Snakebird might be the most insidious wolf in sheep's clothing I've ever seen in the video game world. Or snake in bird's clothing, I dunno. My point is, it's a very bright and colorful puzzle game from Swedish devs Noumenon (they also made the equally attractive Nimbus) with one of those presentations that shouts "iOS game", but not necessarily in the pejorative sense. The game isn't actually an iOS game, at least not yet, but there's a certain style of cutesy minimalism and soft rounded edges that seems to typify most games made for the platform that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just looking at it. Snakebird also happens to be one of the most difficult puzzle games I've played in recent memory: it demands a level of precision and forethought generally not seen outside of a Sokoban game, as players are often required to think dozens of moves in advance or else face an untenable situation and have to hit the "undo" button as many times as it takes to extricate themselves from their doomed attempt.
Looks so easy, doesn't it? It's like a baby's toy. You can even click on items in the background to watch them animate. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security! That's how the snakebirds get ya!
Snakebird is a puzzle game that takes the premise of Snake - that little four-directional dot-eating game that was on every mobile device for the longest time - and repurposes it so that the snakes are birds (with long snakey bodies) and the pellets are fruit, which still increase the length of the snakebird who eats it by one "segment". Gravity is also a factor: if there's nothing underneath the snakebirds, they will drop to the closest solid ground or, as was often the case for me, the void below. The goal of every stage is to eat all the fruit, if any are around, and make it to the rainbow exit portal.
The game starts getting immediately tougher with how it'll liberally throw instant-death spike blocks around to ensure that there's only ever one solution to each puzzle, and increases the challenge further in later stages by adding more snakebirds. Every snakebird needs to make it to the exit, and you end up spending a lot of additional time trying to ensure that no snakebird is left behind. Then the game starts introducing fruit again and you have to figure out which of the multiple snakebirds needs the extra length for the puzzle to be solvable. The sheer number of variables that need to be pared down before you can glean a solution to the puzzle means that, even though you might be looking at a 20x20 grid of snakebirds, fruit, and platforms, each of the game's brainteasers tend to take between 15 minutes to however many hours you can stand to look at the same single-screen puzzle without screaming at it so hard that you black out. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. Still, it's not easy.
What? Where? How?
Playing Snakebird reminds me of the time I spent struggling through Toki Tori and Toki Tori 2+ - the colorful graphics, the avian protagonists and a few deeper connections like an invisible grid that governs the world's playing pieces (which can be made visible, though don't expect it to help much). Specifically though, they're all games that look far easier than they actually are. You only have to attempt some of the puzzles numbered 20 or higher before you start getting utterly lost trying to determine where to even begin, and the game has fifty puzzles total with at least three bonus super-difficult challenges.
For all its primary colors, soft edges and Angry Birds-esque comically expressive character design, Snakebird intimidates me. A lot. I can't imagine the sort of spatial awareness genius who could breeze through a game like this, but I know when I'm beat. Maybe I'll just retreat to the safe confines of Picross, Professor Layton and Match-3 with my tail between my legs...
Bit of a departure today, since Life is Strange is very light on mechanics and heavy on narrative. The first three paragraphs are going to roughly summarize the game, how it plays and how I feel about it so far, and then I'll spoiler-block off some deeper introspectives on the first two episodes which I played back-to-back today. Maybe it's because I've gotten into binge watching TV shows - online-only fare like Jessica Jones and Mr. Robot has turned me into an obsessive serial watcher - but that's how I always intended to tackle the hot Indie favorite for GOTY that is Life is Strange. I was a big fan of Remember Me, DONTNOD's prior and only other game to my knowledge, but I couldn't see myself waiting for months between each of this game's five episodes. Those waiting times might be the aspect of the episodic adventure game format that I dislike the most. Heck, I'm sure that isn't a rare sentiment.
I apologize in advance for the poor quality of some of these screenshots. I tried starting the game on the "high quality" setting, but my PC gave me the mechanical version of an old-fashioned look. Which is to say, being super hitchy.
Life is Strange is one of those adventure games that's light on puzzles and inventory management (very light) but draws its audiences in with tough decisions that will no doubt have all sorts of consequences further down the road. These decisions seem to incur changes as minor as additional lines of dialogue to major ones that affect the rest of the story, or a character's perception of you. I always find it fascinating to look back on all the branches that may or may not have happened due to how I handled a situation, but truth be told this is the first game of this type that I've ever had the cojones to play. I skipped The Walking Dead because I don't care for zombie fiction, but as soon as it got murmurs about its approach to storytelling I checked an LP and... man, I do not envy anyone making those life-or-death choices. It's an adventure game both simpler than anything that came before it, simpler than "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (to which these games are often pejoratively compared) yet somehow more difficult than every Roberta Williams moon logic puzzle put together. How do you choose between telling a friend to go to the cops about her possible date-rape, or to hold off until you've gathered more evidence in case her accusations get her into more hot water?
Yep. Had to hear it to believe it. You demand too much from your subsidiary, Square-Enix. (Though I suspect it was actually a joke at the expense of Square-Enix, given that it almost killed Square. Sort of like The Simpsons' constant digs at Fox.)
The key element of Life is Strange, introduced almost straight away so no real spoiler here, is the main character - mousy but gifted photography student Max Caulfield - and her newfound ability to rewind time to a small extent. Not only does this feature heavily in a lot of the game's puzzles - Max can effectively "teleport" around, gathering items and clues before rewinding the clock in situations where time is of the essence - but also allows the player to reverse any of their big decisions before they "confirm" it. You can see how either side of a decision plays out in the moment and Max's feelings on the two results, but once it's locked in place the consequences will be unavoidable. It's an elegant approach to the "did you mean to go this way on this big important choice, or do you have cold feet?" approach, especially in the few games of this type where a decision will be made for an impatient player, robbing them of the dubious pleasure of being responsible for their own fate.
I mentioned a Buffy the Vampire Slayer connection/inspiration earlier, and there's nowhere where that's more keenly felt than during the big meaningful ending shot montage, which shows us where some major characters are at as some melancholic Indie dirge plays us out. That's for both chapters so far.
Naturally, what follows are major story plot points and so I've safely hidden them away behind a big ol' spoiler block. I think you've gotten a decent enough impression of how the game plays, if not what the game's about, from the above (and those GB vids I've linked to, if you're not seen those yet either). Personally I'm hooked so far, though I won't have anything decisive until I've beaten all five chapters. I'm not sure if that's what I'll focus on tomorrow, or if I spread it out a bit between other games. Shit is certainly getting weird in Arcadia Bay, though, and I'm in for the ride. (Also, is it crazy that I've picked yet another game filled to the brim with cute and/or dumb references to pop culture? Is everything Buffy the Vampire Slayer now?)
Episode 1: Chrysalis
As expected from an inaugural episode, it's a quiet one. The player spends some time getting to know everyone in Max's orbit, including her classmates and the adults she communicates with on a regular basis. We also get to know the school, Blackwell Academy, and Max's past in the nearby town of Arcadia Bay. It gets ominous right off the bat with visions of a tornado and the introduction of the clearly unhinged Nathan and the Queen Bee of this school, Victoria. The episode is essentially one giant fetch quest for a flash drive, and then ends with Max reconnecting with her estranged "BFF" Chloe Price, who has become the cool punk kid your parents warned you about.
