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Gut Check: Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game that might have been made with me and my proclivities in mind. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you play as an unnamed “cutter” for a company that dismantles and salvages derelict space crafts for various clients, while making sure to pick through everything in an effort to get a little extra bonus cash. It’s currently in early access which is reassuring considering its various and completely understandable technical issues, that hopefully will be fixed as time goes on.

Booting up Hardspace: Shipbreaker, I was immediately greeted with the telltale signs of a game that didn’t play well with my dual monitor setup, constantly dropping the image in favor of a black screen. This happens sometimes and simply requires me to change some resolution settings and toggle between windowed full-screen and regular full-screen. I only mention this because Hardspace: Shipbreaker has a surprisingly long and potentially interesting introduction sequence in it, but it was lost on me because I could only see it in quick flashes. Which is why you should all sign my petition to make sure that games let you edit your settings instead of throwing you straight into various cut-scenes and gameplay.

Once that was all sorted out however, I made the smartest decision of my life and played through the entire tutorial. Do yourself a favor if you end up picking up Hardspace: Shipbreaker and play the tutorial. It doesn’t explain everything to you, but it gets you on your feet faster than just winging it ever could.

In the tutorial you’re walked through the basics of movement, which even after completing it, I found myself gently floating into space more times than I’d like to admit. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you need to account for all dimensions of movement including vertically, horizontally, and going forward and backward. You have jet thrusters on your space suit that allow you to roll, accelerate and decelerate, which can help counteract the momentum you’ve built up while you hurdle into the sun.

Once you “master” your movement abilities, it’s time to do some destruction. You get access to a few tools during the course of the tutorial including a grappling laser, two kinds of laser cutters, and tethers. The grappling laser allows you to shoot a beam of energy at something and whip it around if it’s light enough. The two laser cutters allow you to either focus a laser on a fixed point or cut long horizontal or vertical lines into a surface, like if you wanted to make a new window in a ship. The tethers are basically the same thing as the grappling laser, except they’re capable of moving heavier objects and you have a limited amount of them.

Using all of these tools, you have to deconstruct a few ships, take their various components and deposit them into one of three locations. I’m not entirely sure what the delineation between the three areas are, but one of them is burning with fire which I understand to be where sheets of metal and miscellaneous materials go to be refined. The second one is this glowing blue area that accepts other, usually bigger pieces of the ship to be refined, and the third is a barge that sits below you that’s where you deposit the mission critical stuff like the ship’s reactor.

While inside of the tutorial or freeplay mode, you’ve got unlimited time and resources at your disposal, but once you start your career in earnest you have to worry about oxygen, thruster fuel, tether amounts and the condition of your tools. You also have a time limit to complete each job, which means completing the task list. If you’re using a controller like I was, you will not be able to open the task list without using the keyboard. The controller support is mostly there, but that seems like a pretty important function to not have working.

Within the career mode, you have to make sure you’re being mindful of your tools and resources, all of which can be repaired and refilled back at your floating hub platform that’s right by the ship you’re scrapping. You need to make sure you complete the objectives of the job first, whether they be removing the reactor, or collecting a certain amount of a particular metal or material. Secondly you’ll want to scrap and salvage anything you can after the objective is completed, because you’ll earn both money and an upgrade currency that can be used to unlock more features and abilities for your tools.

You can work on a particular ship for more than one shift however, allowing you to truly complete a job if you’re so inclined. Just make sure it’s worth the time investment, because your character is in massive debt to the company they work for, and need to make payments regularly to stay afloat. Hardspace: Shipbreaker captures that capitalistic dystopian nightmare that we’re heading for so well, genuinely making me worry if I’ve worked enough to pay off the company I work for.

Lastly, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is an early access game, which means it’s pretty rough around the edges at the moment. Cut up too many particles or accidentally trigger an explosion in the ship and the frame rate vanishes before your eyes. I don’t begrudge the game for that considering there’s a lot of physics occurring at once and slowdown is to be expected. I also experienced a crash in the brief time I spent with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but I’m going to chalk that up to it being in early access.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker can feel overwhelming at first, what with the amount of mechanics you need to learn before you can actually feel comfortable doing anything on your own, but once you get the hang of it I found it to be a genuinely enjoyable time. I think the tutorial needs to do a better job at explaining how to properly, safely and efficiently dissect a spaceship instead of leaving it to trial and error, but that’s just my personal preference. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a truly good time and I recommend checking it out if the idea of being a space scrapper is as enticing to you as it is to me.

Blog: E3 Would’ve Already Been Over By Now – 06/24/20

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It’s weird to think about it isn’t it? Had this year not been just a catastrophic mess from top to bottom, we would have already experienced what was gearing up to be the potentially weirdest E3 in history. Instead the world broke and we’ve been experiencing a steady stream of announcements that have sprung from various events that are too vast in number to keep track of anymore. I guess in a weird way I miss E3, but I’m also pretty ambivalent about its return.

