I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s gotten really weird and bad out there recently. Like, shit is so bizarre that it’s genuinely hard to keep track of anything anymore even when it isn’t whatever horrible thing is happening in the news. But let’s try and take a fun little sojourn in the opposite direction of the grimness of our world, and instead discuss some video games for a change. That should be fun, right?
Earlier this week I published my review of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a game I truly loved despite it boasting some truly god awful technical performance. Aside from just being a mostly superb game, it also made that urge to upgrade to a PlayStation 5 feel more urgent and necessary than ever before. To be clear, I know that none of those things are true but I just really want one, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales just was that last push I needed to confirm that.
I know there aren’t any real games for it at the moment unless you’re into Demon’s Souls, which I am not, but I guess like a lot of people out there I’m captivated by the shiny new thing that’s on the market. I know that launch hardware is notoriously suspect and bound for a refresh that doesn’t make it look like a penguin with a popped collar, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I want the damn thing now.
I want to get my hands on that controller and see what it’s all about. I want to play the pre-installed Astro’s Playroom, a game that people have been championing since the console released. Yet none of this would be an issue if I could literally find anywhere that was selling one. You’d probably be reading articles on this very site about the PlayStation 5 and all the stuff it brings to the table. The reality is that I’ll eventually get a hold of one, I just would prefer it to be sooner rather than later.
Other than playing Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and pining for a new console, I dipped into a little bit of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and boy howdy is it just another one of those games. It isn’t bad or anything, it just doesn’t feel especially outstanding thus far. To its credit, it at least runs on my computer at a decent frame rate unlike the previous Ubisoft release, Watch Dogs Legion, so that’s a plus. I’m going to put more time into it though because I’ve had this desire to play a big action/adventure game recently and was really hoping that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla would do the trick.
I’ve been looking for a game to really sink my teeth into lately, and aside from Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, nothing has really done the trick. Even games I was really into like Baldur’s Gate III and Solasta: Crown of the Magister seemed like perfect candidates, but they’re both early enough that I ultimately decided to back away from them until they receive some more updates.
I don’t know, maybe all the shit going on in the world right now is eating away at my ability to truly engross myself in a game or something, but it’s been kind of underwhelming for me on the gaming front lately. I think more than anything I think I’m just tired. Everything is so fucking exhausting these days, and I just need it to stop for a bit. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years in the past 4, and these next few months might put me into an old folk’s home if the past few weeks have been any indication.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a game that not only builds on the incredible foundation that was Marvel’s Spider-Man with a new protagonist and mechanics, but cuts out a lot of the bloat that plagued its predecessor. The refinements overall result in a tremendously well-paced experience that every Spider-Man fan should check out as long as they aren’t using a launch PlayStation 4.
In Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, you play as the titular Miles Morales who has been tag-teaming New York City alongside his mentor and OG Spider-Man, Peter Parker. The main conceit of the story is that Peter and Mary Jane have gone on something of a working vacation in Europe, leaving Miles to be the sole protector of New York City for the next three weeks. Peter, having never been able to take a break from protecting the city gets a much needed respite from it, while Miles finally has his chance to prove that he’s just as legitimate a Spider-Man as Peter is.
That chance comes when Miles uncovers a new gang that’s risen from the ashes of the defeated criminal enterprises from 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, along with a corporation doing unsurprisingly unscrupulous things. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn’t waste much time before thrusting you into the heart of this ~10 hour experience, keeping the story and the intrigue moving at an enjoyable brisk pace. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales also cuts out all of those dreadful stealth missions where you played as “not-Spider-Man,” which is an overwhelmingly good decision.
What I love about Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is that not only in its storytelling does it respect your time, but the missions and side activities have been tuned in such a way to keep things fresh and engaging without bogging you down with an enormous activities checklist. To be clear, the game does have mildly repetitive challenges and side activities within it, but their volume has been greatly reduced. While random crimes are still recycled ad-nauseam, the bigger side missions are all unique in their structure. It’s one of the few times I’ve been able to look at a follow-up to a game and see a developer actually respond to the criticisms they’ve received.
When you start Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, you’re already way more capable than Peter Parker was in Marvel’s Spider-Man. Allowing you to have access to advanced swinging mechanics and combat abilities right from the jump makes the game much less of a grind, while also making narrative sense as well considering there would be no reason for Peter not to teach Miles all he’s learned in the course of his adventure.
