SingedFrostLantern's recent activity

  1. Comment on Announcing the Tildes Backlog Burner event for November 2024: Shrink your unplayed games list this coming month! in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Joining for the first time so I'm posting to make sure I commit myself to this. I'm fairly weak to deals and bundles, so I've got quite the selection between Steam, GOG, Epic freebies, itch.io...

    Joining for the first time so I'm posting to make sure I commit myself to this. I'm fairly weak to deals and bundles, so I've got quite the selection between Steam, GOG, Epic freebies, itch.io bundles, a Switch, and a PS4 given by my brother after he got a PS5; guess I'll also make it a personal goal to rotate between them.

    Decided to go for Standard/Flow: Standard because the backlog is huge, Flow for a little more freedom in the "just do it" sense.

    SingedFrostLantern's Bingo Card (Standard/Flow)
    Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25
    Humor Connection Synthesis Morality Progress
    Harmony Love Erosion Causality Trust
    Pride Resistance ★ Wildcard Justice Sound
    Fragmentation Change Choice Community Light
    Threshold Symmetry Isolation Happiness Fear
    4 votes

  2. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Midnight Fight Express Take a top-down beat-'em-up with decent mechanics. Add a skill tree where you gain a skill point after every level for a sense of customization and progress until the tree...

    Midnight Fight Express

    Take a top-down beat-'em-up with decent mechanics. Add a skill tree where you gain a skill point after every level for a sense of customization and progress until the tree is maxed out after finishing the game. Mix in a typical plot about the main character being guided by a drone into going after underworld figures with bits of humor sprinkled in and finish with a ton of optional challenges for replay value.

    Now ruin the entire recipe with hitscan guns and the occasional instakill in a game with zero health recovery. All they had to do was not do that or make the bullets a projectile or even just add more warnings on gun enemies to make them noticeable. Instead, it's a lot of unavoidable chip damage and the solution against gun enemies is to eliminate one and take their gun to shoot the other gun enemies. In a beat-'em-up. I dunno, the game isn't bad, but this is a pretty big sticking point for the entire thing and it's hard to look at it favorably for it.

    TOEM

    It has the vibes of an "explore and help people out" game with a photography focus, but I don't think that's quite accurate which is making me biased when I was thinking it'd be more A Short Hike. Instead of being open world, it's split into regions and rooms within those regions which lead to a much different feel on account of the backtracking and riddle solving in order to get places instead of wandering wherever. This region splitting also makes it feel like disconnected levels rather than an actual built up world since there are few characters that actually travel between them. In addition, the quest system shows up as a checklist with the total quests for the area and the amount needed to head to the next region which makes the vibe more about 100% completion and talking to quest givers rather than leisure exploration. Certain quests also reward gear or new locations that is necessary to progress in the zone so you're tough out of luck if you can't solve it; case in point, I've beaten the game, but still don't have access to the 2nd half of the second zone because I can't find the last spinely brother who went somewhere warm apparently.

    Again, it's not bad, I did get a few hours of chill gameplay (with the occasional frustration over quest hints), but I went in with the wrong expectations, kinda like how my mom used to tell kid me that durian tastes like ice cream and I refused to eat it for quite a few years because of that superficial comparison.

  3. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Went through this week's Next Fest, had a busy week though so it's unfortunate that this post is pretty much on the last few hours. I do at least have my Top 5 though: Silly Polly Beast: My one...

    Went through this week's Next Fest, had a busy week though so it's unfortunate that this post is pretty much on the last few hours. I do at least have my Top 5 though:

    • Silly Polly Beast: My one pick from this fest. Stylish Horror with Twin-Stick Shooter/Side-Scrolling Action. Polly's a runaway teenager who burnt her orphanage down (her sister said she got the other kids out ahead of time. I don't believe that considering how many spirit hands were after Polly) and ends up in the Underworld where she has to make a pact to survive. There's just a distinctiveness, a purpose to its style that speaks out to me, like Polly being quite expressive despite being mute in cutscenes or when she's jumpscared. Gameplay has a basic melee combo (with a skateboard), dodge roll, a stealth mode based on proximity, and the guns which is where the horror influence is most felt. The game is relatively generous about item drops and subweapon refills, but with a low cap which generates tension from having to burn supplies to get through a rough situation and hopefully making it through with enough left for the next one. In particular, Polly's main weapon, the revolver, only reloads from dedicated fires which forces enemy prioritization and kiting in combat rooms. Definitely give it a go.
    • Meat-Grinder: Visual Novel. It's weird, it's crude; the protagonist is a failure of an assassin who's deep in debt and fees from resorting to mass-murdering collateral damage all the time, her robot assistant is named Adolf and has the mustache, the maid is a person who was turned into an actual horrific moe blob, it goes on and on. It is oddly compelling in spite (or because) of the shock humor, as if the creator earnestly put their soul out on display; the best example perhaps being the demo's little finale. The demo chapter itself is basically the meme "Are you tired of being nice? Don't you just want to go ape shitt"; Obi starts off trying to maintain her fast food worker job, ends up brutally killing her manager because of a bad day of customer service, goes back to her assassin roots, then reality hits her in the face when she remembers she has no skills or education and utterly mucks up her hit and barely succeeds at it. Back where she started, an unfulfilling job with tons of debt and personal risk. Food for the nihilistic edgelord part of the soul? Oh yes, absolutely. Oddly hopeful that Obi and her odd household managed to scrape by another day? At least to me.
    • Threefold Recital: Side-Scrolling Adventure, the kind with mini-games, investigations, and hidden objectives. Asian fantasy with 3 beastfolk protagonists, don't have much about the overall plot since it starts off in media res at the finale and then the demo only goes to chapter 1 end. I did vibe with it though and I liked the little chapter end scoreboard that shows how in-character you chose to act and how many objectives were fulfilled.
    • Guidus Zero: Real-Time Dungeon-Crawler/Traditional Roguelike, think Crypt of the Necrodancer but with less rhythm needed. The enemy attacks feel properly telegraphed along the grids, there's a little stamina bar for attack cancels and emergency rolls, special attack on cooldown, and relic synergies. Just everything in a neat little package.
    • Alice's World: Side-scrolling Horror with the player as a fourth wall entity. There's 2 layers to this; the first layer is the girl Alice going between her life as a sickly girl stuck at home who's taken care of by her brother and her finding herself in a wasteland in her sleep where she has to run and hide from monsters and her realities steadily glitching out as the player entity guides her on both fronts. The second layer is system who is adversarial to the player entity, judging you both as an unauthorized user of the computer and as someone who is playing a game and deliberately putting a young girl in danger. Interestingly, the Spec Ops: The Line defense gets used here; system argues that the right thing to do is to stop playing the game and the player entity gets to fire back about guiding Alice/playing through the game to its end and that it's on the game designers for being so sick about the scenario they set up.
    Other Stuff that seemed interesting
    • Garden of Witches: Top-down roguelike with the main character being a sewing witch who's beating some sense into the other witches so they can all get rid of the corruption. Basic melee attack combo, dodge roll, and 2 cooldown skills to take. I like the aesthetic, and there's all the little mid-run optimizations to figure out from what you have, though there isn't a mini-map which is frustrating for routing and you start off a little weak with some unfortunate beginning grinding for the MC to feel not so sluggish.
    • Deadzone Rogue: Sci-fi FPS Roguelike, the kind with ADS and room-by-room combat. Shoot robots in the head, elemental guns and passive perk synergies, etc, etc. Mostly the thing that strikes me here is how the macrogame skill tree can only be upgraded during a run and for 3 random traits at each station.
    • Urban Myth Dissolution Center: Pixel Art Supernatural Horror/Mystery Investigations. This comes with a pretty big disclaimer that the intro shows a pretty gross example of power abuse and extortion which the game brushes over; the titular Urban Myth Dissolution Center's Director has capital-V Vision and forcibly recruits the main character, a timid university student with some supernatural sense, by setting up his office and manipulating her into destroying a cursed artifact, revealing that he knows all her personal information, and then threatening to have debt collectors go after her if she doesn't work for him with the unsubtle intent of grooming her into becoming a supernatural investigator. Seriously gross. If you can stomach that, the game does have a neat pixel style and some detective gameplay, though the "fill in the blanks with the word choices" segments has obvious issues with getting the wrong answer due to different phrasing.
    Might keep an eye on, Might not
    • Card-en-Ciel: 3-mana Deckbuilding Roguelike with a Mega Man Battle Network grid, movement based on discarding cards. It's by Inti Creates so it has cards based on their franchises. It is a little odd though that a turn-based game would have QTEs when using [Action] cards to parry attacks and the scoring system is based on fighting as little as possible.
    • Mirage Noir: Otome game, with a detective lead and the 4 romance options being the hot-blooded gangster, sour prince, the kind cosplayer, and the hacker shut-in as their friend group tries to solve a conspiracy. It does have a little detective work, but the core is of course a dating sim.
    • Toads of the Bayou: Very Into The Breach inspired, though it's swamp-themed and the objective is protecting 1-2 buildings, the win con is defeating 8 foes/the boss, and pits/map edges deal +1 collision damage instead of being an instakill.
    • Undead West: Like a smaller scale Enter the Gungeon, though in black and white, simpler pixel style, and being a Western. Had an unfortunate issue where I had to unplug my controller in order to aim with the mouse.
    • Spirit X Strike: 3D Beat-Em-Up that feels like a playable cheesy over-the-top Kung Fu B-movie. Does it look good? No. Is it hype to dodge, parry, and unleash finisher after finisher into a crowd? Yes.
    • Mohrta: FPS, unlimited reserve ammo (at least for the revolver), and a mana system for the weapons' secondaries with mana drops from killing foes. Enjoyable enough.
    • The Chronos Event: Roguelike TPS based on powersliding everywhere, grabbing fresh guns off of defeated foes, and rewinding time to have your past timeline self deal damage and serve as a decoy. Listing all that out, it reads like it has Vanquish DNA in it.
    • Dimensionals: Turn-based Roguelike with increasing mana per turn. Pick 3 heroes, distribute mana efficiently to defend/attack, and pick the right synergies from relics and after-battle skill choices.
    • Strategem Lost: Turn-based tactics ala Fire Emblem, but with stylish character art and attack animations somewhat akin to Darkest Dungeon .
    • Memories of Bust: Deckbuilding Roguelike Blackjack. Reminded a little of The Robot from Dicey Dungeons, and they were my favorite character there so I did enjoy this.
    • To Kill A God: Roguelike ARPG, like Diablo, with the vast skill tree and nodes doubling as the map routing.
    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate: Action Roguelike with a Hades boon system. I grew up on TMNT 2K3 so I have a softspot for more turtles, though something about the gameplay and meta-grinding rubs me the wrong way.
    • Neon Blood: Cyberpunk investigation, though the walk speed is super slow, combat feels off-putting because the 2x2 UI for it is obviously Pokemon-based, and the QTE prompts are in neon green which blends in with the bar walls. By all means, I should take it off this list, but it's still fresh on my mind for some reason.
    1 vote

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Finished Bloodless and Laika: Aged Through Blood; both of them feel like games with a vision behind them, yet they also feel unsmooth in gameplay and sorely missing quality-of-life things, like a...

    Finished Bloodless and Laika: Aged Through Blood; both of them feel like games with a vision behind them, yet they also feel unsmooth in gameplay and sorely missing quality-of-life things, like a dev's first game where they're reinventing every single wheel instead of taking notes from their genre predecessors. I don't think there's much essence either as they both follow a "3 main missions then the final dungeon" structure. The games' atmospheres are very nice though, so I think watching a playthrough of a skilled player would be a better experience than playing through them.