There’s something to be said about the spectacle and brevity that comes with what once was the focal point of the video games industry. It was a singular event that all of the gaming populace could look to for the biggest and most exciting announcements of the year. Considering we’re in a console release year, the E3 we could have had would have certainly been colossal. As hokey as it sounds, people aren’t wrong when they call E3 video game Christmas. During the course of one day we’d be inundated with massive reveals that would range from genuinely exciting to downright confusing, and I guess I miss that aspect most about the conference. It was a pain in the ass to cover those conferences, but it was extremely rewarding too.

I’m not entirely confident that we’ll have an E3 next year either. Without question the ESA, the folks behind E3, are going to do something to try to reclaim their ever-dwindling throne, but I don’t think we’ll ever see E3 be as big or impactful as it once was. Going to E3 as a game maker or publisher is a tremendously expensive proposition that doesn’t even guarantee any real success in the future. Many people I’ve talked to just assume that the press conferences that come before the actual event of E3, are the entirety of the conference itself. Meanwhile there are people, myself included, who only really pay attention to the press conferences and pick up what else they can from articles and videos later, which probably sucks to hear if you weren’t featured at a press conference that year.

Right now we’re literally in the thick of a deluge of digital events and announcements, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that one is being immediately drowned out by another. With the entire summer serving as the “E3 window” instead of the week or so it normally occupies, these announcements don’t get buried mere hours after they get on stage. I’ve had time to process my feelings about how the PS5 looks, or how excited I am for Paper Mario: The Origami King without feeling like I’m forgetting something. This allows announcements to breathe and exist for a while before immediately being steamrolled by something else.

I still miss E3 despite it being woefully unnecessary nor beneficial to anyone that isn’t a massive game company like Microsoft or Sony. I miss the bombast that came with knowing that this would be the place where the “big guns” would come out. But what E3 traded on for so long was its reputation and stalwart position in the industry, something that its squandered by continually proving how poorly run it actually was. I don’t know that we necessarily need something to fill E3’s shoes considering E3 was going through an identity and relevancy crisis, trying to poise itself as both a press, business and consumer event all in one. I think conferences like Gamescom, PAX and TGS all fill that E3 void well enough that we don’t need E3 to rise from the ashes like some miserable marketing phoenix.

I think this summer has been a test run for what will be the new standard in the industry. Companies will continue to elect to not waste money at superfluous conferences when they can just make an hour long video of trailers and press play on a random Tuesday in June. They control their own message this way, and don’t have to worry about the next press conference that goes live in two hours to completely overshadow them. I like E3, but I think I’m okay if we never see it put on again.

A Look Back at The Steam Game Festival

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As we watch the corpse of E3 gently float down the stream with golden coins placed over its eyes for The Riverman to grant it safe passage, we find ourselves in the midst of constant press events that look to fill vacuum E3 left in its wake. One of these events came in the form of the now concluded Steam Game Festival, where developers could directly market their upcoming games via Steam and allow us to download demos of upcoming games. I played a couple of these demos and wanted to provide a little bit of insight into each of the games I got my hands on.

I want to preface with the fact that most of, if not all of the demos I tried, were of games that were not done and clearly needed more work. I am not judging these demos as full products, nor would I want to imply that was the case. These games are in development and are subject to change, so consider this article as a time capsule that describes what these demos were like.

GRIEFHELM

Griefhelm is a side-scrolling action game that sees you, a knight, sword fighting their way through waves of increasingly deadlier enemies. While it sounds fun on paper, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The controls feel floaty and unresponsive at times, often resulting in the mistiming of blocks and strikes. Griefhelm uses a similar combat system to Nidhogg in terms of having to correctly angle your sword stance between low, medium and high, in an attempt to parry and hit your opponents. While technically that system works in Griefhelm, it doesn’t feel anywhere as responsive or satisfying as Nidhogg.

There’s also another layer to the game that lives in-between skirmishes, where you select which mission you want to go on. Each mission offers a different kind of objective, although they all boil down to just killing dudes and not dying with the promise of some sort of reward that you can use in other levels being bestowed upon you, as well as new pieces of armor for your knight.

While I don’t think Griefhelm is there just yet, I think with some refinement to the controls and mission variety that it could be a really fun game.

UNTO THE END

Remember everything I said about Griefhelm? Then get ready for Unto the End, a game that is cut from the same cloth as Griefhelm, but does just about everything better. Well, except for showing me anything outside of the combat mechanics of the game, because the demo is literally just the combat tutorial and nothing else as far as I could tell.

Unto the End is a much more visually appealing version of Griefhelm, that’s easier to control and more satisfying to play. It uses a similar combat system that seems to be a little more fine-tuned and responsive than Greifhelm. Outside of those examples however, there isn’t really much else to glean from this demo. I look forward to seeing more of Unto the End despite knowing next to nothing about it though.