Here's a few observations about the game's cast so far:
Warren Graham seems like kind of the best friend sweet dork archetype, but I recognize a crush when I see it. He's clearly the chief romantic interest for Max, at least so far, though I have to imagine there's a less pleasant side to his personality when politely rebuffed. It can't all be Jim Sterling-esque ironic self-aggrandizing and Back to the Future references with that kid. I'll keep my eye on him. Gotta say, I have a weird compulsion to just utterly ruin his day whenever I see him; I'm trying not to let that color my interactions with him though.
Chloe Price's an interesting character. I didn't get a feel at the end of the first episode what her and Max's dynamic will be, as it seems like they shouldn't have become such close friends again so quickly without a bit more brooding and bad blood given Max's complete lack of contact. I suspect that underneath the tough exterior, Chloe is still the same tomboy that Max left behind all those years ago, and a few bad experiences and some "rebel" teenage phases hasn't turned her completely nihilistic yet. I look forward to seeing how their relationship plays out in later episodes, though I suspect it'll also be the source of a lot of drama too. Finding out what happened to her missing substitute best friend (and possibly more?) Rachel Amber will no doubt be the focal point of future interactions with Chloe.
I took the chance to be nice to Victoria Chase, though it seems as if the game's setting her up to be the major antagonist, or at least one of them. She's mean to the point of cartoonish, frequently to poor old Kate Marsh, but I'm determined to give her as many chances as the game will let me. It might be because I'm too nice to the point of naivity (which is one hell of a humblebrag, I guess) or because I don't believe this game would stoop as low to create a snobby bully character that can't be reached like a human being. Hold out hope, though like any other decision I'm making it might come back to bite me in the ass someday.
Kate Marsh is the virginal Christian gone viral make-out artist, though obviously something is up. The bad vibes from the gun-toting Nathan and his drugs immediately made me uneasy about a date rape undercurrent here, though given I played both the first two episodes back to back it's a bit of a cheat to say that here since they kinda made it explicit in E2. It's a little on-the-nose to exaggerate her religious purity, though maybe that's more on this Vortex Club and their attempts to rub some dirt onto her reputation. Holier than thou types can engender some ill feelings among the insecure, even if Kate isn't shown to be particularly sanctimonious.
David Madsen is the Blackwell Academy security guard and, it turns out, Chloe's stepfather. He's a surveillance nut, a war veteran, a gun-loving redneck and kind of a creep. He even smacks around Chloe at one point. All he needs is a wifebeater and to be perpetually holding a Coors Light in one hand. As with Victoria, I suspect this isn't just French developers' DONTNOD's cute attempt to satirize America's Trump-voting underclass and that there's more afoot with this character. There's a hint early on that Chloe's sharp waitress mom Joyce sees something in him. Then again, maybe he's the psychotic enforcer of the Vortex Club, following around their enemies for the perfect time to strike.
Mark Jefferson's sort of a non-character so far. A greatly admired professional photographer who teaches at Blackwell, and a large reason why Max wanted to move back there to study, he seems like the stereotypical "hip" teacher who perhaps knows less about his students than he thinks. He's not shown to be particularly engaged with anyone besides Max, in whom he sees great potential, and Victoria, who seems to have the hots for teacher. He's yet another source of friction between the mean and stylish rich girl and our slightly slobby hipster hero, though I imagine he'll go through some changes as the game continues. (Man, I'm saying that a lot, huh? Hedging my bets or what?)
As for everyone else: I hope saving the gothy Alyssa from projectiles becomes a running gag; the nerdy Brooke seems like Warren's perfect partner if not for his crush on Max; Victoria's two posse members - the ditzy blonde Taylor and the fashion-conscious Courtney - strike me as being almost identical to Rachel McAdams's hangers-on in the movie Mean Girls and it wouldn't be surprise me if that was the game's intent; I let the quiet bully-magnet Daniel sketch me, though I have no idea what that might lead to; I said see you later boys to the skater boys Justin and Trevor, who I'm sure will be an ample source of pot humor for episodes to come; and I really don't know what to make of Nathan yet, except that he's clearly a bit psychotic and I'll continue to narc on him until his prestigious family bury me underneath the Blackwell Bigfoots' football field. Go Bigfoots! (Bigfeet?)
Anyway, I'll end by going through the decisions I made. They can be seen here:
I'm... somewhat glad that most of my decisions lined up with the majority. There's something comforting to know that people made the same choices (or mistakes) that I did. Obviously I'm going to rat on Nathan, because I just watched him shoot a girl in the chest and who the fuck knows when that'll happen where I can't rewind it. Narcing on a kid smoking jazz cigarettes in the bathroom? Dick move, sure, but some rich jerk waving a gun demanding GHB isn't something you can let go slightly. Looks like one in four of us decided Victoria wasn't going to get a fair shake, so that's cool. Keep living the college B-movie, guys. Kate looked like she needed help, not more scandalous imagery taken without her consent. I'm not sure how those choices work for the last one: wouldn't you have had to come out of the closet (and boy I have to wonder if that wasn't foreshadowing) to intervene on Chloe's behalf for the first two options to be relevant? Wouldn't they add up to 37% if that were the case? Or is popping out of the closet somehow distinct from getting involved with the weed accusation? Anyway, I hid like a jerk because I figured Chloe would get in more trouble if I was there. She did seem insistent on me hiding, but I imagine she'd be pissed either way.
The minor ones aren't much to talk about. I didn't even see Ms. Grant. I rewound time as soon as that snow globe broke, like I did with most things that break or get destroyed (like David's files) because Max is too short. Yes, I saved the dead bird, I watched the Until Dawn playthrough. No, I didn't go through Dana's trash and pick up her used pregnancy test - which involves urine, if I know anything about those things - and look at it while she was in the room five feet away because who would do that? Besides 3% of people? The 50/50 on Daniel's portrait is curious though. I thought it was cute and innocuous and wanted to see his sketch, but now I'm paranoid that a lot of people went the same route and changed their decision because of something awful that happens in a later episode because of it.
Anyway, I'll drop the character study for the next episode and focus on the events. As I said during the lede, this first episode was fetching a data stick and table-setting. It's important to establish a setting like this while it's still peaceful and rational, give or take one superhuman ability to rewind time, and get a feel for the cast before they start getting killed off horribly. Wait, maybe I'm confusing Life is Strange with the Walking Dead?
Episode 2: Out of Time
This episode was almost as throwaway, though it did build to a thrilling climax as Kate prepared to take the big leap into Jesus's arms because of her constant bullying and personal humiliation over the viral vid, which still sounds like a bunch of make-outs rather than anything more salacious as first-base or further. I guess it didn't take much to completely mortify her, though I'm also glad that the game erred on the side of being less sleazy. Most of the chapter was spent impressing Chloe with the time powers, while also ably demonstrating that they have a limit and Max's health is on the line. I've been getting strong Donnie Darko vibes since this started, and I'm worried that the final big rewind will involve rewinding the entire game with the possible result of killing Max through some kind of brain tumor. Yep, I'm already speculating, though all the pieces fit: best friend/love interest in life-threatening peril; interacting with awkward teenagers and possibly-murderous peers with as much grace as the hero can manage; mysterious powers and unexplained phenomena; and an envisioned "end of the world" deadline that looms throughout.
