I’ve mentioned in the past how the entire roguelike/roguelite genre of games are essentially incompatible with me as a person, but knowing that hasn’t stopped me from giving last year’s critically acclaimed Hades another shot when it released on Game Pass a few days ago. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Hades while possibly seeing if the, “it’s a roguelike for people who don’t like roguelikes” claim had any truth to it, and possibly changing my first impression with the game last year. Ultimately, I didn’t end up falling in love with the genre or Hades at all. I think I can explain it though.
I’ve tried so many roguelikes over the years, desperately trying to find my way into enjoying anything about these games. From Spelunky to The Binding of Isaac and more, none of the games managed to grip me in any meaningful way. In the case of The Binding of Isaac, I just found the whole vibe of that game pretty gross and repugnant, which cut my playing time short way sooner than the roguelike mechanics did.
But even games that didn’t make me want to barf from just looking at them, never managed to hold my interest for too long regardless of what kind of game was wrapped around it. Games like FTL and Into the Breach are both critically acclaimed roguelikes that aren’t a side-scrolling platformers or top-down shooters, but even their unique gameplay mechanics weren’t enough to get me to actually play more than once or twice.
So what’s the deal here then? Plenty of games are repetitive and have you doing the same thing over and over, so what is it about roguelikes that stand apart? The honest answer is that I don’t really know. My theory is that when I have to do something repetitive in a linear game, it’s in service of moving forward. Sure that sequence sucked, but I’ll never have to do it again unless I feel like replaying the game at some point. But with roguelikes, that is the game. The lack of progression in roguelikes is probably what gets me the most. Sure you’ll unlock new weapons or powers or whatever, but it doesn’t change the fact that I still have to trudge through painfully familiar levels with the same enemies as I did before.
I’m sure there are plenty of people that would take umbrage with that previous paragraph, but roguelikes always felt like a slower burn to me when it comes to progressing. It reminds me a bit of those factory games, where you have make everything run as efficiently as possible. The fun there is in optimizing every piece of the assembly line so that you’re getting the most of out your time and production. Roguelikes have a similar thing where you’re making progress to help you better make progress next time. Maybe it’s experience doublers, or better weapons, higher HP, or level shortcuts, but it all feels like a lot of micromanaging, which is something I truly do not enjoy in video games.
Games like Hades, Risk of Rain 2 and Dead Cells, managed to make a compelling argument for why I should actually keep playing, both of which have to do with their excellent gameplay. But that only can keep me interested for so long before I feel the repetitive grind start to wear me down.
These gripes and issues are entirely on me though and I recognize that. It’s my impatience and unwillingness to learn and commit these patterns to memory that’s holding me back from actually engaging with this genre in a meaningful way. Roguelikes seem like a pretty long-term commitment that requires you to play them with some regularity, and that’s the complete opposite of what I’m looking for in a video game these days. Give me something shorter with well-defined and clear goals that I can blaze through in a few hours, not a new craft for me to master.
I know plenty of people who are head-over-heels for roguelikes, and in some cases have built a considerable following around streaming them, but I just cannot muster any modicum of enthusiasm for the genre. It sucks to have to basically shut myself off from an entire genre, but if the “best roguelike around” can’t change my opinion, then it’s time to cut my losses and walk away from the genre entirely. I hope that we get more great roguelike games for the people who can actually enjoy them, but at this point I need to stop trying and just save my money.
One of the things that’s been most interesting to me this year has been seeing the types of games that unexpectedly exploded in popularity. The fanaticism around games and forming communities around them isn’t anything new, but in more typical years it was inevitable that someone might miss a big trend or event in gaming. Considering I’ve been home most of the year however, I was able to see these wild surges in popularity among various games and genres in a way I hadn’t ever been able to before. Despite all of this, I feel as if I’ve dipped into several of these big trends that took the internet by storm this year and managed to bounce off of most of them.