    Bloodless

    Tomoe is an old ronin who was once known as The Slasher, but has since given up on bloodshed and has now returned to her homeland to fix her past mistakes. The game's defining feature is Tomoe's dash being a parry which allows her to defeat enemies by shattering their weapons with her armguards which does feel great. The unfortunate downside of this though is the game overcompensating for it through many, many unparryable attacks and overlapping attacks from multiple enemies. There is a skill upgrade to counter unparryable attacks by attacking right as the red gleam starts shining and retracting, but since the melee system is deliberately crappy with no hitstun to deemphasize it, it felt finicky enough that I couldn't consistently pull it off and very high-risk since enemies partially regen their break meter if they land a hit.

    On the plus side, the game has a very nice retro pixel aesthetic and deliberate color choices, along with a story about stopping the cycle of violence and death shown through Tomoe's atonement and her quest to redeem her wayward nephew.

    On a very specific downside, the late-game upgrade that lets you shatter boulders that were blocking your way is a ki-attack that costs 3 ki-pedals to cast which is the max amount for an unupgraded ki meter. Naturally, you'll have to build it up through combat, find a save point, or waste a potion slot on a ki refill.

    Laika: Aged Through Blood

    It's the post-apocalypse, the Bird Empire is invading, Laika is an immortal warrior who respawns with her motorcycle whenever she dies and is sent to fight them. I don't regret playing the game, but it's crazy how many gaming design sins it commits:

    • One-hit death: Land on Laika's head? Dead. Take a bullet instead of blocking it with the bike? Dead. Get hit by an explosive at all? Dead. Due to this, all the bosses have to be perfected and half of them are the "can only damage them when they're vulnerable" type which is a pain in the ass for making a single mistake. It's also unfortunate that the bosses have to be designed this way since Laika has a crazy amount of DPS by spinning to reload and mashing fire which instagibs the final boss.
    • Mandatory weapon choice: Laika starts off with 2 weapon slots and can upgrade to 4 (I finished the game with 3 slots). One of those slots has to be reserved for the shotgun since it provides a recoil boost jump that's necessary to get around.
    • Resource grinding for upgrades: Pretty much all the upgrades need a lot of mats and you get what, 4 from each resource point which has to be shot at and and drove over to pick up. Already questionable and on top of the game's motorcycle balancing system and the previous thing about one-hit deaths.
    • Crap sidequest rewards: The only reason to do sidequests is for the dialogue. The actual reward is 5 materials at best and a deliberate in-universe waste of time at worst.
    • Mystery cooking recipes: I think I had the same complaint about River City Girls 1; if all the results are a question mark, who's gonna waste their limited resources gambling on whatever result they're getting?

    Story is about what you expect from this genre of cynical post-apocalypic, but the lighthouse mission's ending could reasonably be called the best part of the game with My Destiny playing over the final scene of it. I think my main critique is how the end of the game shifts over to the bond between Laika and her daughter Puppy; it doesn't feel like the rest of the game built up enough on it to connect to their family legacy since Puppy only has the same generic lines on the radio and at home instead of more ways to interact (aside from finding gifts for the gift collection). Could've had her give more sidequests or a bigger role in the story to give her more presence.

    The soundtrack is quite nice though.

    Rabbit and Steel

    Roguelike with Co-op and MMO raid mechanics/ability cooldown rotations/bullet hell. Got the cutscenes for the wolves and the dragons, working on solo hard difficulty for all the class types, got wins with Dancer, Defender, and Bruiser. It is very much a skill game that demands pattern recognition to know the safe spots; the only loot opportunities are the beginning stage which gives 2 treasure chests, and the stages afterwards which have a shop at the beginning for ability upgrades and 1 treasure chest just before the boss. I'm having the easiest time with the wolves, but the mice and frogs are rough with their mechanics.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link Parent
    It's just so good. About the only flaws I can think of are some minor post-game menu stuff: The post-game dreams keep playing the unlock animation even after clearing them. The only way to revisit...

    It's just so good. About the only flaws I can think of are some minor post-game menu stuff:

    • The post-game dreams keep playing the unlock animation even after clearing them.
    • The only way to revisit dialogue is to go back to the main menu and use the mission select option there which uses the one autosave and sets the characters' power levels to what they were then. To get back to the post-game state, you have to finish the final mission again.
    • I only have 11 perk refunds left even after finishing all the confidence goals. Feels like that should be unlimited after finishing the game.

    And that's it! Every other part is gold. It's just hilarious and feels good to play.

    Well to contribute to the conversation in my own way, I'll comment my thoughts and experiences on character perks and optimization.

    Character Mechanics Thoughts & Opinions - Endgame Stuff

    Zan

    I thought he felt weak early on aside from Predictive Bolt, but then he gains False Prophet which tanks a free hit and unlocking enough perks turns him into a hypercarry that enables infinites.

    3 Bolt Burst: 2nd priority after False Prophet I feel. Supportive Fire (Attack if someone else uses a normal attack) makes False Prophet even better and enables infinites with Banks. The Anxiety Dream knockback buff makes it pretty absurd on top of that.

    Time Boost: Haven't touched this much, mostly using this if Zan has spare mana and someone on the other side of the map needs help. Mostly Jen or Dall for Mobility, Possibly Banks or Rion for damage?

    False Prophet: This thing can enable so many infinites with Persistent Delusion (refund mana if the clone is killed) and Hurtful Lie (Clone fires Zan's 3 Bolt Burst and triggers Zan's Supportive Fire)

    • Zan can infinite with Banks if he has 2 mana for 2 clones and Banks has Genius Grant for Transference (Refund if an enemy is protected or ally is targeted). Protect the enemy then target the clone with Transference. The 2nd clone will fire and kill the 1st clone to refund mana, then Zan's Supportive Fire will trigger which leads to infinite damage.
    • Zan can infinite with Dall if she has Rampage II by having her ram the attacking clones back and forth, also for infinite damage. This isn't even going into her own infinites.
    • Rion can indefinitely kill clones with Impaling Vine since Quicksprout refunds the action for pulling a friendly. Same as above, kill each clone and Zan can keep summoning attacks.

    Predictive Bolt: Having a one-shot overwatch is good, especially when improving relative action economy by camping an unsealable spawning door. It's just that its perks are reliant on actively maintaining and knocking foes into it and that takes a lot of positioning. Still, I like Conviction (Reusable on the same turn if it KOs). Doesn't feel like Validation gives mana on new turn spawns, not sure if I'm doing something wrong? +1 damage does let it OHKO Heavy Gunners.

    Jen

    I liked her in the beginning because who doesn't like Chain Bolt. It feels like she falls off though with only 2 knockback for non-conditionals once there's bigger rooms with less windows and more heavy targets. Her kit doesn't enable infinites either unlike everyone else and all her skills are perk-hungry to get to a good level. She does have so many movement options for objectives and door sealing, but I feel like I could do the same thing with Dall and clear out the room while doing it.

    Static Blast: Point Blank (4 knockback at point blank) lets it scale and Refreshing Jolt gives her another move after shooting. Refreshing Jolt II sounds better than it actually is given that it's reliant on Zan being in the same mission, and in line of sight to feed her time boost mana.

    Chain Bolt: AoE is obviously good, especially in the beginning when you don't have any options yet. Once again though, having only 2 knockback makes it scale poorly and not the best choice for mana usage if you get infinites running.

    Broom Breach: It and its upgrade are very reliant on map design, but it does trigger something in the brain to see an objective by a window and know that Jen goes there.

    Gale Grenade: I was so focused on Chain Bolt that I didn't upgrade or test this out much, not helped by this only doing 1 knockback. The ability to refresh movement though looks so good and twice at that.

    Banks

    Very much a burst character to me early on with Spectral Skull for many weak mobs and Death's Door to get rid of big threats ASAP, Sedative Cocktail for debuffs, though she'd need help getting rid of gas masks. Transference to either protect, inflict damage remotely, or just straight up tank and reflect.

    Sedative Cocktail: Good for debuffing groups. Only took Stings (+1 damage). Wasn't feeling Drowsy (+1 Sedated) since sedatives only trigger at the end of the turn after the enemies shoot, so it doesn't help prevent damage until next turn. Lightheaded felt too situational for me since the extra Unsteady only affects the center target.

    Spectral Skull: Piercing, bouncing skillshot woooooooo. +1 damage to reach the breakpoint for oneshoting basic enemies, Honestly haven't tried the other 2. Dunno how big Big Head makes it, and by the time I unlocked Dizzying, I felt like I wasn't really using the skill in favor of Dall support.

    Death's Door: Opening up a window anywhere? This is always good unless the map design is actively going out of it's way to subvert it. +1 use was my first upgrade and Death's Floor lets you instantly teleport an enemy into the 2nd portal if needed.

    Transference: Free damage reflector as a one time save. Found an interesting use if you protect a brittle enemy and transfer it to another enemy, they'll take the brittled damage, plus if you were pulling them with Rion the protected enemy will still take brittled pull damage too. Genius Grant (Refund use if protecting an enemy/targeting an ally) allows for infinites by letting you destroy Zan's time clones over and over by redirecting their damage into the old clone and having Zan's Supportive Fire be the main damage.

    Dall

    I didn't get Dall at first but once she got enough perks, I understood and she became my favorite unit just for being able to go back and forth across the map, plus being able to infinite things with too much armor for Zan. There's a post-game mission with 3 Siege Clerics and I had her charge down all of them without needing Rion.

    Charge: Rampage II is an obvious infinite source by ramming the enemy and Zan's clone over and over until it falls. Also just plain fun to figure out how ram as many enemies as possible in the first turn. Haven't tried Telephasing, not seeing the use unless you're on the really short side of a hallway against 2 lined up foes, but you could use swap instead of spending a perk point?

    Censer Slam: For those situations where there's just not enough space to charge. Like it's usable, but it just feels so sub-optimal compared to charging across the room to slam someone in the face with a riot shield.

    Swap: This is so good for mobility and I'm still uncovering ways to use it. Friendly Refund's obvious use is having an ally get into position for Dall, but you could use it to get Jen into position, blast someone out, move against, and then swap back to Dall for more charging as an example. Swap with Objects enables it to work with Riot Block and pretty much lets Dall reposition for free (aside from mana)

    • Friendly Refund with Zan enables not just a damage infinite, but a movement infinite. Put clone in charging range from Zan, Swap him with Dall, have Dall Charge the clone, Swap Zan back into the new position, rinse repeat. It is so good.

    Throw Riot Block: Free reposition tool with Swap, enables Dall to stop in the right row by ramming into it, especially with recall respawning it after it gets destroyed. Not feeling Wall Mode. Why would you ever need to hide when you can ram everything forever?

    Rion

    Pretty much every part of his kit is usable at a base level which makes sense since he's the last character. Honestly can't go wrong with him unless you're going for super infinites and stuff.

    Impaling Vine: Surprisingly solid normal with Impaling Vine dealing 1 damage +3 reverse knockback. Frostfingers (+1 Brittle after dealing damage) feels kinda unnecessary? Like either you've brittled the target already or you need to 2-tap it. Haven't tried Gripthorns since it's an action point for 3 tiles movement? Quicksprout I found was good, not for pulling allies because there's a lot of tables and stuff in the way, but for killing Zan's time clones for infinites.

    Brittling Dart: The anti-armor, stock up on mana and go ham. The Corrisive upgrade to get rid of gas mask and enable Banks to debuff them with her potion.

    Rabid Bite: Mostly a movement and anti-aggro skill for me. Leaving an enemy alive to be confused has the obvious problem of leaving an enemy alive and they can still target you depending on distance/if you took out all the other goons. The payoff isn't worth it to me.

    Spore Bomb: AoE damage, exactly what it looks like. If the first one doesn't finish them off, the second one should. Not too sure about the Pressurised upgrade. Like it looks cool and piles on even more damage, but I feel strangely wary about it if you're putting your own units close by since it can knockback into them I think.