As before, here are the decisions I made:
I still think that the Nathan accusation is a game of Hearts: once you break the seal, you best go all in. If I pick the "blame Nathan" option every time it appears, I'm hoping it'll lead to enough evidence to get past his family connections. It might cause a lot more trouble than it's worth though; I'm not sure how the game intends to play out his villainous role. Maybe he's being manipulated? I blew off Kate because Chloe was threatening to walk out, though I suppose I shouldn't have worried. Since half the chapter was spending time with Chloe in her junkyard hideaway, I doubt the game will have skipped all of that out because she was pissy about taking a call. No, I did not shoot the drug dealer and fellow human being because this isn't Battlefield Hardline and Max is not Lara Croft. I kinda assumed she wouldn't go through with it either way regardless. I was happy that I managed to talk Churchy La Femme down from that ledge: Max had lost her powers at this point for story reasons, and it was a barrage of multiple-choice "say the right thing" dialogue options. Good thing I spent some time snooping around her room during the early parts of that chapter for clues: learning her dad and sisters were cool to her, while her mom and aunt were anything but and learning that she doesn't care for the judge-y parts of the Bible but big on the whole forgiving and atonement parts. There's been a few cases where you had the chance to learn incidental details about characters by snooping through their rooms, but this was the first time it paid off beyond character-building. Also: heck yeah I blamed Nathan. See above.
I'm already amused by the "water the plant" and "save Alyssa" running gags. I wonder if I'll get anything from keeping the plant alive and/or Alyssa free of garbage to the face for the whole five episodes? This chapter allowed me to talk to both of Victoria's cronies alone, and in both cases I tried mending bridges with them. As with Victoria, I'm betting the farm on them not being so bad, though their pushing Kate to the brink of annihilation will probably not soften their personalities at all. I told Warren where to stick his giant ape movies because a marathon at a drive-through sounded super sketchy (why always a drive-through, Warren? So Max can give you a handy in the backseat between Statue of Liberty scenes?) but I felt bad enough about it that I later helped him with his experiment. I'm actually trying to figure out if I can hook him up with Brooke, or if that just happens anyway if you rebuff his advances enough times. They'd be cute together! I didn't interrupt the Rachel x Chloe graffiti, because it seemed super dickish and needy and my Maxine don't play that way. I didn't know tampering with the railtracks was a thing? That looked to be a tense puzzle with only one solution, at least I thought. And yep, I once again excoriated Nathan and his behavior to as many ears that would listen. That weasel's going down.
I'll keep these up for as long as I have chapters to go. If I play something else tomorrow, though, you'll know why. These episode appraisals are a lot more work.
Well, Castle in the Darkness didn't get a whole lot worse difficulty-wise. The aptly-named Torture Chambers and hunting for the well-hidden McGuffins that unlocked the final ending took some time, but I think I'd already seen the worst of it by the time I wrote up yesterday's Go! Go! GOTY! entry. Either that or I actually got better at the game, but let's not go crazy with crackpot theories or anything here. Needless to say, there'll be less kvetching about fake difficulty this time, though I've still got my eye on you CitD.
Oh jeez. When these things open up, it never ends well.
The game has some very mild RPG elements common to a lot of SpaceWhippers, and IGAvanias in particular, where you'll regularly find better armor and weapons as you proceed. They're sometimes out of the way, requiring some tricky platforming or a boss, but are almost always worth the extra effort. Besides, it's worth fighting every optional boss anyway for the max health boost. Castle in the Darkness might not have a map - which would be a grave offense for any SpaceWhipper were it not for the fact that the game is a very linear affair excepting the handful of dead-ends and breakable walls in each area - but it does exploration well. Well, in this case, would be approaching the idea of going off the beaten path in the same way the Souls series does where alternative roads tend to lead to very difficult and usually optional regions that the player has to either nut-up and tough out or make a mental note to return to that place when they're a bit stronger. (Man, did I really compare yet another game to the Souls series? Sorry. That's some ostensibly egregious video game writing.)
This is the NSFW boss. That's short for "NoSFerWatu." No, I just made that up.
The magic, meanwhile, is very conditional. The game cleverly sets the strength of any assigned spell - cast by charging the attack button for a while - to be equal to the player character's presently-equipped weapon. That means that every spell has the same damage output. What multiple spells provide you with, then, is a strategic smorgasbord for handling bosses and other tough enemies. The default fireball is useful for the first big bad of the game, the giant suit of armor that Vinny took some time defeating in the above Quick Look, but you'll soon find more and with them more options when prepping for the next big fight: a tornado attack that fires a scattershot of projectiles; a room-crossing laser beam that is easy to aim; a short-range shotgun blast of energy; a defensive ice shield that surrounds the player character; a quartet of soul projectiles that homes towards nearby enemies; etc. I stuck with the soul homing shot and the tornado for most of the game, but there are situations where the boss's weakspot can be hard to reach without a decent spell with the right spread of bullets. Oddly enough, it doesn't quite have the versatility of the 25+-year-old Mega Man games since you can't equip new weapons and spells on the fly, but the principle is similar. Designing bosses while regarding multiple possible strategies are how you inspire hope when the player crashes and burns with their standard equipment in the first fight - just equip something else and learn the patterns.
OK, so the game might've borrowed from Castlevania a bit more than anything else...
If you're down with masocore platformers, the type of game that feels like the entire design document just reads "u mad bro?", then Castle in the Darkness is a fine one of those. It's not quite as bad as Pid, 1000 Spikes or Super Meat Boy - I was able to get 100% completion after two days, though my patience was tested to its limits a number of times with the lousy checkpointing - but it's no walk in the park either. I suppose its biggest crime is that it feels very similar to all the other heavily-referential love-letters to a bygone gaming era with pixel graphics, absurd difficulty and/or SpaceWhipper elements. For that reason I'd perhaps suggest that it's not particularly essential if you're the type of weirdo to be rummaging through your 2015 backlog for last minute games to play before writing a GOTY list. Hypothetically speaking.
Hi Matt! Thanks for making this game! It was OK!
(P.S. How cocky is this piece of music for the Windy Ruins area of the game? If you don't follow, try listening to it side-by-side with the Final Fantasy III battle music. Maybe its just another level of reference...)
All right, so the three days we spent plumbing TheBUTT for treasure was more of a warm-up for Go! Go! GOTY! proper. Now that we're in December, it's time to get serious and switch things up with... a throwback Indie game filled with references and in-jokes that belongs to a genre that has long since fallen out of favor with the AAA industry. Oh. I guess I have a few of these this year? Castle in the Darkness is your run of the mill standard 2D side-scrolling platformer with a hint of SpaceWhipper that borrows liberally from numerous NES and SNES games to construct an overall experience that feels very familiar without also feeling too generic or too stale. Not an easy balance, but CitD (aw, that's not a funny acronym) handles it as well as can be expected. It's no Shovel Knight, but then very few games are.
There are more than one Monster Party references in this game. Most don't even have one. But then, most wouldn't go for such a deep cut.
