2015 Game Review Haiku, #46 – What in the World?

Study the picture
Guess what it is, or just look
Up answers online

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Hitting reset repeatedly in Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes

Once, when I was younger and spending the early hours of the morning crabbing off a pier overlooking the Atlantic Ocean with my father, I took a walk while the traps soaked, found a small, isolated cut of shore, and started skipping stones. At first, I was rubbish, getting only two skips or ker-plunking the rock on the first toss, but after enough practice and searching for the smoothest, most flat rocks this side of New Jersey, I was hitting bounce streaks of five or more. Which, if you didn’t know, is extremely satisfying. There’s something magical about seeing such a heavy thing dance across the water like it’s flying with the wind before it loses steam and descends into the watery unknown.

Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes is not actually a stone-skipping simulator, though somebody out there should totally make that game. Actually, I think there was one mini-game in Wii Sports Resort that had you side-slicing rocks (or discs?) across a lake or through rings for points, but even with the updated Wii MotionPlus controller it was still tricky, and I had to constantly remind myself to not let go of the controller when performing the throwing motion. Instead, Alan Hazelden‘s on-the-surface simple puzzle game is about a sailor who has washed ashore and needs materials to fix his ship. In order to find these essentials, you’ll need to skip stones (or push rocks as I saw it) across the water to manipulate lily pads and reach other chunks of land. Sounds easy, but let me assure you it is not; I got no further than the fourth screen before my brain hurt.

Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes did not magically appear out of thin air. Hazelden appears to be a rather prolific independent developer, and an earlier game of his called Mirror Isles looks nearly identical to his latest creation. Except there’s a hypnotic looping soundtrack and has you swapping places with a second character via teleporting mirrors to maneuver around the various islands. It seems just as deceptively difficult. The minimalist graphics vibe is fine, as it is really the puzzles that stand out as the things to pay attention to. You can hit “Z” to undo your last step or “R” to reset to the last checkpoint, and I hit these keys a great number of times.

Give it a go. Maybe you’ll get farther then the fourth screen. Perhaps the fifth screen is the last and where all the ship materials are, or maybe it just gets more punishing from there. At the very least, open Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes in your browser and tab away to do whatever it is you actually do during your time in front of the computer, that way you can work, but listen to the soothing, calming tones of ocean waves lapping at sandy shores. I’ve had it going the entire time I wrote this blog post.

Tilt every platform to make it through Through

Here’s the unfortunate reality: I will never have enough time to explore all the game jams out there that I want to explore. I’m still not even close to seeing all the entries from GameBoy Jam 3, of which there are 237 in total, and I’ve tried out a whooping three, each of which had something unique or fun to offer: The Tale of Kelda, Roguelight, and Meowgical Tower. Now here we are with a further 181 creations for the next iteration, the rightfully named GameBoy Jam 4, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Guess I’ll play something.

Through is a short, proof of concept puzzle platformer starring a tiny black pixel that could probably befriend the likes of Boxboy and the doomed hero from Disposabot. There are twelve levels in total, with the goal being to reach the teleport pad; however, it’s not always a straight path to it, and this is where tilting takes over. By pushing our tiny retro pixel soldier against a wall for a second or two, he or she or it can pass through, turning the wall into empty space and reshuffling the other platforms around. It’s a bit mind-bending, and I never really saw how the world shifted or was going to shift, like one eventually did in Fez, but if you kept playing around with tilting this way or that, the exit would get closer and closer.

The twelve levels here are not difficult, especially the first three that act more like a tutorial than anything, and so Through is more of a casual playthrough, where you try pushing against a wall and seeing what happens. If it doesn’t work out, jump elsewhere and push another wall. Floor spikes make an appearance only in the final level, and those kind of dangerous elements could have been introduced earlier to create some tension or force players to find an alternate path to the exit. All of this is backed by a looping soundtrack of bloops and bleeps, though it works well enough.