    Looking back at all this, I'd have to say Zan >= Dall >>> Banks = Rion >> Jen

    Feel free to comment or change my mind on anything.

  6. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Meta-Ghost: The Breaking Show Wrote about its Next Fest demo before, but having purchased the game and reaching the current Early Access endgame, I can say that I had a lot of fun with this action...

    Meta-Ghost: The Breaking Show

    Wrote about its Next Fest demo before, but having purchased the game and reaching the current Early Access endgame, I can say that I had a lot of fun with this action roguelite and it met my expectations, but it also has a lot of ARPG influence that I didn't expect. The endgame is basically grinding out the team matches (the non-story mode with optional 3-player co-op) for equipment and the traditional art of finding the right set bonus, rarity, equipment quality on top of rarity, and the random stats for mix-maxing, along with trashing or merging anything that doesn't match up to what you need. There's extra rewards for meeting the time requirement, so naturally everything revolves around killing things as fast as possible. With my gear, I can only meet the +6 Heat door (there's a +9) on Difficulty 5 (of 6) on Jean, the tank character because I've accepted that I'm just going to facetank the hell out of everything. It also gives me the same ARPG feeling of not knowing at all how to optimize and staring blankly at a spreadsheet; all I understand is that the flywheel fusion works for heavy attack spam.

    That said, the game does something a little odd with having split scaling. Of the 5 sponsors providing boons, 2 of them, green (crit/atk spd) and purple (digital clones) scale off of weapon attack while the other 3 sponsors, light blue/pink/yellow scale off of tech attack. Naturally, some roguelikes run into this with passive items, but this is the first time I've seen it with a Hades-esque boon system. The "duo boon" equivalent here requires combining 6 drives from 2 sponsors, so you're incentivized to reroll a lot until you find the sponsors for your equipment build.

    Vernal Edge

    It's a 2D metroidvania with emphasis on its combat, but it felt kinda mid overall and unrefined. The air juggle potential and pulse attacks to recover HP do have thought put behind them, but the poise meter made it feel like a slog. For normal enemies, their poise isn't displayed until you break a bar which makes it a gamble between whether you're about to start a combo or get punished for your hubris. Charged attacks have a lot of endlag too, so it's something that's either used for knocking enemies into each other or quickly punishing boss attacks to hit and run poise. That leaves the basic boring ground combo most of the time until their poise is broken simply because it can be quickly interrupted with the guard or dash. As a metroidvania, it just feels lacking behind the genre in terms of features, and the story from start to finish is Vernal wanting vengeance on her mad scientist dad with not much more to it.

  7. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    I've done nothing but play steam demos over the past week (and play Defend The Rook before that). Like several hundred GB worth. As in I searched "demo" in my steam library at one point and over...

    I've done nothing but play steam demos over the past week (and play Defend The Rook before that). Like several hundred GB worth. As in I searched "demo" in my steam library at one point and over 200 results showed up. On the plus side, I did find a lot of stuff I vibed with; here's my top 6 since bullet points stop being comprehensible past that:

    • of the Devil: This one's a stylish cyberpunk mystery VN (Cyberpunk here meaning everything's recorded, people are in for-life debt getting augmented to keep up, and the local police station is in clear disrepair). Morgan may be a defense attorney (and there's a hidden Almost Christmas reference), but I found the mechanics and tone closer to AI: The Somnium Files, specifically the way evidence is shown and chosen to refute a statement is akin to the interrogations there. She's more of a professional though, if a bit of a gambler with the UI stylized to represent it; she sees the opposing theory as the opponent putting their hand on the table and the counteracting evidence as the card she's revealing to beat it. With ambiguous statements, she can either check to hold her tongue or raise to press the advantage. I think is my one must have from this Next Fest.
    • Bloodless: A 2D pixel action game with a focus on dashing to parry and defeat foes. Tomoe is an old ronin who's given up the blade in favor of disarming foes of their weapons to send them running and now must return to her home village. Demo's pretty equal parts narrative and gameplay in my opinion.
    • Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo: A timeloop adventure game, though it's chapter by chapter rather than open world and "timeloop" in that the dead forget at the end of the day unless they really remember your actions. The notebook and goal to help people move on made me think of Majora's Mask, though the day cycle here is simply Day, Dusk, Night.
    • ILA: A Frosty Glide: You're a witch with a skatebroom, explore the snowy island and collect stuff. Reminded of the exploration elements of A Short Hike, though there isn't anyone to talk to in the demo.
    • CATO: A puzzle-platformer. The cat can walk and climb on special walls. The toast can flip off of surfaces. Together, they can jump infinite times. The style felt a little off at first, but then it grew on me and now I'm invested.
    • Tactical Breach Wizard: I was already following the game, but the demo lived up to my expectations and then some. There was a post last week that pretty much sums up how I feel.
    Some more stuff I'm keeping an eye on
    • Handmancers: Rock-Paper-Scissors, but as a roguelike card game (except you stay at 10 cards and the rewards are upgrades). The enemy telegraphs their intents and you lay down the right cards to win or draw. Every time you (manually) draw back up to the 5 card hand limit, one of the cards will be a Cramp which will clog up your hand and auto-lose if used which forces some thought on whether you use up your hand on the current turn or whether the potential draw will be better. Playing this reminded me of Fortune-499 which had a similar RPS deckbuilder premise, except I only tried it a little before Slay the Spire came out, aka before a time where I learned that getting rid of cards is a good thing.
    • Star Vaders: A turn-based tactics roguelike deckbuilder except it's also Space Invaders, as in get rid of enemies before they reach your zone. The player mech is effectively invincible, but getting hit generates clog cards. The heat gauge is basically energy except you can overheat by playing a card past the limit which will turn said card into an clog card for the rest of combat and immediately end turn.
    • The Rise: Clean and responsive precision platformer. There's a jump and a directional airdash and that's all the game needed to feel fun to play (and level design of course).
    • Caravan SandWitch: An exploration game with sidequests from the little home village community. I don't feel like I've played it that much besides completing the demo, yet I also feel like it vibed with me for some reason.
    • SoulQuest: 2D sidescroller that goes for DMC/Bayonetta combat ratings. TBH I haven't explored enough 2D stylish action games, so I'll take what I can see.
    • Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus: 2D Metroidvania that's definitely inspired by Hollow Knight, except with Japanese mythology and more focus on aerial combat (any aerial hit restores double-jumping and there's a heat/combo meter for maintaining hits in the air)
    • On Your Tail: A game about exploring and investigating. The controls feel a little unrefined due to having to hold A constantly for stuff, but I am impressed that everyone in town is a unique person with their own portrait.
    • Lethal Honor - Order of the Apocalypse: Action roguelike. Feels like it's on the easy end, I was able to beat the tutorial boss that was supposed to be unwinnable due to how simple its patterns were (and then was railroaded into dying). The first real run was also easy on account of being able to stack poison and bless onto everything which got rid of enemies fast. Make sure to completely mute the SFX though, swinging a weapon makes a gratingly high-pitch ringing that honestly felt painful.
    • I See Red: This is a twin-stick shooter roguelike that released in 2022 and only has 71 Steam reviews, but I can see the vision even though the demo is clearly the prologue. Every item you can pick up is meant to be disposable, the grappling hook arm can be used to either execute a foe or pick an item up, and the colors are black, white, and red for the protagonist's sheer focus on revenge.
    Some stuff I thought had nice pixel art, but seem too dark for me
    • Hookah Haze: VN with 3 heroines that visit the MC's hookah longue (a little conflicted about the game's focus as my nose and lungs can't stand any IRL smoke). The demo itself was chill conversations (I liked Kokoro and felt meh about the other two), but the store page is upfront about them dealing with trauma & workplace problems and it feels a bit uncomfortable that that's a selling point.
    • Boyhood's End: RPGMaker horror. Due to his father being declared a criminal, the MC has a Human Score of -2000 which leads to the robots running the academy to ignore him and him being openly bullied by his roommate who posts about it. The mix of realistic bullying horror (one in-game picture is the bully posting all of the bruises on the MC's back) and then unsettling "the AI knows you tried to hack it and hates you" horror made me think I had enough after a bad end via death by cleaning bot.
    • SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim: This one's pretty fucked up and I gagged after playing it. The giantess is a normal college student who found these suddenly shrunken people, stuffed them into a dark drawer, and decides to eat one everyday and will physically crush anyone who bothers her. The MC has the dubious honor of choosing who to fatten up each day during the deliberation segments and keeping the giantess company during the lo-fi study sessions. Talk too much and you die. Don't talk at all and you die. Talk back and you die. Disagree and you die. This segment just beats into the player that anything less than being a fearful yesman is wrong.

    Defend The Rook

    Roguelike square-grid tactics (board is 9x9 spaces) with 3 heroes, 3 towers (along with a contraption and trap choice), 3 random spells to keep each run interesting, and your flying wizard castle which you have to keep alive (that's the rook). Each run has 5 stages with 5 waves of spawning enemies; after every wave you get to choose a new perk for one of your heroes and after every stage, you get to use the gold and exp to power up your equipment/heroes respectively. Each cleared stage gives 1 gemstone for meta-progression (mostly in the unlock new sidegrades kinda way) and there are 10 ascensions which I got my fun out of and would rec as a good bundle grab.

    Now the game isn't perfect of course. I don't believe the balance was fine-tuned because it feels like some heroes and towers are very obviously better than their alternatives. The game as a whole incentivizes damage, AoE, and multi-hits to kill threats asap as per the norm for this genre:

    • If a hero takes health damage, their potential perk option is instead replaced with a one-time heal option. For obvious reasons, this will make you fall behind the power curve.
    • Climbing the ascensions will have the enemy waves spawn sooner which necessitates clearing the wave to avoid getting swarmed.
    • The skill tree and equipment tree have their perks randomized on each run, and you can only see what's available after clearing Stage 1. Ascension 7 doubles all upgrade costs, so you need the options that work well even without upgrades.

    Taking all of this together, my gameflow usually resulted in putting all my perks into the rogue slot as they have the most damage upgrades and opportunities to attack again; in contrast, the fighter slot is divided by survivability upgrades and the mage slot needs too much luck and investment to get the chain-lightning/AoE going. It feels "solved" to me if that makes any sense, with not much need to change up tactics.

    I also felt some UI issues:

    • It might be my red-green colorblindness, but it was really tough to spot AoE attacks and a unit's max range due to how light the red/green shade is with it blending into the board.
    • Unlike say, Into The Breach, AoE attacks are very hard to sort out:
      • When your unit is selected, the AoE indicators disappear
      • You have to hover over the enemy to figure out which particular tiles they're targeting. This gets really bad with the graveyard witches or the underwater stage.
      • There's no option to turn the board, so any targeted tile that's behind something big can't be seen.
    Upgrades

    Beeline for Upgrade Spells 1 (total of 3 packs of random spells to pick from instead of just 1 pack) and Upgrade Contraptions 2 (Loot Courier can show up as an enemy, kill them for a hero perk).

    Contraptions has the most useful unlocks imo and spells matter the least due to randomization and debatable usefulness. So Contraptions > Heroes > Spells. Admittingly, I'm not sure about the exact perks that show up as a result of the Hero tree.

    Unit Loadout

    A7 doubles upgrade costs for everything, so I'm mainly judging how good everything is at a base level.

    Fighter Slot

    Elven Commander > Warrior >>> Samurai >>>>> Barbarian

    Prioritizing their ability to facetank followed by damage.