From top to bottom, I had an excellent time with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales both from a narrative standpoint and its new gameplay mechanics. Miles has access to electrically powered attacks, dubbed “venom strikes,” as well as an inherent cloaking ability that I probably didn’t use as much as I should have. Miles doesn’t have the same amount of gadgetry and tech that Peter had in his game, but these abilities more than make up for it. Besides, there was only like one or two suit modifications and gadgets worth using in Marvel’s Spider-Man.
My only real issue with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales comes with its technical performance. Being that this is a cross-generation game appearing on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, the game felt half-baked on my launch PS4 in a way that Marvel’s Spider-Man did not. At the beginning of the game it both ran well and looked incredible, but as time went on, the cracks started to show. My running theory is that as time progresses in the game, the time of day and weather also change with it. When nightfall would hit or snow would fall, the game would run heinously in a way that I imagine newer hardware could handle with ease.
I experienced a ton of frame rate hitches and even had the game just lock up in certain places for a few seconds, but to its credit the game never crashed or made me lose progress. But it really made the best part about these games, which is to say the swinging around, feel like a chore. Having to battle the frame rate every time I dared to take to the skies truly detracted from an otherwise outstanding game. Even aside from that though, the version I played was plagued with other technical errors like dialogue just not playing in cut-scenes, cut-scenes just freezing completely, and my least favorite of all, the game playing two music tracks on top of each other. That last one was something that literally ended up giving me a headache until I rebooted both the game and console.
It’s a shame that the technical quality of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales wasn’t up to snuff, because the rest of the game was so good that it made me power through these issues just to see the end. Hell, I still want to hop back in and sweep up all the stuff I missed, but I’ll have to wait until I can get my hands on a PS5 before I attempt it. If you’ve got a system capable of running it properly as well as a love for Spider-Man as a concept, I cannot recommend Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales enough.
It has been approximately 35 years since the 2020 American presidential election began, and despite the fact that Joe Biden won the damn thing, it sure doesn’t feel that way. But we all knew that this would happen. We all knew that the overgrown man-child in the White House wouldn’t concede any defeat regardless of how definitive the results might have been, but knowing that never filled me with any sort of comfort. See, I’m genuinely horrified for what the next few months have in store for my country, and as of now there doesn’t seem to be any reprieve from the stress.
There’s no need to recap what’s been happening in America, because I’m pretty sure everyone on planet Earth is aware of the elderly man and his latest bout of temper tantrums. It’s shameful to say the least, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from the spray-tanned hobgoblin that’s routinely eroded our democracy for his personal gain.
But he isn’t the only problem. It’s the people around him, his cabinet, his employees and his supporters that continue to enable and encourage his behavior that scare me the most. These people, regardless of if Trump is dragged out of the White House or not, will still be around and in some cases remain in power. His supporters, the 70+ million people who voted for him, will still be around and eager to do whatever the president might decree via his daily deluge of Twitter vomit. This schmuck basically has an army of trigger-happy sycophants who will jump the second he gives the word, and that alone is nightmare inducing.
I fear that one of these days I’m going to wake up to the news that a legal way to stay in power has been utilized, ultimately burying the last vestigial bits of our democracy. This repugnant shit-stain is going to kick and scream as loudly as he can, and no one is going to actually stop him.
See, a lot of folks view inauguration day (January 20th) as an end point to all of this madness, but I don’t see it that way. To me, that day looks to be the apex of this clusterfuck, where Donnie and his supporters stand with their many guns outside of the White House ready for war with whomever dares to try and enter. It sounds absolutely fucking insane that this is a legitimate fear you can have, and not just a plot from a bad action movie.
I don’t know what happens next. I’ve been reassured by friends that are more politically minded than myself that nothing will come of the big baby’s tantrums, but I genuinely don’t have faith in that. For the longest time Americans lived in a shared reality, where those pesky numbers and facts actually meant something. But here in 2020, there are two realities that exist that either political party subscribes to. The democrats, for the most part, are still here on Earth where facts and evidence exist, while a lot of the Republicans and conservatives live in a magical world where they can shape reality into whatever they want like some sort of shitty version of Thanos.