A “To be continued…” message pops up after you finish Through‘s final level, and I do hope we get more from this. The mechanics are there, but a little more variety could help, as well as a smidgen more art, though the simple graphics help create a lonely aesthetic. The game’s developer goes by the username goshki, and I’m not familiar with any of his other work, but I’d love to see this warp maze puzzle game expand into something a bit trickier, more demanding. Personally, I think it’d be a great fit on the Nintendo 3DS, especially if there’s a level editor involved, wherein we can then see what others can create with this idea. All right, I’m off to get a cup of coffee, and I think I’ll just push against the kitchen wall afterwards and see where it takes me.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #36 – Out There (Somewhere)

Time those jumps, fix ship
End boss is out there somewhere
Don’t ignore the trees

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Your broken spaceship’s parts are Out There (Somewhere)

Well, the Steam Summer Sale kicked off the other day, and so far, I’ve produced a haiku about it, as well as bought a bundle of four games for $0.74. I’d also like to note that the money used to purchase this bundle was generated from selling digital trading cards on the Steam marketplace, so this is a big win–in my mind–from multiple angles. The Developer Alliance bundle, which was marked down to 95% off, contained the following, all of which seemed interesting and were not already in my library at the time of purchase: Polarity, Beep, Camera Obscura, and Out There (Somewhere). Today, I’ll be waxing on and off about the last listed title there, but I do expect to try out the other three sooner than later.

Out There (Somewhere), a name that feels like it should be attached to a long-lost Asimov short story, is an action-based puzzle platformer clearly inspired by adventures like Cave Story, Super Metroid, and Portal. See, you play an explorer named Yuri stranded on a dangerous alien planet after your spaceship is damaged. Low on fuel and in desperate need of key spaceship parts, your only hope for escape is to explore and see what this planet holds. Thankfully, you have a teleportation gun, though its use is limited based on your environment. I’ll explain.

In this platformer, you can jump, as well as shoot your teleportation gun, which fires a ball of blue light. Technically, that’s you. Once that blue light hits a surface, you’ll be instantly transported there. Of course, there are some exceptions, as different colored beams of light will get in your way: red cancels your shot, blue will teleport you like any other surface, and green takes you for a ride first. This is where a lot of the puzzles come into play, figuring out how to get from one place to another using your gun. Often, you’ll have to factor in momentum too when landing a teleporting shot. Fairly early on you’ll acquire a more weapony gun, a real pea-shooter, which will help you take out enemies like bats and monster slime thingies; alas, having two different guns confused me at first, and I ended up firing the wrong one at the right time far too many times.

Evidently, I’m a sucker for games where every screen you traverse gets a name. I loved this in VVVVVV and You Have to Win the Game, and I like it here as well, though the screen names, so far, are not highly titillating (for example, Basement). The story is fairly thin, but enough to go on. As you explore, you’ll come across NPCs in the form of alien treefolk; they don’t say much, but there’s an Achievement for speaking to every one of them, and so I’ll do it. However, Out There (Somewhere) is more about the action and nifty mechanics, and the difficulty curve is surprisingly tough–but rewarding.

Part of me is bummed to learn that Out There (Somewhere) was released back in 2012. That means I’ve been missing out on this good, wholesome, teleport-your-body fun for three years. There once was a time when only a handful of games came out, and you could keep track of them all; now, not so much. Well, I’m glad then that this Developer Alliance bundle for the Steam Summer Sale caught my eye, and I’m looking forward to checking out the other titles, but only after I finish Yuri’s mission. For the meantime, I have to get back to work, and by that I mean collecting those vital spaceship parts with style.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #35 – A Golden Wake

The Roaring Twenties
A time of crime, greed, land booms
Use intuition

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

The full Broken Age, now with trickier, disheartening puzzles

At Tim Schafer’s urging, I restarted Broken Age entirely once “Act 2” was released last month. I hadn’t touched the game since I burned through “Act 1” in 2014, so it made sense to refresh myself on the minor story beats, seeing as Act 1’s doozy of a cliffhanger closing has stayed bouncing around in my mind all this time. Magically, I remembered the majority of solutions to puzzles and dialogue navigation, so the first chunk of the game didn’t take too long to get through once again. Plus, the full game now comes stocked with Achievements to pop, many of which are rewarded for exploring all options, something I do often in adventure games.