    • Elf: Dodges 1 attack every turn which is amazing for tanking. His 3 range is fantastic for field coverage, and the lunge contributes to the perk that increases damage for each space used.
    • Warrior: The base unit. Has decent baseline attack and armor which makes him usable before unlocking the elf.
    • Samurai: Blocks 1 attack every fresh wave and an innate 4 damage counterattack. So a nerfed version of the elf's dodge, less armor than the warrior, and has to tank to do the same amount of damage the warrior would deal.
    • Barbarian: Gains strength on the current stage for taking damage. Terrible since he'll only get healing options instead of perks.

    Rogue Slot

    Ranger >>> Consair > Rogue > Mercenary

    They're all usable due to the Rogue Slot's many useful perks, but the Ranger and Consair have the advantage with their range.

    • Ranger: Highest amount of field coverage and can keep distance from the enemy, their innate perk lets them deal the same amount of damage as the rogue would deal, and the many damage upgrades easily compensate for perks that trigger off raw damage.
    • Consair: Has 1-2 range instead of the Rogue's 1 and that just makes him better.
    • Rogue: The base unit. There are perks that enable Stealth and extra movement which still lets him keep up with the above alternatives.
    • Merc: The 2 extra bros aren't doing much even if buffed with the hero banners, they just don't have enough attack or reach to matter. Keeping them alive grants +20 gold each which is almost a perk or almost 2 upgrades on A7. You could kill them off to buff up the main unit, but that takes up turns and why not use one of the other rogues instead of planning for failure?

    Mage Slot

    Banshee > Black Witch >> Sorceress >>>> Possessed soul

    Can become the AoE unit/have chain lightning, but needs luck and investment.

    • Banshee: Gains buffs for landing kills which include more attack for each soul, splash damage at 5 souls, and a 50 damage nuke at 7 souls. Just need to finish off enemies and she's good to go.
    • Black Witch: +5 damage when attack a solo target in range or +5 armor when their are multiple enemies in range. The mage class doesn't get that many damage ups, so the +5 damage does matter, especially early game.
    • Sorceress: The base unit. +4 armor for standing still. Given how much positioning and finishing off enemies matter, I didn't get that much mileage out of it.
    • Lich: After dying, can still act for 1 turn to kill a unit and revive. Useless for the same reason as the barbarian, you don't want to lose hero HP ever.

    Rook

    Fortress > Sanctuary >= Rook

    • Fortress: Gains range and damage for each tower you have up. Basically a slow moving artillery piece that can pick off enemies. Especially deadly with the capstone upgrade that allows it to fire upon all foes in range. Also has the same trait as the base unit which auto-kills normal enemies for attacking it.
    • Sanctuary: Cast 1 spell for free each stage, but lacks the auto-kill defense for being attacked. Since you can check your spell options before starting, you can take this when you see something like Duplication (extra tower)
    • Rook: The base unit. Gains armor for each tower up and auto-kills any normal enemy that attacks it. You're supposed to bait weaker enemies into attack it, or at least trading HP for kills.

    Contraptions

    Hero Banner >>>>> Boom Barrel >>>>> Barricade

    Can place 2 of these

    • Hero Banner: Grant all allied units (towers included) within 3 tiles at the start of turn +3 damage and +3 armor. These are hilariously overpowered in how much they boost survivability, boost DPS by pushing weak units into reaching lethal damage breakpoints, and how the banners protect each other, the more banners the better. The only time they suffer is against AoE units like the Stage 2 graveyard witches or both of the Stage 3 bosses which deal AoE around the field; these are the hardest points in the run as a result.
    • Boom Barrel: Deals 40 damage in a 4 tile radius after being destroyed. It's a nuke that easily clears whatever's by it, but you can't target it yourself and have to bait the enemy into attacking it.
    • Barricade: The base unit. These are supposed to taunt enemies, but they only have 10 base health and can only take 1-2 hits.

    Traps

    Mines > Bear Trap > Freeze Spell

    3 traps to lay down, and a lot of Rogue perks involve them.

    • Mines: These are the AoE option which damage multiple foes and gives a lot more leeway in triggering the rogue's trap perks. As such, I prefer these the most.
    • Bear Trap: Damages the enemy for every step they take after triggering it. Scales insanely well with damage upgrades and can singlehandedly take out an enemy, including moving bosses. As it respawns where the enemy dies, it can potentially lead to bad positioning for it, and there is some redundancy as many of the Rogue's perks include rearming traps.
    • Freeze Spell: Stun is good, but it's reliant on the enemy's pathing and the other options are better for just killing instead.

    Long-Range Tower

    Cannon > Motar >>>>> Sniper

    • Cannon: The base unit. Has the highest range which allows it to utilize on-hit upgrades like dispelling armor and/or allowing the rogue to attack its target for free.
    • Mortar: Short range and deals splash damage. I feel that something's gone wrong if you've got so many enemies clumped up so close.
    • Sniper: Has a minimum range of 5. The board is 9x9. Way too situational from not being able to hit things.

    Mid-Range Tower

    Frostbolt >>> Arcane > Lightning Rod

    • Frostbolt: It roots normal enemies on-hit, enough said
    • Arcane: The base unit. Doesn't stand out.
    • Lightning Rod: Dependent on hero banners to not deal noodle damage. There is potential for AoE, but it needs a lot of investment

    Short-Range Tower

    Eight Gem > Splitter > Emerald

    • Eight Gem: Taunts enemies in range and counterattacks, while still having a normal attack. Tankiest and best option to protect your other units.
    • Splitter: Unlimited range and targets in the 4 cardinal directions. Situational, but deadly if it can be placed on the board eadge to immediately damage spawning enemies
    • Emerald: The base unit. Attacks all units nearby, but only has 2 pitiful range.
    Spells

    Beating A10 allows you to custompick for each spell slot

    Low-Tier Spells

    Lightning Rod > Sight Tracker >= Bolt of Speed > Zap > The rest

    4 uses per stage.

    • Lightning Rod: Stuns an enemy. Pretty much the best option here.
    • Sight Tracker/Bolt of Speed: Grants +2 Range/Movement respectively to a hero which helps with board coverage
    • Zap: 3 damage is still damage
    • The rest: Irrelevant for not being damage. You really don't want to tank.

    Mid-Tier Spells

    Invigorate >>> Weighty Blows >= Boulder Toss >= Rockspear > Mind Control > The rest

    3 uses per stage.

    • Invigorate: A hero gets to go again. Given that heroes are your hypercarries...
    • Weighty Blows: +5 temp damage & armor. Putting a little more value due to perks reliant on kills.
    • Boulder Toss: 8 damage with splash damage
    • Rockspear: Deals 4 damage, then 8 more of the target no longer has armor. Slightly more situational.
    • Mind Control: It can be strong, but you can't attack the the unit until next turn and it can still deal damage to you which makes it a liability. It does nothing if you use it on the same turn as Hysteria (the high-tier version of this spell).
    • The rest: not worth mentioning

    High-Tier Spells

    Shadow Clone > Duplication > Earthquake >= Hysteria > Bloodlust > Static Storm >> Stoneplate >>>>>> Obliteration

    • Shadow Clone: Creates a 1 hp copy of your hero which is absurdly powerful to say the least. Sadly, casting it again replaces the clone with a new one.
    • Duplication: Copy a tower. It spawns on the closest available block and works with multiple casts.
    • Earthquake: All foes lose armor and are stunned. Basically a free turn.
    • Hysteria: All foes attack their closest ally. They're still a threat to you, but it helps when too many enemies spawn in.
    • Bloodlust: +15 power for all heroes for one turn. Good for dealing lethal and triggering killperks, but doesn't boost relative action economy on its own.
    • Static Storm: 10 damage to all enemies. Only lethal for weak early game units.
    • Stoneplate: +10 temp armor for all heroes. The only way this is useful is if all your heroes are in danger of getting hit
    • Obliteration: Destroy a tower and deal 20 damage around it. Actively self-sabotaging, the damage isn't enough to make up for sacrificing a unit and the range is pitiful.
    2 votes

  8. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    The Magister It's a mystery-solving card game roguelike except it's actually an exercise in time management min-maxing because the goal of the game is to gather clues by doing quests for suspects...

    The Magister

    It's a mystery-solving card game roguelike except it's actually an exercise in time management min-maxing because the goal of the game is to gather clues by doing quests for suspects until they trust you enough to give a fake alibi which you then tear apart for useful info within the 10 or 15 day time limit. While the exact details are different between playthroughs, the gameflow already felt the same by the 2nd playthrough (there are 3 ascensions); I got the achievement for doing a perfect conviction on max difficulty so I don't plan on replaying it. I did get 20 hours out of it so I can consider it a flawed gem as a Fanatical bundle grab.

    Character selection has a few factors and nothing can be changed after starting, but there are infinite rerolls before choosing:
    • Character class; this affects their special ability, base deck, default skill tree, and a random starting skill from said tree. There are 3 types between:
      • Warrior: Leans more towards survivability and fighting, about as good for investigating as you think. Did not vibe with it.
      • Intellectual: The smart one. Has quite a few draw cards which allows for cycling through the whole deck in combat, if at the expense of a lengthy time penalty. In my opinion, the best at combat with a hunting rifle for maximum burst damage.
      • Rogue: The sneaky, smooth-talker. The only one capable of diplomacy by default without skill investment. Since the highest difficulty randomly locks 3 skills from each tree, I thought this has the most consistent choices.
    • Flaws: A random downside with the character. Some are okay and some can be downright terrible:
      • Fanatic: Needs to visit the temple everyday. Given how much time management matters, this is obviously terrible (unless going to the closed temple at night counts? Doubtful).
      • Alcoholic: Needs to spend 1 coin to buy a drink everyday. Alcohol gives the drunk card which redraws the hand, so I don't see the downside here.
      • Hallucinations: Harmless fake enemies can appear. bad for a burst damage playstyle.
      • Insomniac: The combat deck has 2 fatigue cards even after resting. Acceptable.
      • Psychotic: Worse at diplomacy, better at combat. That's the text, I dunno what it actually does. Failed diplomacy doesn't have any downsides besides the opportunity cost of going straight to combat, but two classes don't start off with diplomacy so...
    • Melee weapons:
      • Hammer: Most consistent damage.
      • Sword: Very meh.
      • Baton: Offers cards that deal bonus damage for non-lethal engagements. The problem of course is how many engagements must be lethal such as wildlife encounters or cultists and their summons.
    • Ranged weapons:
      • Shotgun: Has a spread which makes it best for point blank. Feels crappy to me though.
      • Revolvers: Needs to use a reload card to cycle it back in. Feels like the worst gun which makes it best used uncharged to exile it and avoid deck clog. Combat typically doesn't last long enough to cycle reload back in anyways.
      • Rifle: My choice for sniping. There's a lengthy time penalty, but ensuring a target goes down while having meatshields to protect you makes this the ideal choice for me.

    Combat I didn't enjoy. All the animations must play out (it's square-grid based tactics) which involves a lot of real-time waiting with no speed up option. Either you take "quick" short turns, or you smartly cycle through your deck which involves a lot more waiting for your next turn instead. Just to make sure you're still there, you have to click whenever someone falls in combat. It says something that I'm mentioning the waiting times first when the combat does have neat aspects like how melee cards allow you to teleport to the enemy at the expense of dealing half damage or dealing bonus damage when hitting the enemy against an obstacle.

    Diplomacy is a little more nuanced, but can easily be screwed over by RNG. Each time you start a talk, you have to generate energy from your inital crap deck to buy cards for the current discussion from the store each turn. Generally, you're looking for cheap cards (because of the opportunity cost of just playing the default wincon card. Ex. there's a draw 2 discard 1 card that costs 1 energy compared to the draw 2 costs 5 energy; the default wincon card starts at 5 energy and costs 1 more each time it's used), Draw power (because you only draw 3 cards by default), and energy generators or other wincon cards that are worth clogging draw power. Best class-neutral card IMO is the one that draws 1, grants 1 energy, and refreshes the shop.