Let's start with a strength, a weakness and then another strength. Classic compliment sandwich. As with almost every retro throwback, Castle in the Darkness is abundant in pixel art, though here it's actually all fairly decent. When the game throws large enemies at you, and it will do often, they all look and animate brilliantly with lots of little quirks that ably demonstrates the artist's style and attention to detail. I prematurely dismissed the game as being inferior to Yacht Club Games's ode to shovelry, but in the art department they're about neck and neck. I tend to think of pixel art the same way I do as anime: the strict conventions of the form tends to result in a lot of samey-looking mediocrity, but that makes the exceptional work stand out all the more. Pixel art has an additional problem, in that if you're focusing on smaller sprites there's only so much room for artistic flair. Not a whole lot you can do with a 16x16 pixel grid, though it's important for games like these that the player's hitbox is as minuscule as possible.
Ooh, a Yashichi. Guy's done his homework. But where's the Dopefish?
Because, yes, Castle in the Darkness is one of the many retro throwbacks that has incorrectly conflated "old-school" with "needlessly difficult". It does at least keep most of the asinine difficulty safely ensconced in some optional areas, and while the checkpointing ceases to be as generous after a short while, the player can upgrade their HP after defeating bosses and withstand a number of hits from enemies and traps before perishing. Well, unless they hit a spike. Or a stalactite. Or a stalactite that's falling on them, but only sometimes for whatever reason. There's a distinct lack of consistency with some of the traps in the game, though it's a good rule of thumb to avoid anything pointy. When you get to the aforementioned "harder optional areas" like House of Ruth or the Sunken Temple, the game suddenly decides to do away with "challenging but fair" and swerves straight into the muddy ditch of fake difficulty bullshit. This includes taking away checkpoints before bosses, forcing you to repeat half a dozen screens of traps and enemies before you can get a rematch; pits that require pixel-perfect jumps that you often need to cross twice before you can save; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poison seaweed that slowly drains your health (see below. Yep, the developer thought that would be a fun reference); and various other transgressions against the player experience for the sake of being a little tougher to complete. I despise fake difficulty, and it's putting this game in a very harsh light.
The "dead" turtles are a nice touch, at least. Still not sure why they had to put so much of it between the checkpoint and the boss *and* make it unavoidable. Seems like a dick move! Yup!
Here's the other compliment: Castle in the Darkness has a neat soundtrack. All right, fine, something a little more substantial than that: the game is clearly a one-person labor of love in the same way that Dust: An Elysian Tail or Undertale are. It feels like the non-team that built this game poured a lot of themselves into it, and it shows with a lot of the game's obscure little in-jokes, its secrets and its many varied, distinct and cool boss fights. It controls well, though the double-jump can be a little unresponsive at times, and deaths rarely feel unfair in the way masocore games with poor controls often make them seem. The concise controls assures the player that they have no-one to blame but themselves if they happen to faceplant into lava inches from the next save point, in other words. I'm presently hovering around 70% completion and presumably fairly close to the end, though I was fortunate enough to save up enough money for some powerful gear to make the last few bosses a little easier. Provided I don't keep running into insta-death spike gauntlets with no checkpoints - a.k.a. The Ryckert approach to scenario design - I imagine I'll have it beat tomorrow, though 100% might be a tall order. I'll have more to say about it then, including more on the RPG and SpaceWhipper elements and its versatile magic system. Toodles.
Hey guys, guess what I've still been playing? By happy coincidence, however, I appear to have reached the game's conclusion minutes before I was due to stop and write the day's entry. Funny how I broached the possibility of an anti-climactic ending, huh? In lieu of anything more in-depth, since I've exhausted almost all my talking points for an adventure game that can't include the story, specific puzzles or any of the jokes, here's a handful of additional observations about the game.
I didn't mention these so far, but the game has a number of wholly optional mini-games. These tend to involve little self-contained puzzles or contests against various opponents that sit outside the usual "find item/hotspot, use item/hotspot" inventory puzzle format. Possibly the developers of TheBUTT wanted to keep these elements independent for the same of its adventure game "purity", while throwing them in there for a bit of variety, a few jokey costumes and maybe an achievement or two. For example, you can play Nim against someone and win for an achievement and a key item, or if you can't be bothered trying to beat the AI at a sophisticated strategic game you can distract this person by pretending to play it while another character steals said item. Another instance involves moving around a maze in a turn-based fashion while evading an enemy and various traps - sorta like that new iOS Lara Croft Go game - but all it produces is a sexy exotic dancer costume for Nate (crossdressing is still an endless font of humor around these parts, it seems) that has no other purpose. I'm very much on board with making these mini-games optional; my only issue is that I missed a couple by moving the story ahead before I could try them out. If you're planning on playing this game yourself: feel free to play any of these mini-games as they appear, but don't be stressed if you can't beat them since they aren't necessary to progress. Seems like practical advice, if you ask me.
One of my favorite reactions to a "now collect all these" puzzle. Hey, she's had a long day and is in something of a parturient condition.
The game has an oddly episodic quality to it. I've talked about my somewhat confusing definition of episodic as it pertains to adventure games before: it simply means that it'll refresh the number of moving parts, often by dropping the player character(s) into a new area of the game, and closes off previous areas that have served their purpose to limit the number of hotspots the player has to worry about. Sometimes you'll progress through a door to have it close behind you, which at first seems restrictive but then comes as a relief because there's no need to ever go back. (I think adventure games are unique in this regard; if I get shut out of a place in an FPS or RPG or a SpaceWhipper in particular, I'm usually not going to be happy about it because I'll feel like I missed something valuable.) Anyway, what I mean in TheBUTT's case is that the game is comprised of various set-pieces, like Wilbur trying to solve the Headmaster's unreasonable tasks, and solving each one causes the story to suddenly lurch forward and present a new character solving new troubles. That's every adventure game, I'll grant you, but here the various set-pieces felt especially disjointed. Each one was largely unrelated to the last, and while the game had a central ongoing plot it rarely seemed to intrude until you'd solved everything that needed to be done for that particular area and let the story take over again. The game never dipped in quality, fortunately, but this sort of disjointedness did make it seem a little interminable at times. Made it hard to judge how close you were to the end too, given how often new and unexpected developments would occur: the only reliable yardstick is the game's achievement list, most of which are arbitrarily handed out after milestone puzzles.
I never did encounter a game-breaking bug, but the minor ones that kept popping up got weirder and weirder. At one point, I clicked on some background dressing with Critter only for him to start talking in Ivo's voice. Turns out it was possible to bring her to the same location, though she wasn't in my party at the time, so hearing her suddenly pipe up about the architecture was a little disturbing. Animation issues would frequently warp characters around, sometimes replacing them where others were standing, so when the game decides to show a montage-esque passage of time with characters warping around the screen, it took a moment to register that the game wasn't screwing up again. I swear one of the VAs forgot to do their voice for a specific character and started talking like a different one instead for a few lines. Really unusual stuff, and coupled with the abrupt ending I suspect the game was shoved out of the door before it could be fully polished. It is an immense adventure game, in its defense, and it didn't look like the art or script took a hit during its production time so maybe this is a "no harm, no foul" situation. If frequent minor bugs are a dealbreaker for you, though, here's my official heads up.
A book written in the mysterious language of Lorem Ipsum.