WINDJAMMERS 2

Windjammers 2 is a game that I forgot existed at all despite it being the sequel to one of my favorite Neo-Geo games, Windjammers. If you have no idea what Windjammers or its sequel actually is, you could call it a mix between pong, air hockey, and that aggressively 80’s attitude that we all love so much.

Windjammers 2 boasts a new hand drawn art style that I’m actually really into, along with a couple of new offensive and defensive capabilities that allow people who know what they’re doing to completely devastate others. Completely unrelated, the demo only allows for online play at the moment, and I definitely didn’t get obliterated by every opponent I faced.

I will always champion Windjammers as a game everyone should try at least once in their lives, although I don’t know that I am foaming at the mouth in anticipation of a sequel. I’ll see how I feel about it when the full game is released, but for now I’m okay with the first installment that currently lives on my Switch.

RUSTLER

Long before the days of Shark Cards and orbital strikes, the Grand Theft Auto series started as a top-down action game where driving a car in a straight line was borderline impossible. The early GTA games also showed off some of that trademark humor that Rockstar is infamous for, but nowhere near as loudly as they do it now.

With that history lesson out of the way, Rustlers is the fantasy version of those old GTA games, emulating everything from the top-down camera angle to the inability to ride a horse in a straight line along with some really hit and miss attempts at humor.

The combat is sluggish and unresponsive, often times defaulting to you just mashing the attack button in the hopes you land a hit on an enemy that’s also flailing wildly, but somehow better at it than you are. Riding a horse is a laborious process that will almost always end in you crashing into something and falling of said horse, which ultimately became the way I dismounted my horse every single time.

The only somewhat redeeming factor is the sense of humor Rustlers has. There were some moments where I might have softly chuckled to myself, like when I saw a cow on a roof that had the word, “horse” spray painted across its body, or when the medieval cops were after me and had one of those rotating red and blue police lights on their helmets. There were also a lot of not so great jokes that I endured, most of which involved being drunk, excessively cursing or soiling yourself.

I don’t think I like Rustlers at all, but maybe you’ll enjoy it. If that’s the case, more power to you.

THE BLOODLINE

A while ago I wrote about the newest Mount & Blade game, specifically mentioning how I thought it was way too much for me to contend with. I know that it’s a very beloved series, but it just wasn’t for me. I only bring that up because I share a lot of the same feelings with the Mount & Blade series as I do The Bloodline.

The Bloodline does itself a massive disservice by starting you out in a mostly abandoned castle with barely anyone around. You create your low-poly character and head out on an adventure that is mechanically similar to something like Mount & Blade. Just like those games, you’ll split your time between first or third person combat, traveling and exploring the over-world, and recruiting allies to join you in what I’ve heard are fairly massive battles.

One of the first things I encountered on my travels was a massive tower that was devoid of any enemies, but had a big bell hanging at the top of it. The game and I agreed that I was to make it to the top of the tower and ring that bell. Luckily The Bloodline gives you a grappling hook that works about 70% of the time which is all I needed to make it to the tippy-top. That and I don’t think there’s any fall damage, so that helped too. I got to the apex, rang the bell, and got 1500XP for my trouble, and was teleported back to the world map. Then I traveled to a town, looked around for people to recruit, and the game crashed.

I haven’t loaded it up again since, but the demo is so rough and janky that I think I’ll wait for a more polished release to continue on my The Bloodline adventure.

NIGATE TALE

Do you like rogue-like games? Do you also like unnecessarily horny representations of anime characters? Well friend, you might just love Nigate Tale, a game that apparently is both of those things and I had no idea. Not like there’s anything wrong with liking these things, it was just a lot to absorb all at once.

See, I don’t enjoy rogue-likes at all. It all just feels a little too grindy for my tastes, but I get the appeal of them, and for what it’s worth Nigate Tale seems like a pretty competent one of those kinds of games. The controls are responsive, the enemies provide a real challenge, and the game has a pretty good look to it as well. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what makes a good rogue-like, this seems like it’s all right.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to “yuck anybodies yum” or anything, I just was not prepared for the 3 scantily clad anime ladies I would encounter within the first 5 minutes of playing. All of that confusion immediately faded away when I met a large hamster-like creature who gave me some special powers, cause their presence alone was easily the high point of Nigate Tale.

I played a little bit of Nigate Tale, and I genuinely have no idea if it’s good or not. It felt good to play, but I was constantly at a loss because the in-game translation isn’t fully there yet which made it genuinely hard to understand what powers I was picking up or even what the story was. I hope this thing gets properly localized and people can get their hands on it, cause it seems all right for what it is.