    Notes and such I've took

    • Talk to the Innskeeper, Waitress, and Dock Worker twice for all info. IDK why they did this, but they did. Noted in the Initial Routing box.
    • Examine clues in the clues menu. Same issues as above which ignores a clear QoL thing.
    Initial routing
    • Inn first to investigate body and gain skill point. Clues typically need the sage to decipher or the smart class skills. Innkeeper may need to be prompted for room key or missing murder weapon.
    • Head to the dock, either talk or spend 5 coin to get the waitress to calm down. Talk to her twice after for her to ID the dock worker.
    • Talk to the dock worker twice for an alibi breaker and to open up the Signal Tower.
    • While here, accept the guard captain's request, as well as use the Courtesan's service (unless reserving money). If you're broke, you'll still get the benefit and only have to pay next time.
    • Get to Signal Tower for a skill boost and gain a companion. Tank is free, Sage is useful for skill checks referencing clues related to the body if lacking smart skills, and Rogue's unique for investigated dedicated clues about cultists and Dust (picked up during Cultist Hunt quests for the Priestess.)
    • Graveyard should only be gone to once, if even that. Gain 3 coins on first visit and a potential alibi breaker for accepting the quest (with no obligation to finish. It's just not worth the time to go back ever.)
    • Inn, make friends with the drunkard for an alibi breaker. This also unlocks another alibi breaker in Town Square by talking to the farmer next to the doctor.
    • Town Square: talk to everyone. Buy a pet and a map from the trader. Finishing the crypt should provide enough trinkets to be set for the rest of the game, and level up the trader and blacksmith's friendships through profit.
    Places

    • Inn: Make sure to A) Recruit your human companion at the start of each day B) Gossip with the innkeeper and waitress when given the chance.

    • Town Square has the most (6) people: This should be the priority most of the time to take on and cash in tasks.

    • Docks only has the guard captain and courtesan. Sometimes one of them isn't there and is visiting Temple instead. Ideally, you can take the level up perk that makes a shortcut between the Dock to Town Square

    • Temple only has the priestess, but church donations allow for a one-time skill point and (2?) card deletions.

    • Graveyard should never be went to unless you need 3 coins or the graveyard alibi breaker.

    • Signal tower is if you need to swap out allies or have enough evidence to accuse. If you're confident with your cash flow, grab the sage. If not, the tank is free.

    People

    • Keep track of gossip manually. If it doesn't unlock a new clue (indicated by EXP), stop asking about that person.

    • The Innkeeper: Always innocent. Provides 1 coin food (boost max hp by 5), 1 coin drink (redraw hand), and a bed (gets rid of fatigue cards). Provides gossip after food/drink. 3 Star benefit is that the room costs 1 coin instead of 2.

    • The Waitress: After calming her down, she will be at the inn. At the start of the day, talk to her to get free gossip about any of the suspects.

    • The Merchant: Always innocent. At max rep, they provide a potential alibi breaker. Depending on the run, you also get to talk to them for the victim's stash (Special card + motives) and/or the location of the poison to investigate (need Perception/The Sage).

    • Doctor: Mushroom quest provides a big exp boost and card upgrade. Special herb quest is RNG pixel-hunting and has the potential to waste precious time, but also provides a unique reward. Injured villager quest provides exp opportunities even after the quest is over

    • Guard Captain: The helping a guard quest usually offers a skill point.

    • Councilman: Never take the missing villager quest since that takes up 2 time slots.

    • Hunter: Has a 2 part quest depending on whether you fight the animals or go after the poachers instead.

    • Priestess: There's a chance to run into an inquisitor in random encounters who will give the appropriate quest. Turning in this particular quest gives you 2 stars and saves a lot of time, but is of course RNG dependent. Make sure to donate before turning it in as all dialogue will also become locked for the day. These missions have inquisitor allies who (usually) use chain lightning, so don't worry as much about angry villagers.

    Meta clues

    • The true culprit will always say someone else was at the inn instead of providing an identifying clue.

    • Non-killers will generally not have useful info from the start when gossiped about.

    Unmetal

    This is a parody of the Metal Gear series (of which I've only read the Hiimdaisy comics and finished MGSV), in the style of the 8-bit top-down entries. At first, I found the humor tolerable and liked Fox as the narrator choosing his answers and messing around with his story. That didn't last long because the game's idea of being subversive is introducing surprise out-of-genre segments with instakills. Why yes, I love using a metal detector every second for half a level to not get insta-killed. Sure, let's add a submarine section where every little bump shaves off some more health. Why not have a dialogue boss where you're supposed to brute force the dialogue options and keep dying until you get it right? You can argue that's the point, but being subversive generally relates to the core element (one example of the game doing this right is allowing you to shoot guards with a pistol instead of the slingshot, but also requiring to you use up a medkit to heal them to enforce Fox's in-universe Pacifist run); these segments of pure frustration are just the designer being an asshole to the player on purpose *ironically*, which is to say, still being an asshole.

    Chapter 9 of 10 is the tipping point where I'm dropping it, and yes I'm aware I'm basically 30 minutes from finishing it. My patience for the game ran out at the bomb disposal and I looked up a guide for it; turns out the answer was to more or less punch everything on that floor for materials with no prompts to do so. I finally dropped it at the maze segment: you're given a long string of cardinal directions to follow to go through it. Take one wrong turn? Die and restart at the beginning. Can't kill the ghosts before they latch onto you? They lifedrain fast enough that you can't run out of the room in time, die and go back to the beginning. This section is clear, both about what you're supposed to do and that the dev thinks this is a funny twist instead of a complete waste and disrespect of time.

    Lost Castle

    I didn't do enough research again. This is a "Roguelike" "Beat-em-up". "Roguelike" as in it follows the Rogue Legacy school of "Screw you, grind more for a basic working character" and "We're raising the cost of your skill tree each time you buy something and you can only keep a little leftover. Didn't put your points right? Screw you, grind more". "Beat-em-up" as in hitstun is more of a weak suggestion than a rule, boss enemies move faster than you by default and will track you down and hit you no matter what, and the most optimal way to play is to hit-and-run by using a ranged weapon, spamming jump attacks, or spamming jump attacks with a ranged weapon because the normal attack chain is laggy enough to belong in a souls-like instead. I'm reminded more of an arcade dungeon crawler where the only way to win is to facetank and scarf down healing food and put more quarters into the machine. Younger me was stubborn enough to finish Rogue Legacy despite disliking all of its mechanics, current me doesn't have the time for something that comes off as a soulless trend chaser.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Wandersong What a lovely game. It's an RPG spoof, but you're not playing the hero, you're playing a bard. And that's okay! The Bard is super friendly, as in an actual non-violent pacifist who does...

    Wandersong

    What a lovely game. It's an RPG spoof, but you're not playing the hero, you're playing a bard. And that's okay! The Bard is super friendly, as in an actual non-violent pacifist who does their best to deescalate situations with apparent monsters and jerks and goes out of their way to avoid stepping on bugs out of sheer empathy. That's not to say the game's all sunshine and rainbows because the world is on the verge of ending, but they still go out of their way to help and believe in everyone. It's just inspiring really. something I would wholeheartedly recommend for people who take their time talking to everyone in RPGs.

    About 12 hours long. The game itself is a 2d platformer, slight puzzle elements with no game over state with the right stick used for 8-directional singing. It also has a thorough chapter & scene select which is my favorite kind of New Game+.

    About Audrey - Spoilers

    The Hero, a self-centered, violent jerk who doesn't care that her role is to mercy kill the universe to make way for a new one or that working with the Bard would save the world for real; Audrey just wants to be special, and if being The Chosen Hero™ means killing the Overseers and ending the entire universe, she's going to be The Chosen Hero™ no matter what and no matter who gets in her way. I've written before that Royal (Iconoclasts) and King Knight (Shovel Knight) are two of my favorite characters; they are similarly arrogant and somewhat well-intended (and in Royal's case, keeps making things worse), but they're also meant to be laughed at, the butt of the joke for their wrongful pride during low tension moments. Audrey, when she's not busy flaunting over being the center of the room, is cruel and simply sees everything she does as part of the hero package. With all the times that The Bard stops Miriam from blasting their problems away with magic, it's a real shock when Audrey jumps in with abrupt violence. She has a lot of these moments, but I think the most striking is her sneak attacking Miriam with a lightning bolt for no good reason and the injury is very much played seriously.

    As a side note, it's amusing and appropriate that all the achievements are related to Audrey's actions. She's The Hero™ after all.

    Zet Zillions

    A deck-building roguelike that just launched last week, same dev as Wolfstride. As satisfied as I am with the game and its style, it does feel like it launched in an Early Access state without the tag. Apparently the game is only up to Part 1 which I've completed, and Foam Gun's deck appears to be the only starter for now. I've wrote about the demo before during the Next Fest demos, but playing through now, I can say that the game gives a lot of opportunity to trim your deck size through Gaia's Altar and the Pineapple God which makes it easy to create fast cycle decks instead of taking a risk and experimenting with the fusion mechanics. Why bloat your deck and hope for card combinations when you can take good stuff that works 99% of the time? Something something optimize the fun out of the game.

    Well it's $10, still on its launch sale, and it's in a bundle with Wolfstride which I've written about before.

    Jack Move

    Cyberpunk JRPG that I picked up from a Fanatical bundle. It really doesn't have any substance, I just got suckered by the cover art and the battle screen perspective. If you picked it up somewhere and plan to play, do yourself a favor and cut the encounter rate to half because it triggers every few steps and still has "just long enough to be annoying" loading times even on SSD and as a pixel game. Its only unique draw is that you have to buy your equipment slots and skill slots and even when maxed out, they're severely limited so you have to take a turn in combat to swap out your skills to whatever's appropriate. Well at least, I'm a little more grateful for RPGs that let you freely swap between your party members mid-combat.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
    Link
    Skimmed across the demos from the replayability fest. Aside from the stunning fact that so many modern 2d games force joystick for movement instead of D-pad, here's what caught my attention:...

    Skimmed across the demos from the replayability fest. Aside from the stunning fact that so many modern 2d games force joystick for movement instead of D-pad, here's what caught my attention:

    Tax-Force

    2d sidescroller beat-em-up with a choice system for making sure a planet pays off its debts by shaking down the megacorps and choosing whether to keep the greedy CEOs in charge for direct profit, directing the corp to work for the public good as an indirect revenue boost, or compromising between them. Combat feels lackluster, but I'm hoping the style and story make up for it.

    Beat Slayer

    Isometric action roguelite that asks you to stay with the beat while slaying robots in 90s Berlin. Difficulty is a bit mixed: offensively, normal dashes build up the beat meter and you have a kick move that can stun enemies against walls so there's not much challenge there, but defensively, a normal attack from a grunt deals about 6 damage to your 25 hp with not many hp recovery options. There's also a skill tree that locks the kick move and ultimate special (the big DPS for bosses) which kinda sets expectations for how much grinding will be needed to reasonably win.

    Galactic Glitch

    Room-based twinstick shooter roguelite like Gungeon, but with challenge rooms for items instead of locked chests that need keys. The main thing here is the ability to grab small asteroids and enemies to lob them at each other; simple, but effective in the demo and just kinda fun. Hoping the end result has more variety though.

    Glyphica: Typing Survival

    You're a turret in the middle of the screen, type the words out to shoot them before they reach you and choose weapons/upgrades for a build. Unexpectedly fun for its simplicity.

    Foretales

    Single player resource management card game with animal people; you have a hand of skill cards that automatically draw from each character's limited deck which can be played on the field's location cards to convert to resources and progress each mission's 3-act structure. Story-wise, the main character is a thief who stole a special lyre and now has horrific future visions that he's trying to avert. The narrator unsubtly pushes pushes at using resources to bribe people rather than kill them in combat, so I'm interested in seeing how the story goes.

