Into the Breach - Thoughts

 

Into the Breach is a paradox. And no, not a time-travelling one; Subset Games' sophomore effort is a perfect experience that's dogged by its perfection. It sounds nonsensical, but hear me out: you know how there's some games you love but probably won't ever play again? Usually they require too much of a time investment (World of Warcraft) or offer the greatest value on your first experience (Undertale), but either way you're not compelled to return. To have this happen with a procedurally generated game—one that's designed for repeated playthroughs—typically forewarns of a broken system, lack of variety, or crushing length. Into the Breach has none of those, but is instead so beautifully balanced that finally figuring out how to play it eliminates your need to.

The premise for Into the Breach is phenomenal: ginormous bugs are attacking Earth, and the only way to stop them is by using equally ginormous robots (that uh, also travel through time). While it sounds like the perfect pitch for an EDF clone, Into the Breach plays closer to a game like chess, prioritizing positional advantages and impactful moves. Each battle opens by showing you how the bugs plan to attack, and you must counter them for four or five turns, whereupon the pests will retreat. The catch is that more bugs will emerge out of the ground every turn, so you must keenly balance offense with defense, eliminating major threats while finding ways to deny their reinforcements.

After a few runs you'll see that the chess comparison isn't just for show: turns are porcelain-delicate, with one wrong move sending you spiraling into defeat. Eventually, you'll shift your thinking from "how do I kill these bugs" to "how do I kill them as efficiently as possible", scouring the battlefield for a better move than the one you have. You'll learn to create two results from a single action, visualize the HP of your mechs as an expendable resource, and finally, reach the epiphany that your objective is simply to stop the bugs, not kill them. To help you on this journey are different mech squads that can be unlocked over time, expanding not only your toolkit, but also the way you approach problem solving. While there are a ton of intricate systems you'll have to adapt to, don't let that discourage you—you can succeed on your very first run so long as you use your brain.

This brings us to Into the Breach's biggest draw, as well as the Achilles' heel of its replayability: semi-perfect information. Most of the game's randomness is dealt with before and after a battle, when you're choosing assignments to take, opening time pods, and purchasing items from a shop. Though enemy reinforcements are somewhat unpredictable, you won't be overwhelmed with more than you can handle—and even if that does happen, it's usually because you made a dumb mistake somewhere (like foolishly going to the island with the spider boss). The only hard dice rolling the game does is actually in your favor, in the form of a "grid defense" that has a low (but appreciable) percent chance for buildings to avoid taking damage. Into the Breach is so meticulously balanced that any team you pick is guaranteed to net you a four-island victory on Hard, provided you know how to correctly react to the RNG you're given.

That might sound obvious to roguelite players, but Into the Breach isn't nearly as susceptible to faulty reactions or lethal saving throws; all pertinent information is given to you, so there's always a salvageable move somewhere. That's not to say you will never lose, but that your losses will make perfect sense in hindsight. Besides resignations from chasing achievements, I only had three serious defeats on Hard mode that I can recall: one for choosing poor weapons for the final fight, another for letting the spider boss grow out of control, and the last for picking a custom squad that lacked "push" potential. While it might be tempting to blame the "grid defense" for failing me, the truth is that I could've rectified all three runs had I made better choices along the journey.

And therein lies the rub; Into the Breach is a majestic Rubik's Cube of options, where fun is found in discerning a method by which to solve it, rather than physically completing the task. The game can still entertain in a meditative way, similar to daily chess and sudoku puzzles, but absent is the nail-biting thrill found in an FTL run, where you're anxiously scouring the sector map for a repair station. And sometimes, it's nice to play a game that's devoid of RNG-failure, where messy fights won't leave you bruised or bitter. Sure, frustration tends to play an element (my artillery got webbed AGAIN?!) but your quest to 100% the game will see you achieving a zen state, fear and doubt leaving the equation. You'll understand that every map is solvable, every pilot useful, and that you've won run before launching out of the hangar. In being so well-balanced, Into the Breach effectively solves itself, and then asks you whether or not you can replicate its solution.

However, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there is an absurdly difficult optional challenge: take no building damage over the entire run. While it is doable, it requires a level of transcendence that I probably won't be able to reach, demanding intimate knowledge of every weapon, map, and even the enemy AI. I've gotten somewhat close at times but I always make a mistake somewhere, given that 2+ hours is a long time to play a game flawlessly. And while I appreciate the existence of that challenge, it conversely creates disappointment; there's nothing to test your mettle between the extremes of "no damage taken" and "Hard mode." The closest thing I can think of is selecting a "Random Squad" as your team, which will hand you occasionally tricky combinations (three science vessels?!) Yet one or two store visits will usually round out your arsenal—if you haven't crashed and burned before getting to that point. I think more modes could go a long way towards spicing things up, but as it currently stands, knowing the game "well enough" works somewhat to its detriment.

I hope what I've written isn't misleading—I adore Into the Breach and would rate it at least a 9/10. But... I'm obviously bothered by my lack of need to return to it. Perhaps I'm just judging it too harshly. Most roguelites succumb to mastery eventually, where even difficult games like Nethack, Spelunky and Slay the Spire can yield double digit winstreaks. But personally, I still look at those games and see the ominous possibility of failure looming overhead, heavy as a headsman's ax. Into the Breach on the other hand carries a footnote of failure, one devoid of bad luck, poor response time, and unfair design. If humanity falls to the insect invasion, the most probable reason is that you were simply too impulsive. Into the Breach is a wonderful, enthralling experience while it lasts—but once you can read it like a book, I guess there's little else to do besides shut it and move on.

Dragon Age 2 - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

I spent half of my blog entry on Dragon Age: Origin griping about how difficult the game was, so imagine my surprise when I sauntered into Dragon Age 2 and found it to be even harder. I'm not sure what compelled BioWare to double-down on the unforgiving nature of the series, but double down they did and man oh man did it give me a rough time. My playthrough took nearly sixty hours and I'd say a good twenty of that was spent in menus, meticulously equipping and re-equipping my companions, staring blurry-eyed at their skill trees, hoping to find an OP ability somewhere. But no, Dragon Age 2 told me there would be no easy paths through life, and by the end I've grown to like its tough attitude—and it's not just the gameplay that gets tough.

As damning as this observation is to make, Dragon Age 2 reminds me most of Deus Ex: Invisible War. Both games are competent titles that have gotten bum raps from trying to streamline a beloved older brother. In Dragon Age 2's case, it looks towards Mass Effect 2 for inspiration, narrowing its scope and preferring combat to be flashy rather than mundane. But these changes are taken to their extreme, reducing the world of Thedas to a single city and having every single character—even the mages!—exaggerate their attacks as if they're middle school LARPers.

However, these issues—low locale variety and over-the-top action—are detrimental only on first glance. While Kirkwall undoubtedly would've benefited from more dungeon layouts, trapping you in the city means that you'll grow attached to the solitary setting, gradually learning more of its uncomfortable history with time. And the flashy combat is mechanically a non-issue—you can turn off button mashing in the options and basically play the game like Dragon Age: Origins, auto-attacking enemies and adjusting companion AI to suit your party's needs. For console players, not only does the spell wheel return fully intact, but it now boasts a vital new command: "move here", a tiny feature which quickly becomes an essential part of your arsenal.

Dialogue is unfortunately one aspect that's been definitely downgraded. Folks online cheekily dilute Bioware's dialogue wheel to "good choice, evil choice, sarcastic choice," but Dragon Age 2 is where the meme must've come from, because those are precisely your three options. Sure, occasionally you can lie or let one of your companions handle things, but you're no longer spoiled with the multitude of responses Origins provides, let alone the variety. Most of the choices in this game will result in binary outcomes—and even then, you're lucky if they don't inevitably turn into the same boss fight. The best thing I can say about the dialogue wheel is there's a new "mood" icon in the center of it, although good luck figuring out what "five-pointed star" and "purple diamond" mean.

That's not to say your choices don't matter or that the narrative feels weak however. The story in Dragon Age 2 is solid, but... kind of strange. Whereas most of BioWare's other games provide a central plot looming in the distance (Saren, the Reapers, the Archdemon) Dragon Age 2 doesn't have one. There's an array of offbeat story arcs and shady characters to be on the lookout for, but Hawke has no core motivation beyond a hazy "protect my family" instinct. Dragon Age 2 is a tangle of side quests that may or may not interweave with one another, knotted around three distinct threads that are mostly unrelated from one another. You'll bounce from one story, to another, to another, until eventually the game decides it's finished and rolls credits.