The worst part of it all is that there’s nothing anyone can do to merge these two realities, solely because one side refuses to believe anything that their president doesn’t agree with. I truly hate that I’ve had to dedicate yet another blog post to this absolute nightmare that is American politics, but it’s genuinely hard to focus on anything else. We’re watching our democracy vanish before our eyes because of this buffoon. We’re letting our country be destroyed by a sexist, morally bankrupt, racist, charity defrauding, philandering, pedophiliac, draft-dodging, pandemic-denying, tax-evading piece of shit named Donald Trump.
If you’re a big Trump person, kindly go fuck yourself because I genuinely don’t know how you an call yourself an American anymore. You openly endorse this piece of shit and condone his heinous acts claiming he speaks for the little guy. The only little guy Trump has ever and will ever care about is his fuzzy little cheese doodle of a dick and it’s quite frankly surprising that you haven’t caught on to that yet.
Anywho, thanks for letting me get that off of my chest. Now if someone could help me figure out where I can buy a goddamned PlayStation 5, that would be appreciated.
When I think about my time with 2016’s Watch Dogs 2, I’m reminded of its many ups and downs both in terms of gameplay and story, but at the end of the day it’s a game that had a lot of heart and charm that managed to make it a memorable and satisfying experience. Watch Dogs Legion however, lacks any of the joy and fun that its predecessor had, contains repetitive and frustrating missions, and also runs like hot garbage.
Watch Dogs Legion is a game that focuses more on the hacker organization DedSec instead of any single character by allowing you to effectively recruit and control any person you find on the street. The goal is to rebuild the organization with these recruits, each of which have randomly assigned traits to them that make them more or less viable candidates to add to your ranks. You might find a guy with a cool car, or a drone expert who knows how to hack more effectively, or even a lawyer who can bail your team out of jail faster if they happen to get arrested. It’s an interesting concept that rarely feels worth engaging in and unfortunately presents its own suite of complications to providing a cohesive gameplay experience.
The lack of any primary character to really focus on in the game wouldn’t be such an issue if Watch Dogs Legion wasn’t also trying to make you care about the narrative. The quick version of the story is that DedSec was framed for a terrorist attack on London that prompted a private military company (PMC) called Albion to turn London into an oppressive police state. While the story itself doesn’t do a great job of handling or presenting any of these topics with the care they require, the whole narrative falls flat because every character you play as just spouts the same bland responses to everything no matter what the context is.
For instance, there’s an early mission where you find what effectively is a prison camp set up by Albion that just exists in the middle of the city. You literally just stroll on in there to see the many, justifiably distraught people just kinda hanging out. Interestingly enough, they all have their cellphones on them which is a weird thing to let political prisoners have, but whatever. Yet after completing the mission in the camp and casually waltzing out the front door, the voice of your boss chimes in and remarks about how terrible the situation is. My character, a bland and procedurally generated ding-dong, proceeded to simply respond with, “I could get used to this DedSec thing,” or something to that effect. That kind of thing happens almost every single time you complete a mission, and it really robs Watch Dogs Legion of any real chance at telling a compelling story by having your blank slate of a character just spit out random one-liners in the hope that it makes any sense contextually.
On the topic of procedural generation and characters, Watch Dogs Legion tries to inflate the “uniqueness” of the citizens of London by pitch-shifting their voices to artificially expand the diversity of people you might encounter. As you might imagine, this leads to a lot of people with the same voice, just one happens to be unnaturally deeper, talking at each other as if you were listening to two robocalls try to scam each other.
Even the missions are bland and uninspired, regardless of whether they were procedurally generated for a recruitment mission or if they’re part of the main story line. These procedurally generated missions will often make you return to places you’ve already infiltrated for either story or region unlocking purposes, and the region specific missions are wildly dull and carry the stupidest implications with them. The main conceit of these region unlocking missions is that you do enough to inspire the people of a certain part of the city to enter a state of “defiance” and rise up against Albion. Even wilder is how Watch Dogs Legion considers putting up a cool DedSec banner over an Albion one to be just as important as uncovering an organ-harvesting operation. The level of cognitive dissonance that’s on display at any moment in Watch Dogs Legion, combined with the lack of any charm or character, really overshadow the few existing high points in the game.
