small thing that might only apply to me, but it made me have to restart an early boss fight several times because Ori would keep getting lost amidst the waterfall of particle effects that the boss was producing. But like I said, that could just me and my aging eyes. One thing that is borderline necessary to do early on is to turn off motion blur. Trust me on this one, the motion blur is incredibly intense.

All things considered, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a phenomenal game that I can’t wait to put more time into. It’s currently available on Steam, Xbox One, and it’s on Game Pass which is how I got a hold of it. If you’re in the mood for a dense and satisfying action and adventure platformer, you should definitely check out Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Doing its Best

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You probably already know if Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the kind of game you would be into, but for me it’s been a crucial part of my social distancing coping mechanism. I absolutely adore the game and could write an entire piece gushing about it. However, I feel kind of bad for Animal Crossing: New Horizons because it’s been thrust into a position I can’t imagine it was ever intended to be in.

For context, Animal Crossing as a series has always been about playing in increments and slowly developing your town over time. It’s consistently positioned itself as something you check in with maybe once or twice a day before moving onto whatever else you had going on in your life. Obviously the world has been a bit different recently, granting people an excess of time to spend with a game that cannot sustain that.

Consider articles like this one, where people are stuck between completing objectives that would normally take an hour or two without much of an issue. Were this a normal world we lived in, people might not be able to simply obliterate all their goals in one sitting, more akin the way Animal Crossing: New Horizons probably planned for.

Now we have people, myself included, blitzing through every goal that would usually take a few days under normal circumstances, left without much else to do in the game. Sure you can catch fish and bugs, collect materials, craft stuff and sell things, but when you’re desperate for anything to do, these objectives might seem a little more thin than they normally would.

This is in no way the fault of Animal Crossing: New Horizons though. The world went and flipped upside down and now we’re all here just struggling to hang on, often escaping into video games to pass the time. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not built to deal with these kinds of sustained, long-term game sessions, but it’s doing its best despite that. There’s just enough to do and check in with in the game that I can check in with it for an hour or two, several times a day without feeling too bored.

I ultimately love Animal Crossing: New Horizons and will continue to play it for the foreseeable future, but I can easily see a scenario in which people burn out on it because they’re playing it ad nauseam. I’ve already seen people complaining about the lack of storage options, or the long wait times for certain amenities to be built, or even with the pace of unlocking new items and crafting recipes, which are all valid concerns if this were a game that you were meant to play in long sessions. But that isn’t Animal Crossing, and while it’s still holding up for me, it’s important to realize that you should pace yourself with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and not expect the same things you would from another game.