Look, here’s the thing. I’m a backer of Broken Age. I did not contribute much to the Kickstarter–in fact, I got in on the action after Double Fine already met its goal–but I was still one of many that helped bring this adventuring air bubble to the surface. I feel a closeness to it, a connection, certainly reinforced by watching the documentary as each unfiltered episode was released, seeing the problems and answers to game development unfold. It’s a special game, and while I loved the story from beginning to end, especially the vibrant, unique characters, I just found myself depressed over the spike in puzzle difficulty for the second half.

Because I hold the story in such high regards, I will spoil very little of it here. For those that don’t know what the four-one-one is, let me steal some words from Broken Age‘s official website:

Broken Age is a timeless coming-of-age story of barfing trees and talking spoons. Vella Tartine and Shay Volta are two teenagers in strangely similar situations, but radically different worlds. The player can freely switch between the characters and their individual stories, helping them take control of their own lives, and dealing with the unexpected adventures that follow.

Right. Let’s talk about puzzles. In the first half of Broken Age–and yes, it is hard to think of the game as a single entity after it was cut in half to get it out to the public even though now one can play it and never realize that there ever was a cliffhanger to hang on to for months–the majority of the puzzles involved using an item on something. Pretty typical point-and-click adventuring stuff, and occasionally you’d have to navigate through some specific dialogue lines or combine items with one another. The number of screens and people to interact with for both Shay and Vella were severely limited or doled out in small chunks to not overwhelm players.

Once Broken Half‘s second half starts, the puzzles raise the difficulty up to eleven. That’s a Spinal Tap reference, I think. I’m not even kidding when I reveal that I couldn’t get past Vella’s first screen, eventually having to look up an answer. It turns out that this puzzle required you clicking on a specific part of the rope, whereas all previous puzzles never asked for such specificity. I figured just highlighting the rope would’ve been enough, but nope. Later on, there’s another rope puzzle that I’ve seen many on the Interwebz complain about, but I actually got through it just fine, as well as found it amusing. The puzzles I really struggled with involved wiring Hexipals for various purposes, as well as tricking someone into believing Vella was somebody else. Both involved a lot of remembering numerous, highly specific details and backtracking. They are also randomized and tiresome, and it is extremely frustrating when you know what you need to do, but can’t do it because you can’t remember if the boy in that faded family picture is wearing red or green shoes.

That all said, I do think Broken Age is a good game, if not the most fun to play during the later parts. Go to it for the characters and dialogue and the jokes you get to tell a barfing tree. Don’t be afraid to try those chatty utensils are everything and everyone, as some of the best writing is hidden in their responses. I urge you to look up puzzle solutions for the later section of the game, if only to remain in the world and see how everything ends. I do have to wonder if this made any non-fans of point-and-click adventure games into fans or if it was just a one-off for them. Time will tell, and you never know…maybe in twenty years–y’know, after adventure games are claimed dead and done once again–we’ll get another crowd-funded game from Schafer & Company. I’ll play it, but no more wire-based puzzles please.

Pokémon Shuffle’s Mega Glalie is bad game design

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was stuck on Pokémon Shuffle‘s level 120 against Mega Glalie, and that everything was fine because, no matter what, my pocket monsters were continuing to gain XP and grow stronger and, without a doubt, I’d eventually have a team powerful enough to conquer the annoying, Generation III ice-type levitating face and move on to level 121. Astoundingly, that hasn’t happened yet, and I’ve been, more or less, using all five of my hearts against the bloody ripper every night before bed. I’m sorry to say, but this is some really bad game design, and I can’t recall the last time I hit such a visible wall in a game.

I’m not the only one struggling. If you type both “Mega Glalie” and Pokémon Shuffle into Google, you’ll quickly get returns for posts about people unable to beat the beast, people beating it using every item and Jewel they had and only then crawling past the finish line, and people puffing their chests out like mighty lions, claiming to have defeated Mega Glalie easily, using no items at all. Uh huh. Here’s a handful of confetti. If you are to use items, which are, let me remind y’all, quite costly, many are suggesting Complexity -1s, Mega Starts, and Disruption Delays.