But like I said, this pivot isn't a detrimental move—by removing a titanic evil looming in the distance, Dragon Age 2 instead focuses on the layperson and their individual plight. Rather than deciding the fate of kings and kingdoms, you help folks find their lost shipments, foolhardy sons, and missing wives (or... what's left of them.) In turn, the conflicts in Dragon Age 2 feel more personal, as years down the line you may be forced to deal with the ramifications of your actions, forced to confront—or kill—someone you once aided. And that should scare you because a lot of outcomes in Dragon Age 2 are fairly bleak: by the end, my love dumped me, most of my relatives were dead, and I was morally obligated to execute my best party member. The narrative can certainly get frustrating at times—its overly binary and has no qualms about removing companions key to your party makeup—but it's a frustration that helps keep you on edge. Hard decisions are constantly pushed in your face, making you question whether or not you can survive the outcome.

And that bleakness wouldn't feel as potent if it weren't for the brutal gameplay design. By far the most unforgivable part about the game is that it will drop enemy reinforcements around the perimeter of the area, which has several nasty consequences: new enemies are quick to target squishy characters, area of effect spells have low utility, and you're never really sure when a fight will be winding down or starting up. Since warriors are atrocious at pulling aggro (Taunt has a 20 second cooldown!), your best bet is to spec for offense and learn to identify-then-dispatch of the problem children immediately: mages, horrors, assassins, and venomous spiders. If you don't stay on top of your party's health and positioning, you'll either blow through all your expensive consumables or watch as your ranged characters are downed fight after fight. Origins eventually dropped off in difficulty whereas Dragon Age 2 starts hard and ends hard—and this is without getting into the absurd boss fights (I hope you enjoy fighting 70 adds and navigating rock walls!)

Like with Origins, you'll eventually learn to adapt to the game's surprise drops, even if you never become a fan of them. Given that combat is considerably more lethal, you'll be spending even more time combing over your skill trees and equipment perks. Both of these features have been simplified from Origins, but it's a minor thing you'll hardly notice once you accept that you're not in charge of your companions' body armor. In fact I think I like the skill trees in Dragon Age 2 more because they let you spend talent points on modifiers to your existing abilities, which makes up for rotating through a long list of similar-feeling spells. Not a single time did I ever feel like Dragon Age 2 was tactically inferior to Origins; my biggest gripe will forever be that the game needs to take a chill pill when it comes to sending sending enemy reinforcements at you. And that magic resistance is too swingy. Aaand bosses are too tanky.

Going into Dragon Age 2, I was prepared for a neutered experience that was all style and no substance. Instead I got a game that was deep, full of good character moments, and much harder than either Doom Eternal or Sekiro. My experience wasn't all sunshine and smiles of course—the word "frustrating" immediately comes to mind—but I respect the game for challenging me with its narrative, economy, and gameplay. There's plenty of value to be found in Dragon Age 2, but you need to head into it understanding that it has an insatiable (and somewhat unfair) penchant for punishment.

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Images obtained from: microsoft.com, superior-realities, reddit.com, youtube.com

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight - Thoughts

Momodora III was the first entry in the series to feel like a proper game, but rdein's fourth attempt, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, makes III look positively childish. Reverie is Momodora but all grown-up and anxiety-riddled, filled with gloomy locations, darker story beats, and a subdued—but fitting—color palette. Gone are the simplistic Cave Story references and chibi girls slapping goofy eyeballs (well, you'll still slap monsters with a leaf, but they'll be of the shadowy and abominable variety.) Your adventure through the City of Karst will be equal parts foreboding and awe-inspiring, unsettling and beautiful; Reverie Under the Moonlight is the elegant culmination of everything rdein has learned thus far.

I'll start by revealing that Reverie is short, but not bite-sized short. I've run through the game multiple times (on increased difficulties) and none of my playthroughs have extended past three hours, with the shortest being just shy of sixty minutes. That's not to say that Reverie feels brief though; you spend a decent amount of time in each location, and just as you start to get a grasp on the enemies and traps in one area, you'll soon venture into another. This keeps Reverie feeling punchy and fresh, maintaining the energetic spirit of the old Momodora titles, but giving you enough time to settle into each zone so that you grow attached to the music and enemies as you search for goodies.