My opinion on TheBUTT really hasn't changed since yesterday. It's still a worthy purchase for any adventure game fan, both for its quality and for its value for money in terms of length. The ending was abrupt but almost welcome after such a long game, and it left more than a few cliffhangers behind for a possible sequel to explore. I genuinely believe that this could be one of those adventure games that would benefit from the modern Telltale episode-based system: its numerous disembodied scenarios are practically built that way already, and the game gets a lot of mileage out of recurring characters and running gags that would befit an episodic format where you wouldn't forget who everyone was because it had been years since the last installment. Plus, it's the sort of setup that can keep a smaller developer solvent as they work on successive episodes. Still, there's probably downsides too. It's not my place to dictate how The Book of Unwritten Tales franchise moves forward after this, but I hope they consider it. It'd be a shame to wait another three to six years to see everyone in Aventasia again.
Yep, we're still here. Since I left off yesterday, I've made some considerable progress through the newest catastrophe to hit Adventasia (I didn't name it), though I have no idea how far through the game I actually am. The game generally doesn't follow a conventional three act structure, given its habit of regularly switching between its multiple protagonists. Wilbur's been doing most of the heavy-lifting, but I quite like the little dork so I don't mind.
I went over the game's mechanics last time, though there wasn't a whole lot to say given that the game deliberately sticks to genre mores so it can just as frequently subvert them. Lots of hotspot hunting, inventory investigating and dialogue tree dilemmas to suss out. The game makes all these aspects more palatable, as I discussed last time, so I've not hit too many brick walls so far. It respects the player's time, which is always a game design philosophy I encourage.
The intent was to dedicate most of this update to the game's central characters:
Captain Nate Bennet, the roguish human... well, rogue, who has left behind his assertive, independent love interest - the Elven Princess Ivo - for reasons that are as yet unexplained, but I suspect it involves getting the wrong idea about trying to impress her with status and wealth when she's never cared about anything like that. The game's spent the least amount of time with him so far, dedicating half of his first real chapter to The Critter trying to outsmart an ape bartender.
Ivo's more the standard subversive (yes, I realize that's an oxymoron) heroine who despairs of the restrictive role of a princess and once again escapes her Elven utopia to seek the solution to a delicate problem. Ivo's main strength and main weakness as a character is that she's a straight-woman in a land of idiots and eccentrics: by giving her a ridiculous problem to solve and a dominating mother to be neurotic about, she's rendered a bit more human (so to speak) and sympathetic here.
Everyone's gnomey homie Wilbur Weathervane is, of course, still a wizard and is stuck teaching the next generation of mages despite knowing next to nothing about the craft.
The Critter is still The Critter and the Chewbacca to Nate's Solo. It doesn't so much speak as emote in gobbledegook, stores items in its gullet and interacts with objects in a way most humans/humanoids would not. As with most comic relief characters I find a little of that guy goes a long way, though his antics do remind me of my beloved slapstick Gobliiins at times.
The game's story gets more complicated from there, continually jumping character perspectives as they frequently prevent disasters only to trigger even bigger ones, and suffice it to say it'd be too much to summarize to get to where I'm at in Chapter 4 even if I wanted to spoil the intermediate story beats for everyone, which I don't.
Don't trust time-travelling books. What is this, EGA graphics? CGA graphics? I can't go back to that again.
I'll say there's been an equal number of highlights and rough spots so far. Some incongruous reference and meta humor aside, the game still has a sharp wit behind its dialogue and puzzle design. One such puzzle involves currying the favor of the four creation gods, long-forgotten and now trapped in statues lost deep underground. They happen to be the God of Stories, the Goddess of Art, the God of Jokes and the God of Riddles: essentially, the four pillars that make up this game. Likewise, the NPCs are still fun to talk to - I met Vinny's favorite, the janitor troll - and the puzzles still strike the right balance of difficult to figure out without being too obtuse for the sake of artificially lengthening the game. However, there was one particular sequence where I had to literally trial-and-error the multi-step operation of a large steam-powered machine that threw me for a loop. It seemed like such a poorly designed puzzle that I almost wanted to check online afterwards to see if there was some hinted-at, preferred solution I was missing other than brute forcing it over and over: given Wilbur's "gnome advice" on the necessity of hitting buttons on big machines until they work, I suspect that brute force was the intentional path all along. Likewise, though the aforementioned Gods and the quests to gain their favor were intelligent for the most part, the riddles the Riddle God gave you were lifted right out of The Hobbit. I mean, I was playing a member of a diminutive fantasy race challenging someone who liked riddles in a dark cave, but I didn't expect the homage to be the entire puzzle. The fact that the God of Stories purposefully let me off with any old claptrap the dialogue tree could construct just because it wanted the game's story to continue almost made up for it.
There's also the bugs. There's a lot of weird yet commonly-occurring problems with dialogue interrupting or skipping and playable characters walking around endlessly in circles to find the right flag ("Wait... here? No, here. This spot is good for talking."). At some points the audio sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, and hotspots would occasionally remain after the item they pertained to had already been collected. There hasn't been anything game-breaking yet, nothing that would necessitate reloading an earlier save - the game also auto-saves, mercifully, so that means I won't have to worry about a Syberia repeat where the game went batshit nuts, crashed and I lost an hour of progress. Still, there's always the dread that one of these many minor glitches might upgrade itself to a major one. This sort of jank seems to follow every game made in Europe for whatever reason. This game is certainly ambitious, so it could well be that we Euros tend to overreach a lot.
Did I mention how useful the "show all hotspots" button is?
We'll have one more update of TheBUTT tomorrow. Whether I finish the game or not, I'll have exhausted everything I have to say about it. Barring some awful anticlimax ending or one of those major glitches I was talking about, this is still a safe recommend for anyone who likes their throwback adventure games to be gorgeous, lengthy and perhaps a bit on the sly and satirical side.
Welcome to a fresh new series of Go! Go! GOTY! I took the liberty of already preparing an introduction to this feature for newcomers: the link is at the bottom of this entry and is also where you'll find links to every subsequent update to follow. Here's hoping I play enough games for a moderately-packed GOTY awards blog this time around, albeit one that's going to look mighty odd without any AAA games on it (besides Super Mario Maker (spoilers?)).
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is the first on the Go! Go! GOTY chopping block this time around, partly because half of this list is adventure games (hey, I like adventure games) and partly because TheBUTT was - wait, really? OK, sure - TheBUTT was one of my most highly anticipated releases going into 2015. I adored the first The Book of Unwritten Tales, though I didn't get around to the Critter Chronicles spin-off game to my chagrin. TheBUTT came out in February of this year, so it's likely a lot of folk will have forgotten about it by now, if they played it at all. Adventure games appear to have settled snugly back in their niche again, supplanted by these new "walking simulators", hidden object games and those that switch out the inventory mashing with more contemporary Manga-esque brainteasers as per a Layton or a Puzzle Agent. Still, between TheBUTT and Technobabylon and Life is Strange and the seventeen discrete licensed series Telltale put out this year, I anticipate this genre will get recognition in some "Best Story" award categories at the very least. (Counting on you for some adventure game GOTY mentions, @vinny, though I realize the fight for a list spot is a doomed one.)
This game looks amazing. Yet, somehow, it's not so taxing on this weak-ass PC that I have to turn the graphics down. I won't question it.
