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Mar 24th, 2024 at 16:38:43 - Trials of Fire (PC) |
I shouldn’t have purchased this. I must have been on a card battler kick, probably when I was playing Slay the Spire and Monster Train last year. There’s nothing wrong with Trials of Fire; it just doesn’t have the personality or the pizzazz that better card battlers have. In fact, playing it after Wildermyth, it comes off as a way less interesting take on the card battler/tactical RPG genre, and I can’t help but compare the two. The main difference, of course, is that Wildermyth has no cards; it’s a tactics RPG with procedural storytelling and character development that was really, really cool. Trials of Fire doesn’t have anything that is really, really cool. Trials of Fire has:
- An overworld that manages to be duller than Wildermyth’s. The landscape is drab, and you just move around following a quest arrow, stopping on whatever blue question marks are around to try and find crafting supplies, food, obsidian (money), equipment, followers, battles (which is how you level up), and so on.
- A stamina bar that means you have to rest and eat food. Resting or dragging food onto a character is also how you recover health lost in battle or through random events. As your stamina drops, your characters get stuck with debuff cards in battle, so you have to stop to restore stamina.
- Time management that is not as interesting as Wildermyth’s. You have to make progress toward the golden quest arrow on the edge of the map, and if you are too slow, then your morale drops. If it drops all the way, it’s game over. So you are basically balancing your morale with your stamina and trying to keep your characters’ level high enough to win combat encounters (i.e., since combat is how you gain XP, you have to stop and fight to level up, but can’t stop too much lest you spend too much time fighting and your morale drops). This was less interesting than the incursion and enemy strength timers in Wildermyth.
- Cards to collect and upgrade. Upon each level up, you can replace one of your existing class cards with another one, or choose to upgrade an existing class card.
- Equipment to wear and upgrade. Equipment can be upgraded with crafting supplies when resting. Each piece of equipment bestows various cards on the wearer, and upgrading the equipment upgrades its cards, which is cool.
- Unlockable character classes that can level up to award more class cards. The classes level up after a campaign, and I suppose that newly unlocked cards are available in future campaigns.
- A bare bones story, random and generic events, simple quests, all of which totally pale in comparison to Wildermyth’s (and most other games).
- Characters with no personality whatsoever, such a stark contrast to Wildermyth.
- Bosses that pose a real threat!
Regarding the latter, at the end of each quest stage (there were three stages in the quest campaign I played), there is a boss battle. The first two of these were easy enough, but the last one just about killed me. It was a dragon with 90 health (double the previous boss). It killed two of my characters, and only my hunter remained. My hunter had like 13 health and 11 armor, and the dragon was at about the same. My hunter was also backed into a corner, and in one more turn, the dragon would have moved in melee range and my hunter would have been stuck (you can’t use ranged attacks in melee range of your target). But I drew like the perfect combination of cards, did double damage with my first attack and then my last card did x damage, and if the target was then below y HP, it automatically died. Well, the math was perfect, and I killed the dragon. If I had drawn different cards, the dragon would have killed me. Intense for sure, but what the hell! The difficulty came out of nowhere in the last battle. Battles are not repeatable, by the way. If your party wipes, it’s game over and you start the whole campaign over. I would have been pissed, because, like Wildermyth, these campaigns are not short.
Upon winning, your classes level up and you unlock some new cards for each of them. I unlocked a new class for achieving something or other. Then you just go back to the menu and start over with another quest. Wildermyth has that cool Legacy system with persistent characters that grow over time, but there’s nothing like that here. Given that the storyline for the quest campaign I did was so generic, I’m not motivated to play another one (and there is only one more story quest, then the others are like roguelike situations where you just play with daily modifiers or create custom campaigns or do a seasonal challenge or whatever). There are surely a bunch more cards to unlock, and there are 9 classes in total to unlock (for completing x quests, for killing y bosses, for spending z crafting materials, etc.), so there is more to do in terms of progression. But it’s just not that compelling! Again though, nothing is bad about the game, but man, I guess it’s just rare that I play something that is so disappointlingly generic.
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Mar 21st, 2024 at 13:13:56 - Flower (PS4) |
Played this after Journey, knowing that it was the same studio’s former game. I see the DNA in the aesthetics. It’s visually striking, with an emphasis on the musical score, which harmonizes as the player guides their flower petals through other flowers in the levels. Basically, you control flower petals, first a single petal in each level, and then a “swarm” of them by the end of each level.
Early levels are really peaceful and serene. You’re floating through grasslands, intrigued by the beauty of the surroundings and the fact that you’re bringing life and color. At the end of one early level, you “enliven” a big old tree, which grows and blooms. It’s all very majestic. The first half was the best.
Later levels change the tone significantly, as you float through areas that are like cold, dead, electrical grids or something. There are lots of power lines and electrical towers. It’s all very grey and drab. Gone is the color of the first half of the game. Touching towers can shock you, so you have to slow down and navigate between the metal to touch the flowers beneath them. Navigating the petals could be tedious, like when you miss a flower and keep circling around trying to get it, or in this later level when you’re trying to slowly creep through electrical towers. I was often unclear as to the “hit boxes,” for lack of a better word, of my petals and the other objects, which is why I’d miss flowers I thought I touched, or get shocked when I thought I’d avoided a tower.