SKELLBOY

Skellboy is the kind of game that I can get behind. It’s this action game where you play as a skeleton that acquires new body parts and weapons from their fallen foes, and wears it on themselves. A new head might give you more health or the ability to spit projectiles, while new feet could make you run faster. It seems ripe for a puzzle solving game where you’re swapping parts of yourself out to progress through certain obstacles, but you don’t have an inventory so you just pick up and discard things as you go.

The game also boasts this almost Paper Mario-esque art style, except instead of everything being made of paper they’re just chunky pixels. But the way the perspective shifts as you move through a level gave me some really strong Paper Mario vibes that I very much appreciated.

The only criticisms I really have with Skellboy is that the combat not only feels slow, but there isn’t much impact to anything you’re doing. I found myself losing a lot of health because I just didn’t realize I was getting hit, and the same thing can be said about attacking. Outside of that however, I really dug what I played.

There it is, my not-so-comprehensive coverage of The Steam Game Festival. Overall, I like how Steam has run this event and gave people access to a lot of neat upcoming games that I would have otherwise not known about. Considering E3 would be over by now, it’s been nice to get a constant trickle of announcements and events like this one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other publishers tried similar things. Everyone has their own launcher these days, so it wouldn’t be outrageous to see someone like Ubisoft announcing a game one day and simultaneously allow people to try a demo or beta of said game on their own platform. We’ll see what happens over the course of this summer I suppose.

The Master of Disaster: Finding Your Style – 13

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Recently my friends and I shuffled our roles, affording me the opportunity to play in a campaign rather than run one. It’s been fantastic both from a gameplay standpoint along with freeing me up creatively to focus on other projects. Simultaneously another group of friends expressed interest in running a starter Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so being the masochist I am I obliged and started running them through The Lost Mines of Phandelver. And honestly, both games have been tremendous learning experiences that I desperately needed.

I don’t want to imply that I didn’t have fun running home-brew campaigns for my friends, but it did get pretty exhausting from a creative standpoint, which is ultimately why I needed to shift focus from running games to playing them. I agreed to run my other friends through The Lost Mines of Phandelver because I didn’t have to really prepare anything on a week to week basis. Everything is accounted for and fairly well explained, leaving little need for drastic improvisation.

Being a player again allowed me to experience how other people run their games, seeing what rules and mechanics they tend to enforce or cast aside. That’s given me a lot of perspective on just how much of my own campaigns I was glossing over in terms of rules and abilities, giving me more insight as to why they exist in the first place. Understanding the various resistances, spell components, move actions and so much more have made it really apparent as to how infuriating my DM style could be at times.

It was never something I did to intentionally upset or undermine my players, but I’m almost certain that my actions directly resulted in a lot of session to session disenfranchisement. Considering I’ve only been a player once or twice back in the very early stages of my relationship with Dungeons & Dragons, I didn’t really have any experience as a player and instead just became a DM when I had no business doing so. But everyone has to start somewhere right?

Being a player wasn’t the only thing that helped me gain some insight into proper Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, running the starter campaign has been infinitely more helpful than anything I was doing before on my own. Being able to see what a module accounts for and doesn’t has been instrumental in my better understanding of how to build worlds, maps and encounters. To see exactly what I should be accounting for when crafting my own adventures has been illuminating to say the least.

At this point I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for about 3 years or so and only now can I say that I’ve really made progress as both a player and a DM. When I first started running games, I was trying to emulate what I’d seen and heard from popular videos and actual-play podcasts, not really understanding that real games don’t work like that. As of now I can safely say that my style of running games has evolved to the point where I am taking the rules of Dungeons & Dragons more seriously, and I am more conscious and aware of so many more facets of the game itself. I believe that this will only lead to a more positive experience for whatever group I end up running games for in the future. And for the first time in a while, I feel really confident about my abilities as both a player and a dungeon master.

For anyone out there that’s aspiring to be a DM, I genuinely and sincerely recommend starting with a preexisting module and really understanding why certain things interact with others and why. Knowing and enforcing effects on moves and spells heightens the tension and importance of every combat encounter because everyone is aware of what can and cannot happen. I look back at my previous blunders and wince at how I behaved and ruled on things, but genuinely hope that one day I can give my friends the satisfying and fun campaign that they deserve.

Blog: I Don’t Really Want to Play The Last of Us 2 – 06/17/20

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To be perfectly honest, there is nothing I want to do less than play The Last of Us Part II right now. If I had to put my finger on it, I think the whole global pandemic thing has really soured me on a lot of zombie fiction in general, but none more so than the inevitable gut-punch that’s sure to be the entire narrative of the game.

The basic idea behind the zombie outbreak in The Last of Us, was that the Cordyceps fungus had mutated in such a way that it would consume up to 60% of the humanity the host had, causing them to be living husks that want to feast on your flesh. I don’t think I remembered that the infected were still technically alive underneath all of that mess, but according to a The Last of Us wiki, that seems to be the horrible truth of the matter.