Like I said, big trends in gaming is nothing new. A few years ago PLAYER UNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS exploded onto the scene and thrust the battle royale genre of games into the spotlight. There was Overwatch, which arrived in 2016 and prompted every company in existence to try and take a stab at the hero shooter genre, with newcomers like Valorant releasing this year and finding an audience, while games like Hyper Scape, Rocket Arena and Crucible, all games which released within two months of each other, failed to gain any traction. Hell, even years ago we saw plenty of MMO’s get conjured into existence in an attempt to dethrone World of Warcraft… which definitely happened.
My point is that these big trends in gaming isn’t a new phenomenon in the slightest, but it’s been particularly interesting for me to watch them come into existence and either explode in popularity or just fizzle out into obscurity. So I’d like to highlight a few big things that happened in the game-o-sphere in 2020, and discuss how they all managed to pass me by.
DREAMS
February sure feels like an eternity ago, but we definitely had one of those this year. In fact, I was still working in my office, a concept that feels completely foreign to me now. But back in February, specifically Valentine’s Day, Dreams, the wildly ambitious game creation tool by Media Molecule, released on the PlayStation 4 and was immediately heralded as an impressive piece of software more so than being a fun game. It allowed creators to make their own games within the Dreams engine, either through hand crafting everything themselves, or collaborating with other users by importing their characters, settings, objects, sound effects and more into their projects. Dreams smartly credited every piece of content used to the user who made it, which encouraged a sense of community that seems to still be active to this day.
Above is a video from the YouTube channel, Ugly Sofa Gaming, a channel that highlights interesting and fun creations from the game. They’re still cranking out videos about the nearly year old game on a regular basis, which to me seems like a great sign for the entire Dreams community, although recent reports make it sound like the player base is waning. I watched a couple of their videos that highlight the cool games people are making in Dreams, and it’s genuinely impressive what people are doing with that engine.
But despite adoring what people were making and mostly catching the wildest things on my Twitter feed, I knew that Dreams wasn’t the game for me. I don’t have the patience to build a game in the slightest, and shelling out the cash for the ability to peruse the user generated stuff back when the game released just didn’t seem like a great investment to me at the time. But looking back on it now, I feel compelled to check in on it and see what people have been able to do in the past 10 months since it released. But it would be absolutely wild of me to, while writing this article, open up a new tab, navigate to Amazon, notice that Dreams is on sale, and purchase it, right? That would be ridiculous…
Let’s move on.
AMONG US
I don’t know exactly when Among Us exploded in popularity, but it sure dominated most of the internet and continues to be one of the most watched things on Twitch. It’s kind of wild when you think about it. Here’s a game that released in 2018 for five dollars and didn’t really make an impact, only to find incredible success two years later during a pandemic. Among Us is another one of those Mafia or Werewolf type games where one or more people are the bad guys who are trying to carry out their grim mission in secret, while the rest are innocents who need to figure out identities of the bad guys while also working towards their own goals. The formula is tried and true, but I’ve never really seen one of those games be as popular as Among Us is.
From what I can surmise, Among Us being as cheap as it is, available on the platforms it is, and existing in a world where people are in their homes more often than they aren’t and are desperate for human contact, were really the things that made Among Us a go to game for so many people. Streamers also helped immensely and that cannot be overstated. For as shitty as 2020 has been, it was the perfect set of circumstances for a game like Among Us to garner such a massive following. It did so well that the developers just straight up canceled the planned sequel they were making and decided to weave the new content into their surprisingly popular game.
Now to inject myself into this story. I played a little bit of Among Us with some friends on a handful of occasions, and it was fun. But it never felt like more than a novelty I could dip into once and a while, and certainly not at the rate that some other people play it. Aside from not falling head over heels for it, there was something weird to me about playing a game solely about lying to people you know. Now, I’ve played plenty of Jackbox games where I have to lie to people, but for every one game in a pack that’s about duping your friends, there’s four others that are about just knowing trivia or being the best at non sequiturs. Whenever the pressure of lying to people was too much, you could just pivot to something else. But Among Us is solely about lying to your friends and playing mindless mini-games. It’s fun for sure, but it just wasn’t something I wanted to play for more than a half hour at a time.