Cognitive dissonance aside, the core gameplay loop of Watch Dogs Legion is still extremely solid despite the overall game feeling like a shell of its predecessor. Being able to take down outposts without ever stepping foot inside of them by utilizing cameras, drones, and traps littered throughout any given locale is still really satisfying. I’ve been able to play most of Watch Dogs Legion without ever firing a gun, with the exceptions being the missions where you’re thrust into combat scenarios against your will. There’s just something infinitely enjoyable about terrorizing a bunch of PMC dipshits without ever laying a finger on them.
But the same could have been said about Watch Dogs 2, hell, even the original Watch Dogs was good at making you feel like a hacking god. Whereas Watch Dogs 2 made its digital version of San Fransisco feel alive and packed with things to do, Watch Dogs Legion feels oddly empty. You can go buy a bunch of clothes, do package delivery missions, get drunk and play kick-up with a soccer ball, but that’s kind of it. For as big and dense Watch Dogs Legion‘s version of London is, it still feels surprisingly empty. It’s even more upsetting when you remember that Watch Dogs 2 gave you reasons to explore the city and hunt down famous landmarks in San Fransisco. Watch Dogs Legion could have really benefited from having something like this present, encouraging people to get to know London and its iconic locations.
But I could get past all of those issues if it weren’t for the miserable state of the PC version of this game. My computer isn’t new and I recognize that, but there is no reason that I should have to play Watch Dogs Legion on its lowest settings, and still be unable to have it run at a steady 30 frames per second. The game is so heinously optimized that moving around the world, getting into combat, or even turning your camera too fast turns the game into a slideshow. It’s all the more upsetting when you look at the console versions that look much better and run more stably despite being on hardware that was released in 2013.
Despite all of this however I kept playing Watch Dogs Legion because that core gameplay loop is still satisfying. The problem is, Watch Dogs Legion has a few missions that strip you of your ability to get creative, opting for a more linear experience. These crop up from time to time, but they were rarely anything that I couldn’t overcome with enough bashing my head against a wall.
However, after ~13 hours of playing I finally ran up against a quest that was so bad and so infuriating that I finally decided that my time with the game was over. Without spoiling anything specific, the mission in question is a forced stealth section where you are basically stripped of any tools you have and have to just kinda of worm your way around the threats. During this time, you’re forced to listen to a plot dump about the leader of Albion via what essentially boils down to an audio log, and then you can progress further. However, if you are spotted, the mission restarts and you have to do it all over again. I must have heard this stupid info-dump about 6 times before I decided that Watch Dogs Legion isn’t worth anymore of my precious time on this earth.
Watch Dogs Legion is a pale reflection of its predecessor, lacking any aspect of charm while failing to actually do anything interesting or insightful with its setting. Bad characters, bad missions, and terrible performance, all combined with Ubisoft’s pathetic attempts to tell an apolitical story about a post-Brexit, police state version of London results in a game that fails to deliver on any of the good will that Watch Dogs 2 built up. In short, Watch Dogs Legion is a colossal disappointment and I don’t think it’s worth your time.
I don’t think I actually have a ton to say about anything right now, especially not video games. As an American, things haven been… challenging in the past 24 hours, and will continue to be that way for a while. I’ve gone through the whole range of emotions over the last day and I don’t even know what to think anymore. Things are still very much in the air right now because of how close this election is, but they shouldn’t have been. Especially not after everything that’s gone on over the past four years. That being said, this is kind of all I can muster for a blog today. Please take care of yourselves and be kind to each other.
It’s been a bit since I’ve actually told a story from my D&D games, hasn’t it? Lately I’ve been prattling on about my ethos and how I prep for games, but sometimes all you need is a good story about players being overly confident. So buckle in everyone, cause this one is short but oh so sweet.
For context, our DM had a lot of affinity for the Dragonlance universe, so we ultimately decided to play through a module of their choosing using the D&D rule-set. I don’t know if Dragonlance is its own game or set of modules or something, but I was interested to play it regardless, and so was the rest of my party.
The story was mostly spearheaded through our cleric, a man on a mission to restore the power of the gods who had abandoned the region for some reason. So in a very Wizard of Oz kind of way, the backstory was set up with the cleric meeting each of us on his travels, conscripting us into is mission. Each character had their motivation for finding the gods except mine, who was more loyal to the cleric than his mission. They were buds.