    Stand-Alone

    2d sidescroller action roguelike; somewhat reminded of Skul: The Hero Slayer from the focus on skills and possibly limited item slots, along with the tutorial having the main character be the sole survivor of an attack. The main thing here is the skill customization, with certain room rewards allowing for augmenting skills with new passives or follow-up skills. No idea how SP recovery works though.

    RAM: Random Access Mayhem

    Body-snatching twinstick shooter that feels like it leans on the stylish action genre with a skill floor to match. There are 4 enemy types with in-depth tutorials for each: a shotgunner with a charged punch that can parry/focus the blast, a dasher that carries its momentum into fastballing grenades, a heavy grapple hook puncher, and a flamethrower recoil-boosting unit that can blow itself up. Gain score and body snatch meter by successfully killing enemies and gain more score by jumping bodies before getting hit or dying. Honestly, I am not skilled or patient enough with the mechanics to vibe with it, but I am intrigued.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Panzer Paladin Retro-style melee platformer with the Zelda II-style standing/low passive block. Finished Hard Classic with pretty good impressions overall as far as music, pixel art, and game feel...

    Panzer Paladin

    Retro-style melee platformer with the Zelda II-style standing/low passive block. Finished Hard Classic with pretty good impressions overall as far as music, pixel art, and game feel with each stage being a bite-sized 10-15 minute run and destructible walls being placed at just the right areas to satisfy the part of the brain that thinks there must be something there. That said, it still runs into the retro issue where spikes/pits are an instant kill which can lead to some issues like getting hit mid-air which kills all your momentum along with only 2 checkpoints (halfway and bossfight) and 3 lives per stage (without 1ups). It also has a Zelda BotW-esque inventory system (without the inventory cap) where you're encouraged to consider weapons expandable by throwing them at annoying ranged enemies or breaking them instantly to unleash a spell, but I figure most people, myself included, simply stick to tried and true melee. The game kind of sabotages itself in this aspect by encouraging you to hoard your weapons early in the campaign to use for upgrading max HP.

    The Knight Witch

    Metroidvania with bullet hell and deckbuilding aspects. Early on, regular damage upgrades are better than spell cards due to mana scarcity until the mana cheat cards come in (+mana on kill buff card, 0 cost mana gen card, and/or full mana gen card that dumps a 3 mana brick in hand) at which point spells takes over until 100% completion where the final two max EXP upgrades give fast passive mana regen and 100% bullet crit rate which even things out. For most of the game, I went with a cycling deck with mana cheats and cheap fire-and-forget spells while maintaining a weapon summon. The true final boss is a massive difficulty spike though; I managed by switching my cycling focus to a "Grant 1 armor if you have no armor" card, but I'd strongly suggest 100% completion to reasonably have enough power.

    I like the protagonist Rayne; despite the cover art showing her with a scowl, she's positive, responsible, happily married, and steps up to defend everyone despite having been kicked out of the Knight Witches for lack of talent 11 years prior because they've mostly gone AWOL in the present. Her personality also comes up in the morality system: since Knight Witches gain power from people's belief and thankfulness towards them, Rayne's called to hold a speech after every mission where she can either follow instructions and deliver PR-approved propaganda pieces or she can be open, honest, and critical about the issues she's encountered at the expense of less support/EXP (though the difference can be gained back by paying currency). The ending choice leading to the true final boss has her decide that despite everything she's gone through with the politics and infighting, she will make sure the problem is handled instead of having enough and going home with her husband.

    Take Me To The Dungeon

    Deckbuilding Hentai game that isn't actually a roguelike (just the dungeon structure being Slay the Spire style), about 10-ish hours for a first playthrough. You construct a deck and augment the cards with rune effects before venturing into the dungeon with X mana per turn gameplay.

    What makes this different is:

    • The entire deck (8-10 cards depending on progress) is drawn at the start of combat with no automatic discard or draw. Shuffling your hand takes up a whole turn and requires exhausting a card until the next camp or mid-boss victory which forces some consideration over whether to use up your entire deck to maximize card efficiency or cycling the deck for the important cards.
    • Armor and discarded card effects carry over through battles which opens some more planning about how to use the deck in mob fights to prep for bosses.

    Not much gameplay replay value though unless you're interested in deck-crafting, no ascensions or anything; might be some value if you're trying to see all events and event choices dialogue. Story is what you'd expect from isekai'd pervert meets girl adventurer and they team up (tactician/fighter) to beat a dungeon for its wish artifact. I thought the background lore was a little interesting though.

    Background Lore

    The normal end leads to a timeloop that returns to the prologue. Uma tries to wish for her dead sister back after the MC returns home, but things go wrong and she turns into the demon Mona while her sister becomes the demon Pamela. They get sent back in time long enough that Mona isn't really responsive besides being thirsty for the MC which leads to his groggy ass being summoned again. The loop breaks in the other endings; bad end where Uma loses to Mona and can't make her wish, or the good end where the MC is honest with Uma about her sister's fate and helps her process it.

    My Burn Deck

    Not the best and can run into defense issues, but it easily deals enough damage to clear the game. Just stack Burn runes on all your damage and take these 3 core cards:

    • Pyroblast is obviously a run-winner, it multiples burn and scales off it. Add splash damage, upgrade the main ability, and put double-cast on it late game.

    • Spirit Break spreads DoT to other enemies. Upgrade the main ability and/or put double-cast depending on how much mana you want it to be.

    • Rest is 2 cost healing + next card free which allows you to mana cheat Pyroblast. Add status cleanse for increased safety and Charge to further increase Pyroblast damage.

    I like Pick Up Stone with max surplus and armor to gacha armor stacking. Bloodseeker for hp recovery and Blizzard to counter mimics are other good picks.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Wolfstride This mech-fighting RPG is full of SOUL. It does have many flaws as the steam reviews will tell you (which I agree with): slow-paced beginning with 2 hopeless fights before you can...

    Wolfstride

    This mech-fighting RPG is full of SOUL. It does have many flaws as the steam reviews will tell you (which I agree with): slow-paced beginning with 2 hopeless fights before you can customize your mech, a pointlessly time-consuming walking zone before each location purely for atmosphere, and grindy minigames that takes up more gameplay time than the actual RPG fighting if you want funds to kit out your mech properly early on or the rare drops that slowly raise friendship levels. On the other hand, it's an expressive world that kinda feels like a 90s anime to me, all that time getting sucked in and getting to know everyone in town a little more day by day as the crew starts winning fights. It's fully voice-acted which is something I definitely find impressive for something of its scope and with changing dialogue lines for the main crew every in-game day.

    So the pitch: a band of friends get back together after the recently deceased leader of their group gifts them a mech out of the blue. They aim to join the mech-fighting sport for cash, but the mech's a piece of garbage, the shounen protagonist pilot has zero training, the mechanic wants to sell the damn thing, and then there's Shade, the main character and manager of the crew. He's slick, dressed up in a suit with Kamina shades, and undoubtedly competent in funding their expenses and making the connections for their next fight. He's also a loser and he knows it, one who's running the hell away from his past, someone who is absolutely faking it until he makes it. I'd wager some of the game's flaws were intended if going a little too far just to showcase this aspect; Shade just having to go back and forth across town doing repetitive menial tasks to support the team, something he accepts because he has no goal besides drifting around so helping his friends achieve their dream gives him some purpose to his life.

    I wouldn't recommend it casually, but the story and characters certainly had the sense of style I wanted from playing the Zet Zillions demo so I felt I got my money's worth.

    Now there's some stuff I learned in Wolfstride's ending that is certainly changing my perspective of Zet Zillions' setting, some ramblings:

    Foam Gun being the capital-D Devil for one. I am even more certain now that the Trash are actual people contracted with her instead of supposed meat clone robots unless this is a completely alternate setting. The game over lines imply it's just a simulation, but that's questionable too since Foam Gun as the narrator constantly addresses the player and Shade's life is portrayed as a video game. I had also expected something to happen to Knife on account of his nickname being Pineapples, but pineapples being a special currency is just a thing in this verse.

    Deathloop

    Meh. "Dishonored with guns" is a pretty apt description honestly. Since there's no non-lethal method and no stealth run save-scumming to worry about, you can just let loose which makes it pretty dang easy. Normally, I get pissy about meta-currency, but all you need is a silenced weapon and and auto-shotty for when things get loud. I dunno, I just didn't feel as attached to this world which felt smaller with even less attachment to the characters.

    Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children

    Just a small update (and possible cry for character advice help), I'm putting this game on hold even though I pre-emptively bought the second DLC missions because the first DLC with the clowns is hard as hell (stuck on the ambush level where they're deploying robots and rangers, but that's on me for not turning the difficulty down). Albus (Great Swordsman) and Heixing (Ranger) are my one man armies, Sion (Black Mage) and Irene (Battle Mage) can hold their own, but I haven't developed the rest of the team well enough to do more than scratch damage to the clowns. I also don't have anti-armor (Heixing is built for poison currently) which is bad because robots are common now and wiping my team.

    Duelists of Eden

    One last shill for this since it came out last week. It's $5, a deckbuilder/fighter hybrid as a PvP sequel to One Step From Eden. It's grid-based so movement is easy to understand and you can take whatever 8-10 moves you want into your deck to cook up whatever crazy combos you can think of. It is a niche fighter, but I'm happy enough to learn the counterplay and positioning against all those people that can absolutely school me. I found it easy to learn as someone who's not into the traditional fighters and only okay at platform fighters, but that just might be the OSFE experience talking. The discord generally says that the experience doesn't transfer over, but there's something to be said about general card knowledge and having a feel for 4 tiles away.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Steam Next Fest: what have you been playing? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Zet Zillions This is a game that introduces itself by having you shoot a bunch of clones, labeled "Trash" in-game, out of your planet-ship cannon at other planets to break down their armor and...

    Zet Zillions

    This is a game that introduces itself by having you shoot a bunch of clones, labeled "Trash" in-game, out of your planet-ship cannon at other planets to break down their armor and overwhelm them at which point the demo deck's signature card is to destroy all the launched clones for massive damage. Your 3 lieutenants are the shark-toothed captain who is seen standing atop the cannon at all times during gameplay, a mad scientist dinosaur who gathers all sorts of hilariously dangerous fauna and flora to add to the deck, and what I assume to be a cheerful telepath who's in charge of brainwashing any resistance that they can't outright kill.

    The game's style just speaks to me, enough that I'm convinced to grab the dev's previous game Wolfstride.

    Well this is a 3-energy deckbuilding roguelite so what are the differences in gameplay?

    • The galaxy map is FTL style, with all the nodes and their connecting paths visible when hovering over and a powerful enemy force that steadily covers the map and prevents backtracking.
    • In addition to the HP bar, there's a stun meter represented by filling the enemy's population number with Trash. Naturally some cards interact with it, some enemies (the Planets) can be won against by filling their stun meter to gain bonus rewards, and some enemies don't have a stun meter at all which necessitates the need to determine the focus and balance of your deck.
    • Draw 5 per turn, no hand discard on turn end, hand limit 7. Card draw can be severely limited from not being able to play your cards or not having the right scenario for the hand so discard effects are important and there's a fusion mechanic that allows for combining cards in hand together though learning what happens or what's possible needs some experimentation though it's thankfully recorded in the in-game encyclopedia.

    Meta-Ghost: The Breaking Show

    Isometric action roguelite with light attack, heavy attack, defensive skill, and ultimate skill. It's a cyberpunk gameshow where contestants are sent in to fight robots for cash money while obviously shady sponsers manipulate things behind the scenes and blah blah blah we've all seen this.