FALL GUYS
I think we kind of all knew that Fall Guys was gonna show up on this list. Fall Guys isn’t a bad game by any means, but it just felt like a game with no lasting appeal, which I mentioned back in the Gut Check from when the game released in August as a “free” PlayStation Plus game. The long and short of it was that to me, Fall Guys was kind of a one-note experience. Yeah seeing the little bean-people flop around and get flung through the air is fun, but it truly felt like a game that relied more on luck than anything else.
Although it’s in my favorite genre of games, the “wacky physics” genre that is, something about Fall Guys just never clicked for me. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it is a battle royale, a genre of game that I am truly tired of at this point. I exhausted my desire to play any battle royale back when PUBG was big, and never really felt compelled to play another game like it. While Fall Guys doesn’t have any guns or anything and is a different kind of battle royale altogether, it’s still a game solely about competing with other people, something that I feel less inclined to participate in as I get older.
There’s nothing wrong with Fall Guys, I actually think it’s a really neat concept. But in addition to me not digging the genre, a lot of the wind was taken out of my sails by the fact that the first game I managed to play, I won. That’s not some weird flex or anything, it’s just something that happened thanks to an accidental, yet helpful glitch. Within ten minutes of booting up the game for the first time, I was able to clinch a victory, effectively closing the book on my desire to keep playing. But Fall Guys is still going strong with consistent support and updates. In fact, their latest season released earlier this month and seems to be fairly popular, so good for you, Fall Guys.
BLASEBALL
Man, for a hot minute there I really tried to get into Blaseball but just could not. Blaseball is essentially fantasy baseball in a fantastical league where rules can change, referees and players can randomly die, super powers can be bestowed, and all manner of weird shit can happen. None of it is visually represented however, which might sound like a drawback, but it allowed for people to fill in those gaps for themselves with a ton of fan made artwork. In Blaseball you pick a team to follow based on little more than their name and home city. I chose to follow the New York Millennials, a team with a player named Dominic Marijuana on it. They were good… I think.
Honestly, the biggest drawback to Blaseball is how inscrutable and inaccessible it can feel to new spectators. For instance, I just checked the site for the first time in months, and all of the teams now have different names (UPDATE: They’re back to “normal”). I don’t have any idea what just happened, but apparently the weird “sport” got even weirder somehow. I’m having a really hard time describing what the fuck Blaseball actually is, and that’s kind of the problem.
Despite my best efforts to understand this spectacle, I eventually just bounced off of it because of how difficult it was to wrap my head around it. According to the website, I have 22,000 dollars, 6 tickets, and 10,000 peanuts. I can vote on rule changes with tickets, I can buy certain buffs and bet on the outcome of games with money, but I have no earthly idea what the peanuts do. I can however, purchase more peanuts with the money, or buy a squirrel to help me eat the peanuts. It’s shit like this that a wiki could probably explain pretty well, but I just do not have the desire to do that. But hey, Blaseball is going strong I suppose.
HADES
At some point this year, everyone really hopped aboard the Hades train and never got off. Well, maybe they got off, but not in a way that makes sense with this particular train-based metaphor. Look, Hades is an incredibly fun and well made rogue-like action game that has a bunch of different elements from other genres weaved into it, all of which it does incredibly well. It also blends storytelling with the rogue-like genre in an apparently very successful way. It’s a very good game by all accounts… except for maybe the people who just aren’t into rogue-likes.
While everyone was getting incredibly horny for the cast of Hades, I was giving it an honest shot in an attempt to see what all the fuss was about. And hey, even I thought it was good. The problem is that these kinds of games just don’t have any real staying power for me. I don’t find the rinse and repeat nature of rogue-likes to be particularly rewarding, so even in the face of a tremendous one of them like Hades, I still would rather just play a more traditionally structured game.
This has been day 2 of The Bonus World’s Game of the Year 2020 coverage. Check back on Thursday for another list about video games from this year.
When I finally gave in to all of the peer pressure I felt from the deluge of praise people were hurling at Hades and begrudgingly bought it, I felt this immediate wave of buyer’s remorse wash over me. After playing a little of it however, I can honestly say that it’s one of the most fun action games I’ve played this year. I can also confidently say that I won’t be seeing it through to the end because I’m bad at it.