Structurally, Reverie Under the Moonlight returns to the Metroidvania genre, but keeps its levels and boss fights compact, akin to Momodora III. There's health upgrades to collect and various baubles you can equip, which add some minor flair to your combat repertoire. While there are hints of a neat combo system here, given Kaho's well-animated 3-hit chain and enemy flinch states, it's... not very deep. It is, however, quite satisfying, especially with how easily you can mix in powerful ranged attacks. The hardest difficulty requires you to essentially play the game flawlessly, taking nearly zero hits—which would brutal if not for the fact that the bow is your best offensive ability, letting you play cautiously and melt most of the bosses. If you learn to love it, the bow shall reward you well.

Not that most people will be playing the "1-hit kill" mode of course. The default difficulty is well-balanced for your first playthrough, though rdein's difficulty curve will vary from room to room. Some areas will test you with tricky foes and nasty spikes, while other times you'll stroll through a section just to unlock a shortcut and go "wait, that was it?" This is the charm of rdein's games though: you never know what to expect from one screen to the next, whether it be new foes, a new boss, or environmental vignettes.

Speaking of: Reverie, like other Momodora games, has a simple narrative that's cloaked in its own enigmatic history. Unlike Dark Souls however, there aren't easy ways to decipher and unravel it; you're a stranger to Karst and its adjoining lands, encountering and dispatching of characters that have six lines of dialogue or less. I like this approach because it gives precedence to the ambiance of Reverie over its lore, evoking the history of the Queendom in short glimpses, often found in stray details like a burnt painting or broken bird cage. Sure, there are NPCs that will give you a general gist of what's going on, but you'll feel like you're interrupting the lives of most folks you encounter—or what little life they have left.

Lastly, the game is smooth as butter to play. rdein has always nailed player control in the previous titles so this isn't a huge surprise, but coupled with the larger sprites and more detailed backgrounds, it's impossible not to be impressed with the aesthetic Reverie displays. Throw in some melancholic melodies that underpin just how forgone Karst is, and you'll find yourself remembering sections of Reverie more often than in rdein's older games. And maybe that's what strikes me so much about Reverie: it has that ineffable quality where it stays glued to your brain, even after the credits roll.

Even though I enjoyed the previous entry plenty, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight was so captivating that I immediately started a Hard playthrough upon finishing it—and yet another playthrough after that. It's a greatly enjoyable mini-metroidvania, although using the word "mini-" belies its quality; what it lacks in longevity it makes up for in personality. Reverie feels like a complete package, full of good fights, interesting settings, smooth controls, and some really stunning music. I'd still call Momodora a quaint series, but with Reverie it's no longer as small or quiet as it used to be—and it's all the better for it.

Diablo III - Thoughts

Diablo III is an exceedingly strange game. On the surface, it doesn't look like it—Blizzard brought their trademark polish and shine to the title, making it look, feel, and sound better than any other action RPG on the market in 2012. But all the bells and whistles belie a barebones interior keeping Diablo III held aloft. It's a game of infinitesimal improvement and repetitive farming, of endless achievements and quixotic gimmicks every season. You get into Diablo III not for its lore, community, or even the clever builds; the main draw is its bottomless, meaningless, tedious grind. And while it may not be a terrible grind, it is an absolutely shameless one.

Before we get to the grind, let's talk about the elephant in the room: Diablo III's main campaign is a bust. I'm typically one of the folks that defends video game narratives (game prose is on par with serialized television at least), but Diablo III is the poster child for lackluster writing. I paid attention to the story, I gathered the bestiary books, and I engaged in the side conversations—yet not a single thing stood out as interesting. My most "captivating" discovery was that the big bad Malthael had once been the Archangel of Wisdom... but the game does absolutely nothing clever with that realization. All the villains are unambiguously evil, their plans positively brainless; comics from the 1970's could generate more hooks in 20 pages than all 20 hours of Diablo III's campaign combined.