The game itself, then. Any neophytes joining us will probably recognize from the screenshots that this is the usual fantasy adventure: dragons, magic, elf princesses, that whole biz. What TheBUTT and its predecessor TheBUTO does different is laugh at it. It's self-referential and self-deprecating in very much the same way as its most clear inspirations: the Simon the Sorcerer games, and to an equal extent the Discworld games. Equal parts satirical, spoofy and dedicated to sharp jokes and writing in spite of the genre fare, TheBUTT continues the tradition of being fairly amusing and a treat for anyone familiar with the genre conventions - and video game conventions, for that matter - that it's parodying. An example of this is when I was required to fish for an ingredient for a potion, only to have the character opine that she had zero experience fishing. Yet, arbitrarily, just trying it once gave her more insight into the sport of angling and, dutifully, the game informed you that you'd gone up one level in fishing expertise. The player could then keep fishing, watching this level counter go up one per time, or go talk to another character to instantly jump to level 15 after being informed that using bait is usually a good idea. They had a similar joke in the first game, where a character had to reforge a quest-important sword on an anvil but needed to practice by creating a hundred useless copper pots for the necessary blacksmithing experience, which the game mercifully skips past. That joke was more specifically aimed at Skyrim, but TheBUTT liked it enough to bring it back.
Even if you're not a fan of referential humor, though the game's subtle enough about it to not manatee-joke its way through every scenario, it still looks incredible and is filled with all the modern conveniences you'd want out of an adventure game. Interacting with hotspots is as easy as clicking on one to look at it and then having that command change to something more context-appropriate, like a spanner icon for something you can interact with or a grab icon for an item you can pick up. Every hotspot on the screen can be made visible by holding the space bar down, and hotspots will vanish once they no longer have anything to offer you in terms of interaction or observational quips. If a hotspot still lingers after you've interacted with it a few times, that means it's still necessary for a puzzle. You might raise the point that this renders the game too easy, but I've still hit a few roadblocks with some of the game's earliest puzzles so I'd say the puzzle difficulty is as strong as it needs to be while still cutting through a lot of the trial and error BS that can make or break a game from this genre. The voice-acting's great, mostly, and in spite of a few typos here and there (the game's German in origin, so I give it some leeway here) the writing's equally good, whether it's being goofy, or sarcastic, or (rarely) serious.
This is about as overt as the reference humor has gotten so far. There's at least three in this picture, maybe more.
Anyway, in terms of progress I'm just about where the Quick Look left off, in Wilbur's first chapter of the game. I don't intend to get too deep into what's happening story-wise for the sake of spoilers, so I'll save the summary of the early parts of the game and what the protagonists have been up to for tomorrow's update. Until then, I hope your own attempts to cram in some last minute possible-GOTY entries goes equally smoothly this month.
Welcome ST besties to my Atari party as we once again plumb the depths of the Atari ST's crypt for, I dunno, skeletons. This analogy got pretty dark real quick. I'd do the usual pre-amble bit but I'll be starting a weeks-long daily series in just a few ticks and I need to save all my primo material for that. You know, food I've been eating (surf and turf! It was my stepsisters' birthday), games I'm looking at but not actually playing yet because I have this whole Steam daily series to work on (Fallout 4!) and wiki projects I've been progressing (PC Engine library of 1989! This one here's a shoot 'em up featuring one of those gyroids from Animal Crossing!). It's all a rich tapestry for sure, but let's press on.
Seconds Out
It occurs to me that I've been whitewashing the Atari ST's past of late. When starting ST-urday, I wanted to do the mostly-unknown platform a solid and really show off what was best about owning an Atari ST: its status as an affordable, accessible proto-PC on the cutting edge of the 16-bit generation. The ST's strengths were always in its mouse-and-keyboard driven games: point-and-click graphic adventures from Sierra, LucasFilm and ICOM Simulations; RPGs from Silmarils, FTL Games and SSI; strategy games from Gremlin Graphics, Bullfrog and MicroProse. What I've been skipping over is the vast amount of crap, most of it either shoddy Arcade ports or attempts to emulate popular action console games of the era with limited success. The many "The Great Giana Sisters"es of the Atari ST library. We've looked at the ports before now - the Double Dragon double-bill was eye-opening, to say the least - but let's look at one of those imitators.
Seconds Out is a 1988 boxing game from the small UK studio Tynesoft, a company named for the river that runs through the northeast of England. As will become evident quickly from the following screenshots, it's biting the steez of Nintendo's Punch-Out!!. Downright gnawing on it, even. The original Arcade version, mind, not the better-known NES game that was once endorsed by Kid Dynamite himself (who is now solving mysteries on an animated Adult Swim show that I've been meaning to check out). The Arcade version introduced mainstays like Bald Bull, but rather than having a tiny Mac at the bottom of the screen, the Arcade version had a regular-sized Mac presented in wireframe so the player could clearly see the expressive, well-animated and eccentric opponents in front. That's also what Seconds Out is going for.
Still, if making a game that's a bit like another game is a crime, then half the industry's getting thrown in the chokey. No, Seconds Out's chief offense is that it's terrible. The designers only got as far as "we should copy this Nintendo boxing game" without realizing how integral aspects like dodging or blocking or finding and exploiting weaknesses in the opponent is to the overall experience. Seconds Out, in comparison, is more of a button-spammy mess. It's one case in a great many where Atari ST owners were presented a sub-par clone of something popular and highly acclaimed on a different system, and snapped it up without checking it over to see if it was a lemon first. Of course, you can get burned the other way around too: the Super Nintendo versions of Theme Park and Worms are, well, not quite the games their PC versions were.
Welcome to Seconds Out! This Bryan guy? I've no idea who he is!The main character is Marco, this coked out fellow on the left. Eh, it was the 80s. Our opponent for the first fight is the customary "lull the player into a false sense of security" weakling with the fitting name. I'd say he has a glass jaw, but that thing looks more like a kayak.There's a lot of things I love about the presentation of this game. Like how my hair has wireframe highlights, or some of these faces in the crowd. That woman on the front row who's had her eyes stitched shut, perhaps, or whatever face that guy on the back left is making.Anyway, this screen is fairly straightforward. We have our energy/health bars, there's a timer for the round and there's a power gauge that increases with every punch that connects from my character, but drops with every punch that connects from the opponent. I wasn't able to tell if filling the gauge unlocks some kind of star punch equivalent or it just made me hit harder in general. The game only has one button, after all.Joe Weed is far easier than the rest of the game's opponents. I could barely knock down the next guy, let alone knock them down three times in the first round for this instant KO. Medusa seems stoked about this victory though!As per Punch-Out tradition, our next opponent is a vaguely racist caricature. Jones is a lot stronger than the last guy, but he's still kind of a chump. If he takes too much damage, he'll start moving away from you to recover health. That's a wuss move, dude.His "special", which doesn't have a tell like it does in Punch-Out!!, is this twin-punch thing that looks like he's trying to do a double fistbump. It's surprisingly gentle looking, given how much it hurts.Between rounds, your trainer tries to rouse you from your near-unconsciousness. It's one of those corner-time mini-games where you have to press all the directional buttons rapidly to restore a small amount of health. Naturally, your opponent also receives a big health recovery boost.Of course, there are times where I get lucky with a punishing combination attack that the opponent can't escape from. I say "combination attack" as if there was some skill involved, but I really just hit the punch button over and over. After three rounds, it goes to a points decision. We're both celebrating a bit early.Jones can't believe it and neither can I. He knocked me down about five times to my one. He did run away a lot though; that doesn't seem too sportsmanlike. They account for that in points decisions, right?Next opponent is... this strung-out hippie. Looks like I'll be trading blows with Trader Joe's.This guy's kinda adorable in his camel tank top. Makes you wonder how he got this far in the rankings.Oh right, because he headbutts people. This is Hagman's main attack, and the source of his "Hammerhead" nickname, and will knock you on your ass in seconds with enough of them.Like so. This fight is the first to really give you a hard time, mostly because he regenerates the lost energy from attacks almost immediately while Glasgow-kissing you to the canvas over and over.His victory was... decisive. Comprehensive, even. Was the ref even looking?And then, after a win, your opponents inexplicably grow a few extra feet. Maybe I'm just delirious from all the head trauma. Either way, this is where Marco's journey ends.