So we wandered around, going village to village in search of anyone who could help point us in the direction of a way to achieve our goal of bringing the gods back. After a few sessions, an NPC we all hated, and a terrible boating incident, we found ourselves deep in a forest where we were on the trail of a derelict temple to the gods. In said forest, we found a village of these dragonborn folks who were praying to an effigy of a big dragon. We had no reason to engage with them outside of the fact that this was the first non-swamp related thing we’d seen in about 3 sessions.
One of the many problems we had was that we’d been fighting these dudes in small packs all throughout the swamp, so they had made it clear they were hostile. We luckily had the drop on them, as they were staring at their effigy in prayer while we approached from behind them. Just to be clear, there were enough of them to fuck us up as efficiently as possible. So we had to devise a clever plan to get by them for reasons I still am not entirely sure about. But unfortunately, overconfidence trumped careful planning which prompted our warlock to flex his charismatic muscles.
He elegantly pranced over to the dragonborn clan, whispering sweet nothings into their ears and caressing their cheeks with the back of his palm. It was like watching a ribbon dancer perform without said ribbon. As he performed his floor routine in front of the dragonborns, who were now facing in the direction of where we were hiding, he played his dumbest card yet. Quick side note here, he was not a dragonborn, he was just a dude. That’s important to know because he literally tried to convince these fools that he was their god in humanoid form as a way to get them to not attack us anymore.
It was sultry, it was sexy, and it was the best plan he could come up with. With a plan this stupid, how could it not work? Well the dice found a way to fuck us, and our warlock couldn’t charm these lads with his puny roll of 13. So suddenly our warlock found himself on the wrong side of a wall of fire that placed him in a closed arena with about 15 angry dragonborn who just witnessed this megalomaniac try to be the focus of their idolatry. Not a great position to be in.
Initiative was rolled, the dragonborn all got into perfect ass-kicking formation around our warlock, and then my turn came around. I was a tiefling monk, which meant I could both move very quickly and resist fire damage. Wall of Fire is a spell that requires you to make a dexteriy saving throw that if you fail, you take 5d8 fire damage, also known as just enough damage to kill a stupid warlock. So I used my mobility spells and natural fire resistance in tandem, couple that with a good saving throw to avoid the brunt of the fire damage, and I was able to leap through the wall of fire, grab a stupid warlock, and drag him back to the other side.
He failed his saving throw to get through the fire, but we were able to heal him quickly enough and bail out on the entire dragon cult thing. We chastised him appropriately and continued our adventure. But for the briefest of moments, there was the possibility that we could have made an army of dragonborn wreck shop in our stead. And honestly, isn’t that what D&D is all about?
Okay, so next week is going to be a wild one for us Americans with the whole election thing going on. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m genuinely terrified for what is going to happen regardless of who wins the thing, but I need to not think about it exclusively for the next few days or I’m sure my head will explode. What I’m trying to do is to look forward to other things that might actually bring me joy instead the giant clusterfuck that is bound to be November 3rd. So here’s a hard pivot into video games.
Did you know that video games were happening this week? Well they are. Personally, I’m pretty jazzed about Teardown entering early access. For those of you who don’t know, Teardown is part destruction sandbox and part heist game. You start a level by looking for these hidden switches hidden throughout the map, then you need to set up an efficient route to get to each of them within a short time window because when you decide to flip that first switch, the cops are alerted and come hunting you.
That part of the game seems okay from what I’ve seen of it, but the real star of the show is the destructibility of everything. See, you can just blast holes in walls and objects all willy nilly if you want, and I definitely do want to do that. I’m just excited for a fun physics-based destruct-a-thon in a pretty voxel-based world. I want to destroy shit and watch it explode into tiny, GPU-burning pieces, and Teardown seems like the perfect way to accomplish that.
Teardown – Tuxedo Labs
There’s also Watch Dogs Legion, a game that I’m fully expecting to both enjoy and recoil at for how either spot on or tone-deaf it comes across. I’ve been yearning for a good action game for a while and based off of my enjoyment of Watch Dogs 2, this sequel seems like the way to go. I also went ahead and signed up for a month of Ubisoft’s Uplay+ service so I could avoid paying full price for yet another video game, especially when you consider that within the next month a new Assassin’s Creed is coming out too. It seemed like the most fiscally responsible way to play these games which is a new look for me.