While these gruesome details were just lore and world building for the 2013 release, the sequel was unfortunate enough to release during a global pandemic which in my case, has soured me on the product as a whole. It isn’t as if I didn’t enjoy the original The Last of Us, in fact I championed that game to a lot of my non-PS3-owning friends at the time as a genuinely emotionally impactful game. Under normal circumstances, I would be all over The Last of Us Part II, but I just cannot muster the enthusiasm for it right now.

Additionally, I’ve been desperate for a game I can sink my teeth into, but haven’t really been able to find anything to scratch that itch. The Last of Us Part II seemed like a great contender back in the before times, but I genuinely don’t know when I’m going to ever find time for it. The Last of Us Part II seems poised to illicit the exact opposite response that Animal Crossing: New Horizons received earlier this year from a lot of folks who considered it an escape from the misery of our new normal.

Maybe I’m being overly sensitive about the content of The Last of Us Part II and am dismissing it without giving it a proper chance. But the reasons for why I’m probably not going to play it aren’t indictments of its quality, it’s just that I really don’t feel like it’s going to offer me the escapism I want right now. I fear that the entire time I’d just be drawing parallels between it and our reality, and reality sucks ass right now, so I’m good.

Review: The House of Da Vinci 2

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Back in 2016 the first The House of Da Vinci was released on mobile devices and was received warmly by critics and myself alike. In 2019 a sequel was released, once again on mobile devices, and despite my enjoyment of the first entry I completely missed The House of Da Vinci 2. Now in 2020, The House of Da Vinci 2 has been released on PC and has proven to be another solid entry in the series, mixing both very creative and frustratingly obtuse puzzles with a largely forgettable story.

To be completely candid here, I found the story of The House of Da Vinci 2 to be entirely forgettable and mostly an obstacle that got in the way of solving cool puzzles. I understand that you need some connective tissue to grant some sort of motivating factor or narrative thread, but it never managed to engage me at all. The story seemed fine overall, but it just was so far from the reason I was playing, that for the rest of this review it won’t really be a talking point.

With that said, you start The House of Da Vinci 2 off by escaping a prison cell and the sewers that run beneath it. You learn the basics of interacting with the world along with how to manage your inventory and how to use a special magic orb that you eventually come across.

The orb in question can be twisted open to reveal two lenses inside that both allow you to see hidden things in the environment, and also see through time. The first lens let’s you see hidden mechanisms that are obscured by walls or inside of another object, and it allows you to interact with them. So you might not be able to see the lock on a door, but with this orb you can see the mechanism for it, and mess around with it.

The second lens allows you to see through time and travel to a past version of the level. These are highly scripted events and not something you can just do whenever you like. In certain parts of the level, if you open up the orb you’ll be greeted by a static swirling portal that you can walk through and enter the past. For example, in an early level I was in a Gazebo that only had one entrance in it, but opposite me in the distance was a very large door that seemed like where I had to go. I popped open the orb and was transported to a past version of the gazebo that had two exits, allowing me to progress further and solve other puzzles before returning to the portal and climbing through into the future.

One of the things that jumped out to me immediately was how clearly The House of Da Vinci 2, just like its predecessor, is a mobile game first. From the menus to just navigating and interacting with the world was crafted with a mobile user in mind and ultimately feels clunky in spots on other platforms. That’s not a bad thing if you’re playing on a mobile device, but considering I was playing it on PC I found some of the movement and interaction stuff to be a little tedious.

The entire game is mouse driven, allowing to you look around by clicking and dragging the mouse which works without any issue. The problem is that in order to move around or zoom in on a puzzle so you can interact with it, you have to double click the area or object, and sometimes those things can be a little closer to each other than you’d like. There were plenty of times in levels where I would try to interact with an object, and suddenly find myself gliding across the floor to another section of the level. It’s not game breaking or anything like that, just a minor annoyance that I kept running into.

The puzzles themselves run the entire gamut from really interesting, to straightforward, and to completely obtuse nonsense that doesn’t make any sense and you just so happened to luck your way into solving. There are so many puzzles that are either really cool or just not noteworthy whatsoever, so you just kind of breeze past them thinking you’re the smartest person in the world. Then you get to a puzzle that mentally breaks you, occupies an hour of your time as you start to question how you ever even made it through school, and then eventually realize you didn’t fully move a switch or something. Standard puzzle game stuff.

Luckily there’s a pretty good hint system in place that will give you increasingly more descriptive tips depending on how long you’ve lingered in a section without advancing a little. To better explain it, there will be a room filled with puzzle boxes and panels that all tie into each other in some fashion, but they usually have some chronological order for you to tackle them in. So the hint system starts some timer depending on how long you’ve gone without any progress, and gives you the first and most vague hint before starting the timer again and issuing a more descriptive one. It’s a good system that unfortunately doesn’t offer much for when you’ve exhausted all the hints and still don’t know what to do.