There's a lot to defend on the Atari ST but its action games are inexcusable, at least for the most part. It was capable of some really nice-looking and well-playing Arcade ports, Taito games especially, and there were a handful of platformers and shoot 'em ups unique to the Amiga/ST that were almost as good as anything the NES had to offer. The majority were like the above, however: superficial MS-Paint lookalikes with barely any of the substance of the games they aped. Still, it's too bad I couldn't get past the headbutting guy; I'm sure the later boxers get even weirder.
Greetings all Rocket Colleagues and Downwell-wishers, to this year's Go! Go! GOTY!: A late-year daily feature from yours truly as I madly try to fit in as many 2015 games left sitting in my backlog before the inevitable GOTY deliberations occur. Through a combination of magnanimous sources and financially-irresponsible decisions, I've just this week amassed a fair number of 2015 games to explore before a point sometime close to Xmas when I will once again start drawing JC Denton behind a lectern, giving out pretend awards to vaguely recognizable stickpeople. As is my wont.
Enough about that Mento guy, though: Go! Go! GOTY! is more about letting others in on what they may have missed this year, as a fair number of the games on this list are real radar-dodgers. (I have to double-check them all to make sure they were actually 2015 releases.) So if you're curious about a specific game I'm looking into, be sure to stop by and see if it's worth your time. I'll be linking to the site's own Quick Looks for each of the games featured, if you need a refresher and/or a second opinion.
I'll be using the same rules as this year's May Mastery:
I'll try to finish every game I start, unless they really don't agree with me or they aren't the sort of games with completion states.
After three consecutive days of updates for one game I'll move onto another, regardless of how close I am to beating it. I'll keep working on those as I play through the others, but unless something drastically changes in the late-game I'll have no doubt said everything I needed to after three updates.
I'll be stopping around December 20th so I can write up a GOTY rundown before the Holidays start. I'm hoping to hit around ten extra 2015 games before that mark.
The purpose of this particular blog right here is to consolidate all the Go! Go! GOTY! entries made so far into one convenient table, updated every time a new one goes up. Here's the contents page thus far:
Welcome, all and pre-Sunday sundry, to another episode of ST-urday. I usually fill this top part with ramblings about what I've been up to this week, but I've really not been up to much. I've been intending to play the presently final Ratchet & Clank game in its series (that would be Ratchet & Clank Nexus) as something to fill the gap between now and December 1st, upon which date I intend to relaunch Go! Go! GOTY! and bash through as many unplayed 2015 games as possible. It's presently a meager list of three - The Suikoden-sorta comedic RPG Citizens of Earth, the cute but deadly action-platformer throwback Castle in the Darkness and the amusing graphic adventure game The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (really enjoyed the first) - but I'm hoping to add to it when the Thanksgiving Steam sales start sometime next week. I received some birthday Steam vouchers that have been burning a hole in my digital wallet, and I have my eye on more than a handful of possibilities: Axiom Verge, Titan Souls, Ori and the Blind Forest, The Magic Circle, The Beginner's Guide, Divinity: Original Sin (though that might wait until I have a current-gen console), Life is Strange, Rebel Galaxy, Technobabylon, Cradle, SOMA, and so many more. 2015 was definitely a good year for Indies.
Needless to say though, my GOTY list will be interesting without any PS4/XB1 console games (or their PC equivalents, which are a forlorn hope on this system) on it. We're talking a Wii U game and a bunch of Steam Indies at the moment. Maybe I'll get to shine a spotlight on a few smaller titles that were otherwise overshadowed by the big releases of this year. The alternative is to focus less on new releases and just rate the games I finally got around to in 2015, which include a lot of fantastic games like Yakuza 3, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Burnout Paradise, Shantae: Risky's Revenge and a whole bunch of other stuff I should've played years ago.
On the Giant Bomb Wiki front, I'm happy to announce that I completed my last project: sprucing up the game pages for the infamous kitty-litter tray that was the Atari Jaguar. Most of the work had already been done long before I started - largely by a user named xdgx, who did most of their work around the inception of the wiki in 2008 - but there were a few skeleton pages and header images to fix up. My present stopgap project is to go back and revamp all the NES/Famicom pages from 1983-1985, some of which I created or added to but years before I started getting serious about the wiki. There's various style issues with those pages and, of course, the ever-present (non)issue of them not having header images. After that it'll be some time working on the early PC Engine library and then, finally, the launch of Wiki Project Super '95. That's another 400+ page project that won't be done overnight, to say the least.
Drakkhen
I was apprehensive about covering this one. As with Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, which I looked at on ST-urday a little while ago, it's a continental European RPG that didn't feel like playing ball (or couldn't, due to licensing issues) with the various games building on the D&D ruleset and decided to go its own way. Drakkhen might be one of the least intuitive RPGs out there, but it's also packed with a deep amount of lore, some clever ideas, a very efficient if chaotic combat system and a lot of mysteries that would be more fun to explore and solve if the interface hadn't already created so many extra question marks to deal with on top of that. It's like trying to solve a murder case with the QWOP guy: you want to puzzle out the whodunnit, but first you have to puzzle out, like, basic movement. Drakkhen was definitely a game that continually bamboozled a younger me, even if I eventually figured a lot of it out. The controls, at least.
Drakkhen was developed by Infogrames, back when they were a moderately-sized French developer who, like their contemporaries Delphine Software and Silmarils, would often take a lot of risks on high-concept ideas. Nowadays, of course, they're playing it safe to a fault trying to relaunch numerous Atari properties as Atari SA to varying degrees of critical disdain. (Whatever did happen to that weird Asteroids base management reboot?) Drakkhen was a minor hit for them, and was fortunate enough to see a Japanese-developed SNES conversion from Kemco-Seika that confused and frustrated an entirely different audience of players.
To succinctly summarize the story of the game: The last great dragon is slain by a particularly foolhardy knight, plunging the world into a post-magical apocalypse, as the Dragon Gods were the ones responsible for the creation of the world and left their scions, the great dragons, as custodians of its magical power. The various peoples of this world have been dependent on magic over technology, since one was a lot easier to figure out than the other, that the sudden lack of it had some unfortunate repercussions. A boat-load of pilgrims were swept off course when their wind magic suddenly ceased, leading them to a hidden land full of half-human/half-dragon folk named Drakkhen. The Drakkhen have an ancient prophecy that dictates that they will conquer the planet and exterminate the humans once they are no longer protected by magic. The humans that are in the land of Drakkhen, however, discover that their magic is working again. It's up to a small band of adventurers to prevent the spread of the Drakkhen forces and possibly restore the world's magic in the process.