But to perfectly counteract that small, fleeting glimpse of financial responsibility, I’ve been eyeing a bunch of computer parts that I want… that I need. See, I’ve reached something of a ceiling on how good my computer can be, mostly because I cheaped out when I initially built the thing. My motherboard doesn’t support newer CPU’s, so I need a new one of those to support the new CPU I need because I’m being throttled to hell and back. And also, I’d like a freaking SSD too, so that’s added into the equation. I also would like a new case for my computer that isn’t a third of my height.
Watch Dogs Legion – Ubisoft
“What what about the graphics card?” I hear you ask. Well, even if I got a new 3000 series card, it wouldn’t matter because my CPU is still basically a hamster with a calculator, so he would probably make it difficult to see much of a performance increase. I want to ultimately build a new computer and set my terrible hamster-based CPU free, but money isn’t something I have a ton of right now. And now I’m thinking about why I’m broke, and I’m worried about next week once again.
Fuck.
Well, hopefully by this time next week you’ll be reading a blog with a much happier tone, but like I said up top, regardless of the outcome on the 3rd, it’s gonna be a shit show. Please for the love of god, vote for Joe Biden and free us from this hell we’ve been living in for the past four years.
Contrary to what its morose title might suggest, I Am Dead is a genuinely touching and pleasant puzzle game that has you uncovering the history of the small port village of Shelmerston in an effort to secure its future.
In I Am Dead you take on the role of Morris Lupton, a recently deceased citizen of the village of Shelmerston. In his life, Morris was the curator of the Shelmerston Museum, a role that he took great pride in as a lover of his hometown. In death however, Morris teams up with the ghost of his dog Sparky to uncover the true nature of why the dormant volcano that the village is perched around has begun to rumble for the first time in centuries.
Shelmerston has long been kept safe from a fiery demise thanks to a spirit who sacrificed going to heaven in order to watch over the village, taking on the role of the Custodian of Shelmerston. Aggi, the Custodian in question, had her remains dug up and put in the museum by none other than Morris himself, which is what seems to have caused her power to wain. So Morris and Sparky set out on a journey to find a new spirit to take up the mantle and keep the village safe for years to come.
You do this by diving into the memories of people who came in contact with a potential replacement Custodian, learning about who they were and what their impact was on the town. One of the first spirits that you’ll investigate is the daughter of a prominent artist in the village who had no interest in following in her father’s creative footprints.
You’re then presented with this tableau of an outdoor art installation filled with various tourists and artists. You’ll eventually come across someone with a thought bubble above their head which signifies that they’ve got a story about this potential new Custodian. Upon entering their mind, they’ll begin to narrate a story about their encounter with whomever you’re investigating at the time. You’ll also play this not-so-great mini-game where you drag your mouse up and down until you make a blurry image that encapsulates their narration into a clear one. The story being told, while very interesting and enjoyable, is in service of revealing an object that held meaning to the potential Custodian.
This is where the “puzzle” aspect of I Am Dead comes into play. You’re never really solving anything when it comes to the main plot-line of the game, instead you’re trying to locate the object that was discussed in the memories you invade. It seems simple at first, but the way you go about finding these objects is pretty fun, but might be better explained through example.
One of the objects on my list was a Frisbee with some stars on it that was confiscated by a real uppity campground manager. In each level, there are these smaller inspection areas where you can focus on individual objects and structures. In this example, the manager’s RV was one of these inspection zones that I could zoom into and peel back the layers of. As you zoom into the RV the walls melt away to uncover a messy interior littered with various flotsam and jetsam to look at. You can click on cupboards, bottles, coolers, toys, plants and much more to see what’s inside of them by zooming in. Eventually I zoomed in on a chair that had a storage space underneath it and found the Frisbee, crossing it off the list of items in the level I needed to discover.
The idea behind finding these objects is to awaken the spirit of said influential person that once inhabited the island in order to ask them to take on the mantle of the new Custodian. And that’s kind of the core loop of I Am Dead. There are other challenges in every level that you can accomplish that fall into two categories.
The first comes in the form of these tiny little spirits called Grenkins. Unlike the plot relevant objects you need to find in I Am Dead, the Grenkins are tougher to find and even tougher to collect when you do find them. Whenever you click on a tableau with a Grenkin hidden in it, Sparky will bark a bit and show you an icon that most of time, looks like nothing. In reality, what you’re being shown is the cross-section of an object that is at a particular angle and level of zoom. Luckily the game gives you an indication if the object you’re highlighting has a Grenkin in it, but finding the correct angle can sometimes take longer than any other objective on the island.