    What sets this apart from the rest is that perks and relics drop like candy. Almost every room guarantees some sort of boost which can be built upon and synergized with right from the get-go; no useless filler rooms, no meekly wandering around with crap damage for the entire run's start. Even the money-only rooms can be cashed-in in the shops en-masse with a few shop refresh tokens.

    There are 2 meta-currencies for a global skill tree and per-character customization, but thankfully they're rewarded just for playing instead of like other games that would force you to pick between meta-currency or empowering your run.

    QUIT TODAY

    Beat-em-up about an company worker whose robot co-workers are trying to kill him because they think he's quitting so he decides to quit for real after working his way through each department. The interesting part is how the result of each room offers a choice between 2 upgrades. Air combos or ground combat? Eat faster or heal more from food? Even the intro scene offers a hidden choice of button mashing out of bed to get a 40% movement boost or hitting snooze and sleeping in to get an additional point of max HP.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children Korean hero-based XCOM combat which I got a while ago purely out of reputation even though I'm not one for macro decisions in strategic games. I'm still in the...

    Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children

    Korean hero-based XCOM combat which I got a while ago purely out of reputation even though I'm not one for macro decisions in strategic games. I'm still in the early game just after Irene joined so I'm poor and have no idea what I'm really doing. Currently shaping units as follows:

    • Albus as an enemy phase unit with Wind Veil, Forestallment (Opportunity Attack for the D&D people), and Counterattack. Think I'm going to put bleed effects on him as the slots open up.
    • Sion I haven't actually built anything for lack of relevant masteries. May as well put offensive boosters on him and Impulse Fields to make sure he doesn't get one-shotted later on. Think I'll swap out Lightning Ball back for Thunderbolt due to the latter not having to deal with cover penalties despite lesser scaling and speed.
    • Irene has a lot of mixed scaling, so I'm not sure where to go besides putting Berserker on her so she can keep running in.

    I've had Albus and Sion KO'd in the last two missions by virtue of splitting the party and the Bull leaders exploding them, so that's a lesson to not do that even though the maps have so many treasure chests to loot.

    LONESTARS

    Took note of this during the last Next Fest and it just went into Early Access. It's a turn-based roguelite where you customize your spaceship in the random events between fights and allocate your hand of energy cards in the ship's weapons to deal enough damage to overpower an enemy's attacks. Each run has 12 fights (divided into 2 mob fights, elite, and boss each zone) and an optional victory lap where you can take on 5 bosses back to back (haven't had a build good enough to do this though). The new ship type allows for moving around the ship's systems a few times in the middle of combat so it allows for covering gaps in offense or maximizing the attack after moving the ship out of the way. Already have 7 hours, so I think this is a keeper just for that feeling of "I math'd everything out and avoided damage", though of course it's still developing.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Was in a roguelite deckbuilder mood this week and the new Momodora came out. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell The fifth (and final?) game in the Momodora series came out Thursday and I'm just plain...

    Was in a roguelite deckbuilder mood this week and the new Momodora came out.

    Momodora: Moonlit Farewell

    The fifth (and final?) game in the Momodora series came out Thursday and I'm just plain satisfied as a fan. Took about 7 hours, which is more than the 4 hours of RutM and Minoria. It hit the right notes with me and I liked being able to see Momo and Dora in HD pixel. Gonna hop back into it for Arrange and Hardcore mode.

    Objectively, there's a few changes to the formula:

    • Bosses don't have a reward for perfecting them this time, so that's less FOMO and save reloads for the people worried about that. Shouldn't be anything missable.
    • The map is still metroidvania style, but the areas are unlocked in a linear fashion akin to III.
    • No active items besides the healing bell, but there's more passive items.

    Fights in Tight Spaces

    Finally got a win on Classic difficulty with every deck type. I do like playing it, but it's all too easy for a single mistake to wipe the run. It feels like the UI doesn't signpost the each enemies attributes enough (ex. the enemies that move when you do) leading to preventable mistakes, especially with the lack of a combat preview.

    Vault of the Void

    Stepping back into this, got 2 wins as Tempest, one with Power Walk + Wrath for massive attack multipliers and another with Amplify + Retaliate for constant multi-hit shocks. Unlike the other roguelite deckbuilders I have, this one always gives an overwhelming feeling for actually starting a game due to all the planning for the routing and fights, so it needs the right mindset to play at times. Still, it's always good to see the run come together once the deck starts shredding enemies apart.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on MangaLove, a series sharing thread: January 2024 in ~anime

    SingedFrostLantern
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    She doesn't know why she lives / Nande Ikiteru ka Wakaranai Hito: Izumi Sumi 25-sai by Anu Not as grim as it sounds, it's about a 25-year-old part-timer living with the anxiety and depression in...

    She doesn't know why she lives / Nande Ikiteru ka Wakaranai Hito: Izumi Sumi 25-sai by Anu

    Not as grim as it sounds, it's about a 25-year-old part-timer living with the anxiety and depression in her daily life. It's a mundane setting: Izumi can get out of bed in the morning, maintain her apartment, and go to work just fine, but she's weighted down a lot by her thoughts.

    I think it just portrays the subject well: all the little moments of self-doubt and second-guessing, the negative thoughts that lead to feeling guilty over not being better which spirals into more guilt and self-loathing, and Izumi just not feeling ready for the world which leads to her not wanting to face people. She's not suicidal, but she wishes she could disappear sometimes.

    I think the part that still resonates the most for me is how Izumi feels left behind in life and doesn't know how to fix it or have an answer for when she'll have a solution. I've got a decent job, but I understand the feeling of being lost and diminished in the pressure and expectations of constantly being asked about grades/career/finding a significant other and not being able to answer.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Sea of Stars Just got to the marsh of Mesa Island. It hasn't been exciting besides spotting all the references to The Messenger. It feels really slow pace too, like I wouldn't even say the game...

    Sea of Stars

    Just got to the marsh of Mesa Island. It hasn't been exciting besides spotting all the references to The Messenger. It feels really slow pace too, like I wouldn't even say the game actually begins until commandeering the ghost ship a good couple hours in. It also feels lacking in the wit The Messenger had, with everything being played straight and seriously so far. Hoping it picks up sooner rather than later.

    WORLD END ECONOMiCA episode.01

    Linear VN about a teen runaway on the moon hoping to make it big via day trading and getting taken in by the small, local church. Episode 1 of 3 so I can't judge fully; I'd say it was an okay read, though with a stiff translation. Hard to recommend given A) a random fanservice CG of Hagana leaving the bathroom in just her panties which just felt out of tone B) Hal having frequent and casually misogynistic thoughts against Hagana and Lisa. I suppose if you were feeling generous, the latter could be attributed to him being an arrogant teenager who thinks he has everything planned out and doesn't like them lecturing him, but regardless, it just felt uncomfortable.

    Otherwise it's a tale of Hal choosing between his grand ambition and the people who've taken him in. The first half is slice-of-life-ish world-building which I preferred over the stakes and drama of the second half which felt like it moved too fast. I thought it was interesting that Hagana represented logic, yet also the bonds of the quiet, steady life Hal had formed during his stay with the church. Meanwhile, Barton represented emotion with the exciting glory and riches Hal was dreaming of.

    Credit where it's due, I did like the ending

    In so much media, the stakes are too high for its setting and tone. A city getting nuked or the world getting destroyed or every main character dying/sacrificing themselves to save the day. You just know it's not going to happen or will get reversed lest it leads to a very jarring tone shift. It's one reason I don't like certain sequels to certain games as they dramatically overshoot the scale when escalating and in some cases, still maintain the same tone while doing so.

    Here, the stakes are just believable enough: Hal has been suddenly entrusted by the local community with raising enough funds to pay off their debts in a week or else their properties will be claimed by an uncaring company wanting their land. And so you see it coming: Hal is well-meaning, but he consistently pursues the big dream over what's in front of him throughout the story. He heads out to his meeting rather than wonder why Chris and her father would abruptly show up to the church. He prioritizes the virtual tournament for the recognition to be scouted and prize money to give to Hagana so he can walk away without guilt rather than the real stock market to help people settle their debts. In the end, he trusts Barton's false advice over Hagana in one last bid to meet the deadline.

    In the end, he fails.

    Okay, Hal falling into a coma for 4 days and no longer being able to control his body due to the mental shock of being betrayed by his idol and the crushing weight of failed responsibility is overdramatic, but besides that. It's not failure for the sake of failure or to be dark and edgy. It's the end result of his overall choices, trusting the wrong person, and making the wrong gamble. It's just a feeling I prefer; instead of just "Surprise! Plot Twist!", it's "Of course things would play out this way."

    I'm not a fan of Hal, but I think the above is why Royal (Iconoclasts) and King Knight (Shovel Knight) are two of my favorite characters. They're entertainingly haughty and (somewhat) well-meaning, but as circumstances test them, they fall back to their flaws again and again until it's no surprise what happens to them.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    LunarLux 10 hour-ish JRPG with some Megaman Battle Network DNA woven in. Shorter than I had expected, but it was a fun and cute experience and there's supposed to be more updates from meeting...

    LunarLux

    10 hour-ish JRPG with some Megaman Battle Network DNA woven in. Shorter than I had expected, but it was a fun and cute experience and there's supposed to be more updates from meeting stretch goals, so I'll look forward to more of it in the future.

    Aside from its charming aesthetic, I'll comment on two aspects of its battle system:

    • The first is defense because you're given an S-rank for not taking damage. Depending on the type of move, you can either dodge or you're forced to use up a temporary shield to block it. You can generate more shields (that's where all my first skill upgrades went), so it's a somewhat interesting dynamic of balancing offense and defense, especially with 2 other skills that use up your shields for attacks.
    • The second is how intimidating the skill system looks and the accompanying decision paralysis for what to use and upgrade, and even moreso when you don't have all your options yet. The Active Skills are basically your moves and you get to decide for yourself which move is powerful/efficient enough for its SP cost and how easy the action command for it is. The Support Skills are basically a deck you build and after choosing an Active Skill, you pick 1 of 3 random Support Skills to use. Early game was mostly experimentation, while mid-late game I was pretty much able to stack flat attack boosts and multipliers onto the multi-hit moves which kinda snapped the difficulty in half.

    Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster

    On the first game, recruited the 3rd party member and took down a tank boss. I am making this much harder for myself because the characters gain more stat boosts when doing bulk level ups so the entire party is severely underleveled from me not wanting to waste EXP. Aside from that, Kalas has been an unrepentant dick which is nice and different for a JRPG protag and the normal battle theme goes hard.

  19. Comment on Steam Winter Sale 2023: Hidden gems in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Sorted by a mix of what I'd personally recommend, price, and general amount of steam reviews. The stuff in tabs are either in that zone of popular indie or pricier than $10 or not on sale this...

    Sorted by a mix of what I'd personally recommend, price, and general amount of steam reviews. The stuff in tabs are either in that zone of popular indie or pricier than $10 or not on sale this time.

    Way of the Passive Fist - $1.49 / 90% off / 159 Reviews

    Beat-Em-Up with the premise that you're only parrying/dodging to tire the enemy out and charge up your special moves. If you have any interest in the genre or parrying, then go right ahead. There's medal rankings for each stage, a remixed post-game campaign, and a random encounter/upgrade mode.

    Betrayal At Club Low - $6.69 / 33% off / 345 Reviews

    A single-player dice-rolling, pizza-upgrading tabletop session where you pick your skills and choose how you infiltrate the night scene of Club Low to extract another undercover agent there. The latest in the surreal Off-Peak series by Cosmo D and the tunes to match.

    Has a demo for the beginning area just outside the club itself.

    The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass - $6.74 / 55% off / 163 reviews.