The House of Da Vinci 2 is also a pretty long game for what it is, clocking in around six hours for me which was a welcome surprise for me. The beauty of The House of Da Vinci 2 is that there’s very little to no repetition in the puzzles, and for the few times there was a similar puzzle, it was just different enough to feel fresh. The levels themselves are visually interesting, but usually boil down to little more than a cool new backdrop for you to play with a few objects inside of. The levels do a good job providing something that’s new and visually interesting, without being overly distracting.

Lastly, I should mention that while the game looks and runs well on PC it also comes with an inflated price tag if you choose the non-mobile approach. On phones it’s just five dollars, whereas the price on Steam is twenty. I don’t say that as a value judgement, just something for potential player to consider if they’re interested. Aside from playing on a larger screen with better graphical fidelity, there’s no real difference between the versions.

The House of Da Vinci 2 isn’t going to change your life or the way you think about puzzle games or anything like that. The truth is that it’s a solid puzzler that’s good for a few hours of fun. Maybe you’ll find the story to be engaging and thought provoking, but judging it solely on the strength of its puzzles, The House of Da Vinci 2 is pretty good.

Gut Check: Neversong

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Neversong is a spooky little side-scrolling game that tries to blend so many elements together, but ultimately doesn’t succeed at most of them. The spooky action, adventure and puzzle game has an interesting enough stylistic and plot hook to grab your attention, but many of the gameplay decisions are just dull.

In Neversong, you play as Peet, a young boy who you might traditionally call something of a coward. Peet is juxtaposed by his best friend Wren, a young girl with no fear. The two were inseparable best buds who one day found themselves in an abandoned asylum, where Wren was kidnapped by a horrifying monster, and Peet was put into a coma from what I can only assume is fear. That part wasn’t super clear, but the main thrust of the story seems to be rescuing Wren.

You wake up in your hometown, a place that is suspiciously devoid of any adults and only inhabited by what can only be described as the shittiest children on the planet. Seriously, these kids are horrible, often times reveling in the fact that your best friend is missing and probably dead, or just calling you weak and a coward. I genuinely hated every character in the game that wasn’t Wren. If that was the desired effect, then mission accomplished.

Neversong excels in its tone and presentation, from its usage of music to its art style, everything is cohesive and vaguely terrifying. Then you actually start playing the game, and you’re immediately confronted with the shallowness of the mechanics. Now, to preface, I don’t think that Neversong is a bad game, I’m actually having a pretty alright time with it so far. I just think that of everything I’ve seen so far, the parts where you need to either fight things or be accurate in your platforming are severely under-cooked.

Early on, Peet becomes armed with a baseball bat which does exactly what you think it does. You walk around the world and whack things with it until they explode into XP or health drops. The XP system is pretty simple, offering you an extra pip of max health in return for collecting 100 XP shards. It adds a welcome, albeit shallow form of progression that the game is ultimately better for.

Combat however just sucks. It’s boring and lifeless, ultimately feeling more like an afterthought than anything. Now, that might change as I progress further in the game, but after defeating two bosses by doing nothing more than mashing the X button at them, I feel less confident about that change actually happening.

Enemies up until now haven’t actually been a challenge, instead feeling more like obstacles that impede you as you move from area to area. The same thing goes for bosses, who up till now haven’t been difficult at all, but they take forever to defeat because you need to go through that whole song and dance of hitting them then waiting for them to attack, and repeating that process 5 more times until they actually die.

But after you finally defeat one of these time-consuming bosses, you unlock the notes for a song of theirs. I’m not sure why you get a song from them, but you do. So you head back from where you fought the boss, wading through the now respawned enemies and excessive amounts of loading screens, and head back to the town and into Wren’s house where a piano is. At the piano, you play the song you just learned which unlocks a new tool or ability for you to use. The first is the baseball bat and the second is the ability to latch onto these hanging orbs that you can swing from. It’s a neat little bit of progression that feels laborious at times because you have to trudge your way back to the town, arguably because some story stuff will happen to you while in transit. I get why they make you run back home after each level, but it’s still annoying.

For all the bellyaching that I’ve done at the expense of Neversong, to its credit, it hasn’t made me do the same thing twice. The puzzles are all unique to the areas I’ve seen, they keep layering in new kinds of enemies for you to fight, and the only place I’ve had to revisit has been the main town. Like I said, I’m not saying anything that Neversong is doing is bad, just some of it feels half-baked.

For what it’s worth, I think Neversong is a pretty good package that has its fair share of ups and downs just like any other game. There is a part of me that’s thankful for the bare-bones combat being included, and another part of me that thinks that Neversong would have been a better game if it was just a puzzle focused experience. I’m less conflicted about Neversong, and more just underwhelmed by it. Although, even saying “underwhelmed” is too strong of an emotion for how I feel about the game. Neversong is a game that I genuinely don’t have strong feelings about, whether they’re positive or negative.