For me, there’s certainly a stubborn drive behind my desire to beat Mega Glalie without any items, and this is not at all to prove I am a big macho man and super skilled at matching severed Pokémon heads. I conquered all 119 Pokémon levels before Mega Glalie without using any items. Perseverance, patience, and picking the right team was all it took, and so it bugs me deeply that the same strategy simply cannot be employed here. The problem is that, within four or five turns, Mega Glalie begins freezing entire columns, two at a time, often locking you out of sweet–and powerful–combo chains, forcing you to chip away at its health until the board resets or you run out of moves. Even with a team of level 6 Pokémon, the farthest I’ve dropped Mega Glalie’s health is down to about 25%.

This level is designed for you to spend money on (either in-game currency, which takes a good while to stock, or through extra turns via Jewels bought by real-life money), unless you hit the biggest luck streak of the century. Truthfully, I was enjoying Pokémon Shuffle, which just celebrated some 2.5 million+ downloads, when it kept progressing, even if just little by little. Play a few matches every night, unlock more to play the next night. Heck, Nintendo is even adding in more levels to the base set, upping the count to 180. That’s sixty more for me to get through…or potentially never see.

I may have to try an item against Mega Glalie. Call it desperation, call it despair, call it giving in–I don’t care. I have a free copy of Disruption Delay in my inventory, acquired from…uh, doing something cool, so maybe I’ll give that a go tonight. However, if the match goes just as poorly as all previous attempts, I will forever be bitter against using items and will refrain from ever experimenting again, deleting this free-to-play Pokémon game and focusing instead on that other free-to-play Pokémon game. That one, so far, hasn’t raised any walls yet to impede my journey.

If you have any good tips on taking down Mega Glalie, please do share. If you beat this level with your eyes closed and one hand behind your back, kudos for you.

Help Jason defeat the corruption in IAMJASON

It’s not hard to see that I appreciate just about any game with a low res retro style to it. It makes my imagination work ten times as hard. Some recent notable examples include A Place in Space, Bernband, and A House in California, but we can dig deeper and see that I’ve been into this style since the heydays of the text-based murder mystery Sleuth on the family computer. To be fair, that game’s retro look was due to it actually being a retro game and using ASCII characters as graphics, released in 1983 by Eric N. Miller of Norland Software. Anyways, IAMJASON is another great runner to carry the “less is more” torch for indie games, delivering a somber, unsettling story through traditional mechanics and a visual style that has you determining for yourself what you are seeing.

IAMJASON is a point-and-click adventure game set in a dystopian other-realm where the colors pink, purple, and orange reign. The long and short of the game’s plot is that you must help Jason defeat the corruption, and to say anything else would ruin a lot of the discovery. The game was developed by Calico Reverie for the Monthly Adventure Game Studio (MAGS) competition in February 2015, which is a 30-day game dev challenge. I believe the theme for that month’s challenge was “losing something,” and IAMJASON is successfully all about that, whether it is in the form of family or memory or even meaning.

Mechanics are what you expect for the genre. You have an inventory to collect items into, as well as four commands–go, use, take, and look. Interestingly, the text you get from looking at items or trying to combine this with that is presented largely at the top of the screen in single word blips, as if the protagonist is really thinking about every word. You could almost imagine a “DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.” joke to pop up during some puzzle error, but the game never breaks from its seriousness. This goes the same for IAMJASON‘s soundtrack, which is low, peppered with muted bleeps and bloops, as well as the occasional burst of static acting as a drum beat. It works magically to create an atmosphere of dismay and disinterest, of broken beings continuing to just go through the motions. Many of the puzzles are logical even if you are dealing with fairly illogical concepts and items, such as daemon robots, passcode mechanisms, and power cores.

Unfortunately, I ran into a nasty, game-stopping bug in IAMJASON. Basically, I solved a part of a puzzle’s process earlier than expected, immobilizing a daemon robot to allow me to get a key item, but in doing so this locked the door to the room said robot is now trapped in. To complete the game, I needed to extract something from the wonky robot, but the door refused to open for me. I had to watch the remaining five or so minutes of gameplay on YouTube, which, while not the worst outcome, was still a little disappointing.

Other than that, I heartily recommend you give IAMJASON a go. It’s about thirty minutes of gameplay in total–so long as you act accordingly–and hopefully that previously mentioned bug is fixed or will soon be. Regardless, this is a strange and fascinating world worth ridding of corruption, even if it means losing everything.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #28 – IAMJASON

Defeat corruption
In this dystopian realm
But lose everything

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.