    Mystery VN where 8 people are trapped in a building for 12 hours. The characters are weak and it can be played as a linear VN, but the story asks that you try to take notes and figure the mysteries out yourself. It provides a summary for each scene, a note section alongside it for you to use, and the entire text log for everything you've read with a search function for it for you to freely look back at past clues.

    Space Gladiators - $7.49 / 50% off / 310 Reviews

    Do you like the idea of Hollow Knight as a roguelite? Do you trust the Brotato dev? Well, this is the game they made before Brotato with the same artstyle and 8 characters to play as. 3 biomes + final boss.

    Has a demo under Space Gladiators: The Hole

    <=$10, >1k Reviews

    Iconoclasts - $4.99 / 75% off / 3.5k Reviews

    2D shooting platformer with lots of setpieces. There's lots of praise for it, but the main thing for me personally is the story and how dark it gets, the way everything just gets worse and worse because nobody can let go of their fatal flaws as the world gradually reaches its end.

    It's been cheaper and part of bundles though, so this is something I vouch for as a fantastic experience, but not the best deal.

    One Step From Eden - $7.99 / 60% off / 5.5k Reviews

    Megaman Battle Network-inspired deckbuilding roguelite. 16 starting loadouts from the 9 playable characters and the characters you're not using are the bosses you face.

    Paradise Killer - $7.99 / 60 % off / 2.5k Reviews

    This is a stylized first-person exploration game disguised as a murder mystery investigation. Wander around, grab collectibles, talk to everyone repeatedly, and unlock more of the weird cultist island as you investigate.

    Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling - $7.99 / 60% off / 4k Reviews

    Paper Mario-inspired JRPG. Though inspired, it grasps its own charm in its bug-themed world and 3 main characters instead of Mario having several partners to swap between.

    CrossCode - $5.99 / $9.33 with post-game story DLC / 70% off / 13k Reviews

    This is the most popular game for this post in terms of Steam reviews and it absolutely deserves it. It's just a solid in every way SNES-esque action RPG.

    Has a demo

    Project Warlock - $2.76 / 77% off / 3.3k Reviews

    Retro-style FPS. I'm not normally into these with all the secret hunting in the genre, but the guns here felt super punchy to me and there's a lot of different ways to build the Warlock with the skill points and gun upgrade paths.

    Has a demo.

    Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight - $3.99 / 60% off / 9k Reviews

    The 4th game in the Momodora, this entry began mixing in Souls elements into the series' metroidvania style and is the most well known for it. The next game is releasing in January actually.

    The 1st and 2nd games are free on itch.io with the 2nd game being where the series found its identity as a metroidvania starring a leaf-wielding priestess with a bow. The 3rd game is the first of the series on Steam and felt more 8-bit along with going one stage at a time. Minoria is a spinoff made after the 4th game featuring sword-wielding nuns hunting witches and is apparently an alt timeline.

    Yoku's Island Express - $3.99 / 80% off / 2.5k Reviews

    Chill pinball metroidvania. I don't think anything else needs to be said because I don't think there's anything else out there that's like this. If there is, I'd want to know.

    Has a demo.

    Furi - $5.99 / $7.46 with DLC playable character / 70% off / 8.8k Reviews

    Sci-Fi boss fight game. You control a silent badass with a sword and pistol breaking his way out of his custom prison by killing all the jailers between him and freedom.

    Fight'N Rage - $7.99 / 65% off / 2k Reviews

    Beat-Em-Up with 3 main characters, co-op, and lots of different routes and content. I think this is the gold standard for an indie Beat-Em-Up.

    Shadowrun Trilogy Bundle - $9.97 / 80% off

    Fantasy Cyberpunk WRPG with the XCOM cover-based combat. I believe the first game was fan-ported to the third game's Steam workshop, so that's an option for a mechanics update. Otherwise yeah, choose what you want to play as, influence your companions, and what kind of runner you are.

    >$10, <=1k Reviews

    Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane - $11.99 / 40% off / 492 Reviews

    Ace Attorney-inspired game set in a low fantasy setting with 5 cases involving magic. I'll try to say the following in a compliment-meaning way: the lack of breakdown animations for the witnesses gave me an uncanny valley feeling from how well the rest of the game drew me in and getting the sense that something was missing from the experience (it's a crowdfunded game apparently, so I assume there wasn't enough budget which still makes it impressive).

    Has a demo for the entire 1st case.

    Your Turn To Die -Death Game By Majority- - $13.59 / 20% off / 1.2k Reviews

    Deathgame VN with some puzzle solving and trial-esque sequences. The characters do actually die here, so the tone honestly mixes the horror and trauma well along with the human will to survive and cooperate with each other even when trapped like this.

    Well, you can actually grab this for free from vgperson's site since it started out as a translation project there and it was basically chosen as the official English translation I believe. The Steam version has some exclusive sidestories, is said to get updates earlier for the rest of the main game, and of course, supports the dev.

    The Wonderful 101: Remastered - $17.99 / 55% off / 468 Reviews

    Part of the Platinum Games catalogue of stylish action. Honestly, this game holds a warm place in my heart with all its Saturday morning cartoon goodness and I think the controls are more mechanically simpler than others of its genre.

    Has a demo that covers Chapter 1.

    Demons Roots - $14.99 / 25% off / 1k Reviews

    JRPG with an epic story (in the dramatic sense of the word) of being driven to the brink and fighting against oppression, though it is the type of game that'd be marked as private in Steam's library. I'll just say that Deathpolca is a refreshingly competent JRPG protagonist who walks into situations prepared and with an ace up her sleeve.

    Not on sale, but keep an eye out

    The Zodiac Trial - Previous low $4.49 / 70% off / 118 Reviews

    Very 999-inspired deathgame VN. 12 people are kidnapped and told to play a boardgame where the first people to reach the end go free while everyone else is executed. Lots of routes after the initial split and lots of death too.

    Has a demo that ends just before it branches off to a route.

    Rail of Möbius - Previous low $7.14 / 45% off / 286 reviews

    Timeloop VN. It's got the pseudo-science, the dread of death in every loop, and highschooler shenanigans. Translation is basic, but understandable depending on your tolerance for it.

    Has a demo.

    428: Shibuya Scramble - $20 / 60% off / 1.7k Reviews

    It is currently on sale, but its sale history shows it going between $10 and $20 so...

    VN with lots of viewpoint swapping and the key premise of figuring out what decision each character needs to make to avoid butterfly effect bad ends for everyone else to make it through. The live-action footage/screenshots might take a little getting used to, but this is oh so worth it once everyone's stories start getting connected to each other.

    6 votes

  20. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    SingedFrostLantern
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    Skimmed over Steam's Next Fest demos. There was a surprising amount that I want to keeps tabs on, but few that feel distinct in identity? Well, here's the stuff that felt different: AMEDAMA: It's...

    Skimmed over Steam's Next Fest demos. There was a surprising amount that I want to keeps tabs on, but few that feel distinct in identity? Well, here's the stuff that felt different:

    • AMEDAMA: It's a 7-day timeloop game where the main character is a recently-deceased spirit possessing different bodies to rescue his sister. I think the premise is interesting though I can already see some flaws:

      • It's a samurai game, so Guard Counters are pretty much the only DPS that matters.
      • The demo is the first chapter, so I'm really hoping the rest of it is more open-world timeloop rather than being shoved towards objective after objective.
      • The MC's personality amounts to "My sister!" which is understandable considering he was killed and she was kidnapped, but oh so dull.

    • Against Great Darkness: You know that game where you control a bar at the bottom of the screen and move it left and right to bounce a ball at blocks? This is that, except as a roguelite where the ball is your main DPS, all the blocks are shooting at you, and the premise is that you're playing as a pagan god who's climbing out of hell. I think this is a nice twist on the genre with a distinct style to it.

    • TEVI: Same dev as Rabi-Ribi. The demo starts off slow with no gear or skills but once the ball gets rolling, it's a whole chapter of Metroidvania goodness that speaks for its quality with in-depth combat. Went melee for the demo, but the different sigils look interesting for mana regen burst style. I should give Rabi-Ribi a shot anyways.

    • LONESTAR: Turn-based spaceship roguelite. This seriously scratches that itch of optimizing ship equipment and card hand to minimize damage and overpower the enemy's attacks in the beam-to-beam tug of war. First try at it was a successful 1H40M run that was constantly generating energy which powered up the the specific type of laser cannons that I had.

    • Rabbit and Steel: By the Maiden and Spell dev. It's a Co-Op bullet hell-ish roguelite, though the page itself compares it to an MMO raid with different classes, attacks on cooldowns, and cooperation needed unless you're playing solo. Tried out the Dancer due to the attacks having a chance of resetting the Special attack and that paired up well with items that triggered on Special attack.

    • Duelists of Eden:

      • Disclaimer for this one, I'm an alpha player who was fortunate enough to receive a key.
      • A sequel to One Step From Eden focused on 1v1 fighting. Draft up an 8-12 card deck and get to queuing. Like any other fighting game, it's a matter of figuring out your opponent's deck, threat range, habits, and combos in the back and forth. There's also an NA tournament scheduled for this Friday where top 8 get alpha access, so check that out if you're interested.
    Other games that seemed neat.

    • SpellRogue: Slay the Spire, but with dice. I think the main differences are having to choose between an artifact or deck upgrade after an elite, and being able to destroy cards to gain other cards or artifacts. From what I saw, the demo character is focused on dice manipulation, poison, and multi-hits. Had a successful run simply from having 2 good damage cards, and two cards that retained dice for the next turn and gave effects for doing so.

    • Pizza Bandit: Co-Op Objective Horde TPS. Honestly, it reminds me of Payday before it went full Payday so I hope it can fill that gap.

    • Skybreakers: Normally I'm not into Survivor-likes, but each character having a unique melee moveset with character-specific perks makes it more interesting to me. Played as the hammer girl, and the first perk I got was being able to charge up her golem by attacking it. This was already great on its own, but then I rolled a hammer affix that made it a constant whirlwind attack so that just played itself.

    • Darkblade Ascent: Roguelite First Person Brawler. It's a bit simple: your options amount to parry attack, dodge attack, cast spell off cooldown, and melee; the upgrades are all number/% stat boosts too. Despite this simplicity, I thought it just felt nice to play. Didn't see a brightness setting though, the lighting is just a tad dark.

    • Phantom Rose 2 Sapphire: Roguelite deck builder where your cards are all available, but go on cooldown when played even between battles and you have to get rid of cards if you're above the deck limit at camps. Each turn, the enemy shows the two cards they're going to play and you get to fill the remaining gaps on the board with two of your cards while each card gets activated in order. The game definitely has some mobile game DNA in it though; apparently the first game was originally on PC but then had the mechanics remade for F2P mobile.

    • Sovereign Syndicate: Haven't played Disco Elysium yet, but this game is reminiscent of it with the narration and rolls, though with Tarot Cards and steampunk. Felt a little railroaded in the demo, though it is the start of the game. The steam forum comments also cite Shadowrun as an influence, so I do hope this game turns out well.

    • Star Ocean The Second Story R: Classic realtime JRPG remaster. Haven't heard of the series before and the story so far is 90s JRPG, but it is holding my interest. Chose Rena as my main character, mostly casting a boulder before going in for dodge/melee combos.

    • Little Locked Rooms Small cutesy game of looking at a crime scene diorama and solving the mystery by answering each question of what happened.

    • Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley: I'm unfamiliar with the Moomins, but this felt like a wholesome pro-nature exploration game with mild stealth elements.

    • SUPER CRAZY RHYTHM CASTLE: This is a rhythm game except A: up to 4 people can join like a party game, B: the game is deliberately trying to screw you over with its scenarios which is a little frustrating until you accept that that's what this game is about.

    1 vote