Blog: GOG Galaxy – 06/10/20

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With the nearly untenable amount of launchers and storefronts currently available on PC, a joke eventually arose from this heap of software that essentially said, “Soon enough you’ll need a launcher for all of your launchers.” Sure enough, in the past few years we’ve seen several pieces of software try to position themselves as the last launcher you’d ever need. From Playnite to Discord, there have been no shortage of these inter-intermediaries available, but I’d like to focus specifically on GOG Galaxy.

For years now, GOG has offered a wide variety of classic and modern games for people to purchase and download, all of which carry a DRM-free guarantee. Essentially this means that unlike a Steam or a Uplay, games purchased on GOG are just yours and don’t require an extra layer of software to run. The makers of GOG also happen to be the people behind a little indie game series, perhaps you’ve heard of The Witcher? I think that’s what it’s called.

A few years ago, the makers of GOG made the decision to launch their own software that could not only be a storefront, but a launcher for your games. Just last year however, GOG announced and later added the ability to integrate your accounts from all corners of the PC launcher universe and settle them all in one place.

While other software had existed that filled this void well before GOG Galaxy was released into an open beta, I never felt emboldened to actually use any of them. This changed for me due to two very important developments in the way I get and play games. Firstly, the Epic Games Store started to sell a lot of games I was very interested in, while also giving away new games every week. And secondly, Xbox Gamepass became a part of my life. Now, the Epic Games Store has come a long way since it launched, but it’s still a bit too messy for my taste. Then there’s the Xbox Gamepass for PC launcher which is still in beta, but can be a laggy and unresponsive nightmare at times that I’d prefer to use as little as possible.

Those factors combined with the disgusting amount of games I own that are spread out across so many launchers meant it was finally time to try some sort of universal solution. So I embarked on the tedious journey of trying to remember all of my logins to these other services, forgetting them, and resetting every password I had in an attempt to streamline my gaming experience. I understand that GOG Galaxy is still technically in beta and isn’t finished, so take what I say next with that in mind.

I really like how everything in GOG Galaxy is laid out. It’s clean and simple to understand, while offering a ton of different sorting filters and categories for further refinement of your game library. Setting it up is simple as well, that is unless you don’t remember your logins to other services, but that’s never happened to anyone.

What is frustrating however is how you might find yourself waiting longer than it would take to just launch another launcher to play your game of choice. Whenever I start GOG Galaxy from scratch, it understandably has to validate and verify your logins to every service you’ve connected, and make sure your lists, stats, friends and recent activities are all represented as up to date and accurately as possible. For some services, this is hardly noticeable if at all, and is what I would consider seamless. But for other services, specifically Steam, I find that sometimes I’ll have to wait a few minutes for the list populate or to even verify my account is connected to GOG Galaxy.

To be completely fair though, I do have an unnecessarily big Steam library, so maybe that might be a reason for its occasional hiccups? But those hiccups are the sole reason as to why I don’t consistently use the software anymore. At this point I just default to opening Steam when I want to play I game I purchased through there, or clicking on a shortcut I have on my desktop. Very rarely am I opening GOG Galaxy at all, and it’s almost exclusively to avoid having to open the Xbox Gamepass PC launcher.

Outside of that, I just wish that the GOG Galaxy overlay actually worked so I could capture screenshots of every game I play, without having to worry about which games respect the GeForce overlay, which a surprising amount of games just don’t do in my experience. Having a universal way to capture images from games would make writing articles for this site a whole lot easier.

But in all seriousness, I think once GOG Galaxy sands down all of those rough edges I’ll ultimately return to it and save myself the headache of remembering what game lives where. Maybe you’re good with the setup you’ve got now, or maybe you’re actively looking for a replacement to whatever mess you’re currently in? Regardless, it couldn’t hurt to check out what GOG Galaxy has to offer.

Gut Check: Beautiful Desolation

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Beautiful Desolation is a point and click adventure game that puts you in the shoes of a gloriously mullet-ed man who is investigating the presence of a mysterious triangular object that’s appeared in the sky. Through a combination of puzzle solving, dialogue trees and aimlessly wandering around gorgeously rendered landscapes, you start to peel back the cosmic mystery that’s upended your life.

Beautiful Desolation starts out very dramatically as you and your wife are driving through a thunderstorm to go pick up your brother from an undisclosed location. The dialogue reveals that your brother has a reoccurring problem that’s put a lot of stress on your relationship with him, but before you actually arrive anywhere a mysterious shape in the sky called the penrose appears, and some sort of wave of energy flows out of it that ends up flipping your car and killing your wife.