Hades is a rogue-like action game and the latest release from Supergiant Games, makers of such classic indie titles like Bastion and Transistor. With previous titles like those, Hades had some big expectations around it and a lot of hype that seemed to dull between its release into early access at the end of 2018 and now. That’s at least how I perceived it considering I never really heard much about the game until its official release a few days ago, so I might be entirely incorrect on that front. I know people have a lot of strong feelings about Supergiant’s past games, but I truly think Hades might be the best game the company has released up to this point.
That might come as a surprise to anyone who frequents the site and knows my disdain towards the rogue-like genre as a whole, but that’s how good this damn game is. I won’t lie and say that my feelings toward the genre have changed in any meaningful way, but I am enjoying Hades in spite of the fact that it’s a rogue-like. Hades does some interesting things in weaving the story around the concept of you dying and returning only for you to perish once more. Characters acknowledge these cycles and play off of it in some pretty neat ways that I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t played it.
It also helps that the game looks incredible and is just oozing with style on all fronts. The character design is incredible, with NPC’s and enemies alike all rendered in a gorgeous art style that’s even better to watch in motion, Hades has its visual presentation locked in. Even the way menus and title cards explode into frame are exquisitely done, letting it be known that every part of the visuals of Hades were crafted with the highest level of care and attention. Also the soundtrack is rad as hell and you should listen to some of those tracks.
Despite the quality of the writing and the brilliance in presentation, Hades biggest strength is in the quality of its gameplay. It’s honestly been the main factor that’s kept me wanting to keep coming back to Hades. I’ve only gained access to the second weapon thus far, a bow and arrow, but that alone made the game feel completely new and fresh thanks to how it works and the power-ups you can get for it.
Every weapon has a standard and heavy attack that can be augmented by various upgrades you can find throughout the levels, adding higher critical chances, replenishing health, making certain attacks better against armor and a lot of other standard upgrade stuff. But when Hades hits you with an upgrade that allows you to shoot lighting bolts that chain between enemies as you use your dash, that’s when the true fun begins.
From run to run you’re collecting all sorts of different flotsam and jetsam that you can use to trade in for upgrades, items, weapons and some other things that I still don’t fully understand just yet because of early into Hades I am. But unlike a lot of other rogue-like games, Hades doesn’t seem like it’s obscuring information from you. Every power-up and ability increase that I’ve been presented with has very clearly explained what it’s going to do, which I appreciate very much. I’ve always hated when games try to be overly secretive and obfuscate simple item descriptions to seem more mysterious or enigmatic. I don’t have the time or patience to learn about the origins of this health potion, I just need it to keep all of my blood inside of me.
I haven’t seen too much of the game considering I’m still very early on in it, but I’ve heard it only continues to get more and more buck-wild as you progress. I look forward to potentially seeing some of this stuff, but I can’t shake the feeling that no matter how strong every other aspect of the game is, I still won’t be able to shake the fact that it’s still a rogue-like. It sucks because I like just about everything else about Hades except the genre it’s in. Actually, I don’t love when enemies off-screen manage to hurl themselves at you with a speed that’s borderline impossible to dodge, but I’m sure I’ll “crack that nut” soon enough.
I’m genuinely glad that I decided to give in to the heaping helping of praise that people have been dumping on Hades, but I do wish it was more of a standard action game that I could progress through normally. I suppose the way the story is handled in its current form wouldn’t work as well in a genre where constantly dying isn’t a thing, but there is a “god mode” setting I want to try out that allegedly let’s you play it without having to worry as much about dying that seems right up my alley.
I don’t think Hades is going to change your mind about rogue-likes as a genre if you’re like me and just don’t click with them, but it might make you a believer for a little while. But if rogue-likes actually are your thing, then Hades seems like one of the best ones that’s been released in a while.
I think my brain might be busted in a major way because all I can think about is wanting to buy games that I know I’m not going to be into, and in some cases on a platform I know I don’t play that often. I feel stupid because I literally have to have an internal argument with myself every time I see someone praise Hades or Spelunky 2. The problem is that I know exactly how this ends, and it involves me just throwing about $50 into the garbage.