That leaves Diablo III's core gameplay loop as the main draw, which is a nest of webs to navigate due to two reasons, the first being its heavy reliance on equipment. That might sound like a petty complaint—aren't all ARPGs centered around their loot?—but Diablo III is unique in that your build is determined first and foremost by what you find rather than the skills you pick. During my replay of Diablo III's campaign, my hardcore Monk was absolutely useless (on T1) until she stumbled across a level 14 legendary item (Cesar's Memento), which granted a whopping 750% bonus damage to a skill I didn't even like (Tempest Rush). But to avoid fights that could take upwards of five minutes, I had to center my build around activating that boring ability as much as possible, never needing to switch it off my main skills when the bracers became horribly outdated.

If having to balance your build around random item drops sounds awful, don't worry—you can opt to ignore equipment synergy by instead grappling with Diablo III's second issue: the ludicrous Torment system. The game boasts a total twenty tiers of difficulties, 80% of which are just numerical additions to the word "Torment". Sure, you can play through the game on its base difficulty of Normal or Hard, but you'll never be challenged so long as you remember to equip gear (any gear!) that's around your level range. To fully engage with your skill set and feel a modicum of accomplishment, you'll have to dive into the Torment difficulties—and even then you're not likely to make it beyond Torment IV unless you really know what you're doing.

I dove into Season 22 of Diablo III prepared to finally make an endgame build that could topple the highest difficulty: Torment XVI. I watched a video on the Masquerade Bone Spear Necromancer and dug into the icy-veins page to get a better handling on what every piece did and why. For the most part, it was fairly fun battling my way to level 70 with my skeleton mage army, and then knocking off the seasonal achievements one by one until I could claim the entire Masquerade set as my own. After that, my goal was to fill every equipment slot with its recommended legendary, having to mix and match what I was wearing until the fabled Haunted Visions amulet—the linchpin of the entire build—landed in my lap. From there, all that was left to do was reroll the stats on my current gear, or hope to find Ancient/Primal versions of it (ie rare max stat mutations) either via Kunai's Cube or Rifts.

If a lot of that sounds like nonsense to you, let me break things down more clearly: once reaching level 70 in Adventure mode, you run one activity (Rifts) 90% of the time and do another activity (Bounties) 10% of the time. Once you get good gear you raise the difficulty, which allows you to find more gear to further optimize your build, letting you raise the difficulty to find even more gear in order to raise the difficulty and so on and so forth until you become a snake eating its own tail in the belly of a Greater Rift. As Rifts are just recycled content (same with Bounties), you're not really seeing or experiencing anything "new"—your adventure through Torment X will mirror your experience with Torment VII, IV, XIII, etc. Even when you topple the fairly lethal Torment XVI, you can try your hand at Greater Rift pushing, where you can play all the way up to a theoretical super-duper lethal Torment XXXII—which, need I remind you, boasts no new content outside of inflated enemy health and damage.

I could posit that I soured on Diablo III after finally reaching Torment XVI, but I think from the very beginning the game was slowly, gradually ebbing my excitement. To its credit, Diablo III at least hides this process very well—every class is a lot of fun to play and there's bound to be some abilities you'll never get tired of using (Disintegrate, Falling Sword, Corpse Spiders). But the game's one-two punch of gear dependence and arbitrary difficulty settings will always leave me stupefied. And it's not that it's wrong to allow players to tweak the difficulty—Supergiant Games is a master at this—but Diablo III's Torment tiers all blend together, testing you in the exact same way from the first numbered iteration to the last. Eventually you'll find yourself playing the game as a habitual way to kill time, collecting loot you'll never need and spending Paragon points to increase your stats by a fraction of a percent. It's a great game to play while listening to an audiobook or podcast, largely because your brain will need something more captivating to do in the meantime.

In a way, it's weird that I can't accurately speak to what Diablo III was like in 2012. I played through it at launch but didn't explore the harder difficulties, nor engage with the real-money auction house. I'm sure—as fans are quick to note—that the game is in a better state now, but I'd hesitate to call the features that have been tacked on (Rifts, Torments, Haedrig's Gift) "solutions". They certainly add to the replayable and help the game feel more diverse, but fundamentally, Diablo III's blueprint is severely lacking. I've funneled more than 200 hours into the title but most of that time was spent looking for something meaningful and rewarding out of its complex systems and plethora of gear. In the end, I'll have to face the fact that I'm walking away from the Diablo III with my hands...

... empty.