The other challenge comes in the form of riddles. Some bizarre spirit will list off some objects that are pretty well hidden and provide you a riddle to their location. I found these to be the hardest challenges in the game, because they’re phrased fairly vaguely and usually point to objects hidden inside of other objects. An example that sticks out to me was a clue that alluded to a steeped art supply, which turned out to be an eraser that was dropped into a cup of tea. You’d never even find it unless you were inspecting this one particular cup of tea very closely for some reason. That, or you’re really good at riddles.
To me, the story of Shelmerston, its history and inhabitants were the real star of the show. Learning about the village and the stalwarts who lived in it very quickly out-shined the hidden-object part of the game. The characters are all pretty interesting and seeing the impact they had on the lives of those around them was delightful and quite frankly, heartwarming. I also thought that I Am Dead ended very strongly, delivering on the emotional weight that had been built up over the five hours or so it took me to complete it.
I Am Dead is a great story wrapped up in a low impact game that touches on so many aspects of coming to grips with mortality in a surprisingly hopeful way. It’s funny that a game that’s quite literally about death and being dead can be such a pleasant experience, but I think that was the point. If you’re looking for something lightweight and cheerful, oddly enough, you should check out I Am Dead.
Not so long ago I wrote a lengthy piece about my issues with the state of the early access release of Baldur’s Gate III. Without rehashing that entire article here, the main crux of it focused on the mechanical liberties Baldur’s Gate III took with the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. My initial thought was that translating the rules of D&D into a video game would naturally require a ton of concessions, however another CPRG named Solasta Crown of the Magister recently entered early access and proved that theory wrong.
Solasta Crown of the Magister is a turn-based, isometrically viewed, party-focused RPG that might not have the best presentation, but impressively implements the rules of D&D in an easy to understand fashion. It’s actually been quite refreshing to be able to jump into a CRPG and know exactly what I’m doing for once, because usually it feels like I’m trying to learn a new language with these types of games. Solasta Crown of the Magister uses the SRD 5.1 rule set to great success, managing to appeal to veteran players of D&D without compromising accessibility to new players, and that’s something that deserves to be praised.
When you start Solasta Crown of the Magister, you can build an entire party from scratch or use some of the pre-generated offerings if you like. When building a character, you can choose from 8 playable races which include specific race variants (i.e. High Elf & Sylvan Elf), 8 backgrounds and 6 character classes. You are walked through character creation step by step, letting you know everything from what a particular god is all about, what benefits a certain background might grant and much more. I genuinely love the process of creating a character and think it’s fantastically well done, with the exception of how the character actually looks.
Therein lies my main hangup with Solasta Crown of the Magister. The actual appearance of your character is pretty rough. There’s only a handful of face and hair options to choose from which is particularly underwhelming for any role-playing game, but it highlights this hilarious imbalance between how mechanically sound the game actually is, versus the customization stuff. That point is only exacerbated by the facts that not only do the character models look very rough, but all of the NPC’s in the game are made from those same options. It led to a lot of moments where I’d see the same “dude with a beard” as both a quest giver, and a random bandit attacking me in the night. There isn’t any real variety for physical appearances, which desperately needs to be addressed.
But hey, it’s early access, and I honestly prefer having a mechanically sound game versus a pretty one. If I could mash up both Solasta Crown of the Magister and Baldur’s Gate III, we’d have ourselves one hell of a CRPG to contend with.
I also really appreciate that this game starts with your adventurers meeting in a tavern and sharing their stories (tutorial missions) about their journey here to each other. It’s a very funny jab at the fact that all good D&D campaigns start in a tavern, although it really tries to force some of your characters into specific tutorial boxes. For instance, my party is comprised of a paladin, a fighter, a cleric and wizard, all of whom shared their “tale of triumph” with one another.
The first tutorial taught me how to just move around the world via escaping a prison, the second taught me how to kill wolves and push them off cliffs, the third taught me how to utilize light, resting, and healing potions, and the final one was a stealth mission. Now, you may have noticed it too, but I don’t have a rogue in the party. However, Solasta Crown of the Magister made a decision and decided that my cleric was the perfect fit for the job. She handled it well enough, but I’m certain the rolls were weighted in my favor for the tutorial. It’s nothing game breaking by any means, but it certainly is immersion shattering when the game just decides on a character trait for the sake of a tutorial.