I’ve gone over my distaste for the rogue-like genre of games in the past and for a while it was easy for me to look at something like The Binding of Isaac and think, “Not only is this game visually unsettling, but I can just tell that playing it won’t be a great experience for me.” But here I am staring right at Hades and Spelunky 2, and I’m actively feeling my resolve start to falter.
Hades – Supergiant Games
Just look at Hades and tell me that it doesn’t at least look visually appealing. Every screenshot and clip I see of the damn game makes me load up the store page for it and hover my cursor delicately over the “gimme the cash” button. But it isn’t just a delight for the eyes apparently, because people are raving about every aspect of Hades to the extent where I think the mechanics, visuals and story might be able to outweigh my dislike of its run-based nature. Hell, Dead Cells was a rogue-like and I fucking loved the time I spent with it.
What’s really fucking with me is the desire to buy it on my Nintendo Switch, a console I play so little that whenever I do decide to check on my Animal Crossing town, I have to wipe the dust off of the screen first. So why in the world am I looking into buying Hades on a console I don’t really play that much? My running theory is that Hades is the perfect kind of game for the Switch, and apparently I’m planning on doing some gaming on the go in the midst of this pandemic or something. It’s stupid and I’m pretty sure I’ve talked myself out of buying it on the Switch.
Spelunky 2 – Mossmouth
The other game I’ve been contending with is Spelunky 2, a sequel to a game I actively didn’t enjoy but everyone on the internet apparently is wild for. Spelunky as a series are some of the only games where I feel like a genuine weirdo for not enjoying, and while I can’t make specific criticisms about a game i played back in 2008, I just remember hating its overly ambiguous approach to items and objectives as well as its cumbersome controls.
By all accounts, Spelunky 2 is just more Spelunky with fluid dynamics involved, a combination that a lot of people are really enjoying. Maybe with 12 years of wisdom and experience under my belt since the last release I can finally appreciate Spelunky for its true brilliance. Maybe Hades will make me a believer in the rogue-like genre. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll waste my money on two games I’ll play just a handful of times.
UPDATE: I have bought both games. Somebody please help me.
Welcome to another fantastic edition of this blog where I sometimes talk about video games. Boy howdy are there a ton of video games I want to talk about this week, I’m basically swimming in rewarding gameplay experiences that I’m eager to discuss. It’s hard to convey sarcasm through a written piece, but that was all a big fib. I did a lie. No, this week has mostly been about me reading a book, hearing about how people are enjoying games I know aren’t for me, and watching the slow and steady erosion of our democracy continue unabated. So hell yeah, video game blog time!
Honestly it’s been a week of just reading through the latest Dungeons & Dragons module, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and preparing to run that for my group. You can read more about what that process has been like in September’s Master of Disaster feature on “prepping,” but to quickly summarize, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of fun. It’s consuming most of my time these days but I’m enjoying the process of it all.
Rime of the Frostmaiden – Wizard’s of the Coast (Image Published on IGN)
Otherwise I’m just kind of watching people lose their collective minds over the release of Hades and Spelunky 2, two rouge-like games that I know aren’t for me. But seeing all of this praise being dumped on these games is making me feel like I owe it to myself to at least give them a shot. I’m really in a holding pattern until next week when Baldur’s Gate III enters early access and the desire to play other games will leave my body.
Oh, and there’s that clusterfuck of a “pre-order” situation that Sony and Microsoft both waded into unwittingly that’s been interesting to watch. For those who don’t know what happened, both Sony and Microsoft had some pretty rough pre-order snafus, with people even ordering the wrong Xbox in some cases. It was bad, and even though I literally just wrote about my wanting both Sony and Microsoft to delay their consoles, I still keep trying to get a PS5 anyway. Like, there’s barely anything to play on launch day as is, but I just want the new shiny thing! I can’t buy a 3000 series graphics card because I’d literally have to upgrade everything else in my computer to accommodate it so I want the funny looking PlayStation instead!
But hey, all of that is small potatoes when stacked up against the deluge of bullshit that’s currently going on in the world. So do yourselves a favor, check your voter registration and make sure you vote on November 3rd. Seriously, it’s fucking grim out there and it’s getting worse every day.
The Bonus World 