A decade later your character arrives at a hangar owned by your brother in the hopes of getting him to pilot his helicopter up to the penrose that’s still in the sky. Your character has basically become obsessed with the true nature of this structure, eagerly laying out his intentions of retrieving some sort of data set from the now government (I think?) controlled penrose. Once up there, you collect the data and things immediately go wrong. Suddenly, you’re whisked away to another place in another time where you’re arrested by robots, and in transit to the authorities for questioning are shot down. Thus begins your search for your brother as well as a way home and probably some explanation about what the hell is going on.

Typically, this is where I’d discuss the gameplay side of Beautiful Desolation, but the gameplay really doesn’t seem like the main attraction. You’re basically just clicking on points of interest, interfacing with them using your PDA (which is more or less a handheld PipBoy,) and dragging items around your inventory to combine them. That is until later on when you get control of a spaceship and can head from point of interest to point of interest.

The real star of the show seems to be the story and characters, rightfully so considering this is an adventure game. You’ll talk to several other beings on your travels, picking from a few different options of dialogue in an attempt to further your goals and learn what you can. Since starting the game, I haven’t met a character that wasn’t fun to talk to, although I admit I’m still very early on in the game so that could all change. I also can’t say how much of an impact on the story your choices have, but I’m hoping that in this dialogue driven experience it’s pretty severe.

While I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Beautiful Desolation up until now, one thing that proved to be a nuisance has to do with the beautifully rendered world you traipse around. While it’s a delight to look at, it also has led to several instances of me not knowing what was walk-able terrain and what wasn’t. I must of killed fifteen minutes trying to find a way out of the map I was on, only to accidentally click my way onto a ramp that didn’t immediately read as a ramp. Everything looks so damn good in this game, that I just assumed I couldn’t walk on it. There’s an indicator that’s supposed to tell me if I can traverse an area or not, but clearly it didn’t register for me.

Beautiful Desolation is a game that intrigues me more than it does interest me, at least that’s how I feel about it a few hours in. No element of it has either gripped nor repelled me yet, and I’m hoping that changes soon. Where Beautiful Desolation ends up going is something I can’t answer yet, but I’m definitely going to give it another shot and see if anything changes.

Gut Check: Umurangi Generation

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Umurangi Generation is a stylistic and serene game about being a photographer in some weird dystopian, vaguely cyberpunk world where somebody is paying top dollar for your random pictures of birds. It’s actually a really neat concept that fumbles the execution in certain spots, but still retains a certain meditative quality that I appreciate.

When I jumped into the first level of Umurangi Generation, I honestly felt a little overwhelmed by what I was supposed to do. You’re given a list of photo objectives, most of which just want something specific in it like a mountain or a flag, but some will have an additional piece of criteria that asks you to use a specific lens or be at a particular distance from the subject. As I played more however, I started to feel more comfortable with the suite of tools I had and when to use them.

What doesn’t get easier however, is the unnecessary vagueness of some of these objectives. Often times the objectives are straightforward, asking you to get a certain amount of an object in one shot or asking you to recreate a postcard. Then there are objectives that are so purposefully vague that you’ll end up spending several minutes trying to even comprehend what you’re actually supposed to be looking for.

For instance, an early objective was to find a sarcastic version of the phrase, “Property of the United Nations.” This level looked like some military outpost, so literally everything had the phrase, “Property of the United Nations” on it somewhere. But not knowing what I was exactly looking for caused me more frustration than satisfaction when I eventually discovered that one of the soldiers was wearing a helmet that said something cheeky on it. Like, it was a decent joke I suppose, but the punchline didn’t land because I had already wasted twenty minutes trying to find the damn thing.

That nebulous goal was only made more infuriating by the slow and imprecise movement of your character. My main issues are the speed at which you move and how often I found myself getting tangled up on level geometry. I’d get caught on corners and ledges for the most part, which were less than ideal when you have ten minutes to complete all the objectives in a level.

Technically you can go over that time limit, but you’ll take a penalty for it. In Umurangi Generation, you pay for every roll of film you use in your camera, and get paid for the content and accuracy of your shots. I never really felt the financial impact of wasting time or film in the early parts of the game, but I imagine that could change in later levels. You’re also dinged for having any “blue bottles” or man o’ wars in your shots, something I feel I should mention because they’re literally everywhere. It’s this extra obstacle that makes you find more creative ways to get the perfect shot.

Once you take a picture, you get the opportunity to edit it. It starts simple at first, only allowing you to change the exposure and color tint, but by the third level I had unlocked a saturation slider as well. Umurangi Generation has a decent progression system in it too, where you unlock a new tool as you move from level to level. The first unlock I got was a telephoto lens, followed by the aforementioned saturation slider. I don’t know if Umurangi Generation will keep up the pace of unlocks as I progress, but I sure hope it does.

Umurangi Generation is an extremely cool concept for a game that does a really good job with the photography mechanics, but has some rough edges on almost every other aspect of it. That being said, I really like Umurangi Generation. When the weight of the timer or the nebulous goals isn’t pushing down on me, it truly feels like the meditative experience I want from a game.