Anyway, the last level is like a triumphant return of nature to the gray city-scape, smashing through the electrical towers now. Take that, cities! Take this, industry! Eat dirt, electricity! Flowers rule! I did enjoy the revenge of destroying electrical towers. Interesting game for sure, and haven’t played anything quite like it, but the experience itself wasn’t as captivating as Journey’s was.
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Mar 21st, 2024 at 12:57:31 - Journey (PS4) |
I definitely think waiting like 12 years to play Journey made it less special than it would have been before I'd played other games that Journey reminded me of, like Abzu, Gris, or Playdead’s games. I mean, since then, there have been plenty of artistic, emotional, beautiful indies. It ticked all those boxes: artistic, great score, great visual style, emotional, some light platforming or puzzling, etc. But the thing Journey does have that the others don’t is the cooperative element. I’m surprised that no game I’ve encountered has ripped that off. Surely, there is a janky game out there somewhere called “Voyage” or “Trip.”
I was playing Journey, and I knew that I was supposed to have a partner, and after 10 minutes, there someone was! I couldn’t speak to them in any way, but it was cool how we ended up communicating and playing with the sounds we could make. When you make the chime sound, your partner’s scarf “fills up” and they can jump longer distances. So, there’s a practical element to staying with your partner and chiming: you both will be able to move farther and faster. At some point, I tried to see if my partner would recognize chime patterns, and lo and behold, they immediately did, and mimicked them! Chime chime chime…chime chime chime. Chimechime chimechime chiiiiiiime…chimechime chimechime chiiiiime. That was cool. But at some point, my partner disappeared! Then they came back. Then I realized at the end of the game, when it tells you who your partner was, that I had two different partners!
I’m not sure I felt a strong emotional connection or anything to my partner, but I did like knowing that there was someone else on the other side of the screen and that we were weathering the storm (see: snow level) together. My partner did have a tendency to get killed by the big bird enemy (well, one of my partners) and to take the long way around to get to places. I’ll assume that I had one fun partner (chime chime!) and one less good partner who got attacked and turned around a lot.
Anyway, definitely a cool experience, and I’ll file it away in the “classics” bin.
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Mar 11th, 2024 at 09:09:55 - Pyre (PC) |
A Supergiant Games game! I loved Bastion and Transistor, and knew that this one was a bit different, some sort of RPG-sports hybrid. I have been looking forward to playing it, with dreams of Blitzball. It’s a tougher recommendation than the first two, though. And whatever preconceived notions I had about playing RPG basketball were a bit misplaced. I think that first and foremost, this is a visual novel, with some RPG, sports, and MOBA elements. As a visual novel, the focus is on character development and storytelling, and I think that if you approach it like this, then you will enjoy it more. As per other Supergiant Games games, the narrative, the worldbuilding, the characters, all that is quite good. You will spend more time reading, especially if you read the (100 or so?) entries in the Book of Rites, than doing anything else.
You’ll recognize similar themes as in Bastion and Transistor: a disembodied voice (here, not so much a narrator, but actually a titular Voice) whose origin is later revealed; characters who are trapped in one way or another (here physically in the Downside and by reputation and past deeds); and an end-of-the-world scenario (or a major change or remaking of the world). Despite the shift in genre, some of the RPG stuff is still there (combat, leveling up, some equipment, some skill trees), and so is the modifiable difficulty of Bastion and Transistor, this time in the form of constellations, members of a pantheon that you can toggle on/off to make the Rites (the MOBA/basketball sport) harder on yourself.
The Rites is the sports part. You and others cast into the Downside must compete in the Rites to earn your freedom and return to the Commonwealth. The Rites are divinely inspired and ritualistic, serious business. Most of the characters (especially those on the opponents’ teams) very much want their freedom, and they all resent the system that would cast people into the Downside. Much of the story is about how the Rites came to be, including about the Eight Scribes who banished the Titans and formed the triumvirates, and on and on, and you can read the extensive mythology.
I am trying to start talking about how the Rites work, but keep veering instead into the narrative surrounding the Rites because that’s the more interesting part! It really is “just” RPG/MOBA basketball. Games are played between two teams of three. Your goal is to put the celestial orb (ball) into the other team’s pyre (basket) and extinguish it (score enough points to win). Each character has attributes that govern movement speed, how quickly they respawn once defeated, how large their “aura” (attack range) is, and how much damage they do to the enemy pyre. They also all have some movement and attack abilities (e.g., sprint, leap; project aura, spawn sapling), and can gain various skills (e.g., more stamina, faster speed, faster respawn, force enemy to drop the ball in flight, etc.). The characters really don’t play all that differently from one another, Rites are over in a matter of minutes, and in my experience, the faster/more mobile the character, the better they are. Fast characters, especially once upgraded with stamina and greater burst speed, can just zip around the field and outmaneuver the slower ones. Sure, their strength isn’t great, so you have to score a few more baskets, but you’ll be doing donuts around the strong, slow characters. The game emphasizes teamwork, but it isn’t all that necessary.
All in all, the story is the star. The sports addition was a miss. It was a weak vehicle for delivering narrative. I would have liked a more fleshed out sports component, with more complexity, longer matches, and so on. I think I could have really gotten into it then.
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