Welcome to Drakkhen! Because this is a serious, contemplative CRPG, the intro begins with a ten-foot-tall dragon prince carving the game's creators onto a stone tablet with his eye lasers.The game has an unusual character creation process. I don't just mean because they have an education statistic instead of wisdom and charisma, but rather that it takes advantage of the fact that the Atari ST version of the game came on three disks. If you were to play the first disk, which has the above intro, it would prompt you to insert the second disk which starts the game with the default characters. By loading the second disk first, you can create and save your own team to a blank data disk, and insert THAT instead after the intro prompts a disk change. Convoluted, but then creating your own team is a fairly superficial thing: you have to have one of each of the four classes anyway, so there's not a whole lot of wiggle room for customization.These four, in fact: the melee heavy Fighter/Amazon, the agile Scout, the walking band-aid that is the Priestess and the nuke-ready Magician. The characters all start off with nothing equipped, but they have some basic starting equipment in their inventories to put on. (The female Scout actually starts topless in this version of the game, so I made sure to equip her first before taking the screenshot. That's mainland Europe for you; they're a liberated bunch.)The game is all in real-time. That doesn't just refer to the combat, but to everything. The game has an internal timer that regulates a gradual day/night cycle (still fairly unusual in 1989). It also means that if you stand out in the open with your party for long enough, enemies start showing up to fight you. You'll also meet them roaming around too. Combat in the game is automatic: you simply have to click the sword icon on the bottom right and everyone fights hostiles in the vicinity. They default attack with their readied weapons, but you can switch the magic-users to spells.You'll take a lot of damage early on, and though the game doesn't really say it, you should probably run away from anything bigger than that tiny blue garter snake we just massacred. At least early on, when your equipment and levels are low. It's an unfortunate aspect of the game's random encounter engine: it will throw all kinds of powerful shit at you at all times. Saving frequently is also a good idea.Otherwise this happens. They really rub it in, huh? A little more dire than "You and all of your friends are dead."Anyway, by hitting the Enter key, the team returns (oh I get it) to the bottom of the screen and you can move around a fully 3D landscape as a team. Roads are the best bet, since enemy encounters are low and they all tend to lead to important places. Water is a bad idea, since your adventurers sink like rocks and will be dead in seconds if you don't move away.You, uh, might also want to avoid bumping into things. Something doesn't like it. Ditto with the night sky: constellations will come down and attack you, and there's not a lot even high-level parties can do against those guys besides disintegrate a little more slowly. Even if the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin here is a pretty shitty thing to have happen to you, it does demonstrate the game's intriguing sense of mystery I was talking about earlier. Wouldn't you want to know what this thing's deal was? Or, purrhaps more purrtinently, how to kill it?So this is the first location of the game, a keep in the mid- Goddammit, did that moat shark just eat my scout? I hate moat sharks.So this is the first location of the game, a keep in the middle of the wilderness close to where the player starts. It, like all the castles in the game, houses one of the game's bosses: the Drakkhen Princes and Princesses, who are far bigger and stronger than the rest of their species. This one has protected itself with magical forcefields, though I suspect they're just here to keep out wandering riff-raff like ourselves. Activating the wrong symbol on the walls summons some low-strength hunchback dudes. In fact, it might be a good idea to accidentally get this part wrong a few times, since it guarantees a fairly easy encounter and some useful cash. Most of the encounters outside, in comparison, are less than survivable.Dropping the forcefields means you can now send one or all of your team out exploring the castle. it's worth noting that the game doesn't let you save inside castles: You have to return to the entrance, leave, save and then come back in to find the whole place has been restored. This also comes in useful though, as it also respawns all the items you can steal. Remember the shield on the wall on the previous screenshot? It's mine now.It's not a bad idea to grab some items from the surrounding rooms, leave and come back in to fill up on valuable equipment for when we reach a vendor. I'd also like to heal up, but I never did figure out how healing spells worked in this game. You seem to regenerate health very slowly, so I usually ran away from enemies whenever my health was low.I've sent my Amazon out solo since my Scout isn't feeling too hot. Your team will follow the leader wherever they go, but you can manually select someone who isn't leader (it's indicated by the red light on the left between the paper dolls) and they'll be on their own. Splitting the party has its uses: it means not having to corral this bunch through a series of doors, but it can also leave you vulnerable. Both your single explorer and the team you've left behind, should something randomly encounter them.Aw crap. Maybe I won't go in here.Uh, thanks old dude? These hint NPCs just magically teleport in and out when you're exploring or outside for some useful lore and tidbits. So far none of them have asked me if I want to play money making game or talked about secrets in the eastmost peninsula.The game uses jade coins as its currency, and it has an odd way of distributing cash: every character has their own treasure total, their own inventory and their own XP gauge. XP only goes to the one that killed the monster, which can put your two melee characters a little ahead of the others, but the player can fix this by beating a monster half to death and letting the two mages finish it off by telling the warriors to stop their attack. Kinda awkward, right?This doorway just took a bite out of me! Hey, when is a door not a door? When it's a jaw! Yeah, now you know the pain my Scout feels.This is Prince Hordtkhen, the Prince of Earth. Each of the Drakkhen royals have an elemental domain, and it determines where in the world they are. Other elemental Princes/Princesses are in less hospitable parts of the world, where the encounters are tougher and the terrain less survivable. It's an effective way of "gating" what is essentially an open-world.If you try attacking him now, there won't be anything left of you. Not even vapor. But you can talk to him to get a little side-quest instead. The game's main questline is gently goading you towards a fairly boss-free route for right now, while you're still vulnerable and squishy. Before we try to figure out where East is (there's no map or compass in this game, though the sun still works the same way as it does here), you can grab these powerful armored pants from the Prince before leaving. Not everyone can equip them, but you can leave and go back in a few times to get as many pairs as you need. Sort of an exploit, but you need every advantage in this game. From here, there's Inns (these allow you to heal up and possibly buy/sell from merchants), Shrines (shrines are instant heals and can resurrect fallen members, who appear as crossed swords and don't earn XP while dead) and the aforementioned castle of the Princess. For now, though, I think I'll leave off here.
Drakkhen's one of those games where half the reward is in figuring it out. It's brutally unfair, even if you know how the game's systems work, and the UI leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly singular in its genre though, and that went a long way back then when every other CRPG was either Wizardry-inspired dungeon-crawler or a D&D Gold Box turn-based strategy game.
There are also precious few games as intimidating as Drakkhen. A game where you get attacked by enormous panther heads by bumping into gravestones, or colossal flying space caterpillars by having the temerity to look up while walking around at night. The land of Drakkhen really isn't for the faint of heart. Maybe that's why it appealed to so many; there's definitely something to challenging the insurmountable. Or maybe people just liked it because it looked incredible for 1989 and had a wide range of novel features they hadn't seen before. Or maybe because it has giant dragons with laserbeam eyes, who knows? That last one alone was probably enough for tiny baby Mento.
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