Once through the tutorial, you get your first chance at navigating dialogue situations. Each player was given a set of tags to choose from during character creation based on their alignment and background, which I believe (although I’m not certain) impacted who had a certain dialogue option to use. I didn’t see any dialogue choices in the traditional sense, but a tutorial tooltip made it sound like the game would automatically select the character with the highest stats to perform a particular dialogue skill check. But from what I saw in the first hour or so of playing was that each character just has one dialogue option to interject into the conversation. Hopefully this expands as I play more of Solasta Crown of the Magister, but as is, I do appreciate how every character is at least involved in the conversation.
Solasta Crown of the Magister really shines in a lot of different areas despite being pretty rough in the presentation department. The voice acting is hit or miss and the characters all look pretty bad, but it’s mechanically competent for a D&D video game. One of my favorite touches is how you’re placed into a visible grid when you enter combat, leaving no ambiguity about where you are or who you’re vulnerable too. Honestly, the user interface in general is much easier to follow than it is in Baldur’s Gate III.
Another really intriguing aspect about Solasta Crown of the Magister is how it’s structuring campaigns. From the looks of things, there isn’t going to be one overarching campaign that will occupy you for hours upon hours. Instead it looks like they’re going for a more anthology approach, with Crown of the Magister being the first playable campaign. It’s a really interesting approach that comes with its own set of pros and cons. For instance, I can see a really easy post launch support structure that just injects new campaigns into the game, but it also makes you wonder if you’ll get any of the inter-party drama that you would get from other games like romance options and new recruits.
Solasta Crown of the Magister is in early access, so my gripes with the game as it is are bound to change, but without a development roadmap to refer to, all I can do is speculate at this point. Most importantly, it should be noted that this comes from a very small studio that hasn’t shipped a game before and found their funding via Kickstarter, so their resources are a bit more limited. To expect Solasta Crown of the Magister to offer the same amount of features and intricacies that something like Baldur’s Gate III is implementing would be unfair, but in my opinion they’ve already tackled the hardest part by successfully translating the D&D rules into a video game. That alone might be a good enough reason to check it out.
Change is good, isn’t it? Like, exhibiting personal growth and being able to look back and recognize that maybe you were a little too harsh on something just because you didn’t know any better and changing your opinion because of it is something to celebrate, right? That’s where I’m at with Divinity: Original Sin II, and I honestly couldn’t be happier to be wrong.
I don’t think I ever really hated Divinity: Original Sin II, rather, I would just write it off as a game that people other than me could actually enjoy. Hearing the rave reviews from critics and friends alike made it painfully obvious to me that the game was excellent, but it just always seemed like an experience that just wouldn’t resonate with me. Then Baldur’s Gate III entered early access, and everything changed.
I’m not going to reexplain everything I’ve mentioned in my previousarticles about Baldur’s Gate III, so you can read those on your own if you’re so inclined. Instead, I’m just going to say that because Baldur’s Gate III managed to sink its claws into me, I was able to easily make the transition to Divinity: Original Sin II. Let’s be clear though, I want to play more of Baldur’s Gate III far more than any other game I own at the moment, but it’s so early and janky that I’d rather wait and play a similar, yet structurally sound game for now.
Divinity: Original Sin II isn’t a perfect game, nor is it scratching the exact itch that Baldur’s Gate III was, but it’s still a good time. I’ve been told numerous times that Divinity: Original Sin II has something of a difficulty spike towards the end of the campaign, but that’s why easy mode was invented.
Not only did I make the decision to not only play on the easiest difficulty, but I also opted to load the game up with mods to make it a more “interesting” experience. I’ve got custom classes and unique weapons falling out of my ass at this point with all the shit I’ve injected into the game, and I’m enjoying this play-through much more than my initial, mod-less one. And I can already hear the cries of, “aren’t you going to play the game normally?” to which I say, “no.”
I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin II in a way that’s enjoyable for me, and I have no interest in looking up optimal builds or guides that will basically tell me how to play the game step by step. I’d rather just wade into the game on my own terms along with the ability to summon any item in the game whenever I damn well please. Sure it isn’t the “intended experience” or whatever, but I’m happy with the version of the game that I’ve created called, “Divinity: Original Sin II: Ari’s Bastardized Edition.
The Bonus World 