Loot River - Thoughts

Like a hobo's bindle, Loot River is a ratty patchwork of incongruous ideas. Occasionally you'll glimpse snapshots of a clever gimmick—such as gambling with your healing potions to earn more of them next stage—but promising concepts are the best the game has to offer. Spending a mere hour with Loot River will reveal that it's less than half the game that it should be. It's not simply rough around the edges or in urgent need of more playtesting; Loot River is completely unrefined, like a gnarled tree trunk posing as an IKEA dining table.

Loot River's premise is distinctly alluring: a top-down action roguelite that sees you venturing through a forgotten, flooded city via sliding polyominos that you control with the right analogue stick. It blends tense combat with impromptu puzzle solving, letting you choose how and when to engage groups of enemies. You can briefly connect platforms to pull enemies one at a time, or split the battlefield in half to deal with the runts first, or blitz your way over to a block, break away, and forego combat altogether. A lot of the decision-making is left in the player's hands, which is one of the rare things Loot River gets right.

A shame that everything else is such a mess.

First up, build variety doesn't exist because the player is given nearly no choice in what to receive. Despite there being a decently-sized unlock tree for weapons, armor, and spells, there's no way to start a run with the paraphernalia of your choice. Instead, you'll either receive the default starting set or a completely randomized loadout. New gear can be found during a run, but not only is such a thing rare, but its quality is completely randomized—meaning you stumble across low level equipment even in the endgame. So expect to find one or two upgrades at best.

Shops could theoretically remedy this issue, but there are only a handful in the game—all of which offer a single randomized item at a time. It boggles the mind! There are over 50 pieces of equipment to choose from, which could have easily expanded the shop inventory to three or five items—or at least allow categorization by type (weapons, armor, spells, etc)—but Loot River simply shrugs its shoulders to such obvious solutions. Exacerbating this are the randomized shop prices, tending to land on the expensive side more often than not. So shops wind up being a complete non-factor in determining a winning run—which is a bizarre design decision for a roguelite that leans so heavily on its item pool for variety!

And that's all without getting into how rubbish the majority of your equipment actually is!

If you seek to best Loot River, you must understand one simple rule: speed is king. Big weapons might look impressive as your character drags them across the ground, but they're too unwieldy, lacking both the damage and reach needed to offset their slow attack speed. Parrying is also linked to weapon attack speed, granting quick blades nigh-invulnerable when you spam the parry button again—a tactic that works on almost every enemy in the game! And there's no drawback to it either! Loot River lacks a stamina system to punish you for spammy play, meaning you mash your way through any fight and escape those you can't by repeatedly dodging over and over again. And since bosses are the only lock-in fights, it's fairly easy to sprint to the end of the game and parry the final boss to death with your starting weapon. I tested this out a few times and got a sub-10 minute run, placing me in the top 10 for the XBOX PC leaderboards... an achievement I'm not sure I'm proud of.

There's a bit more to the combat—like a string of combos, charge attack, and spellcasting—but you won't need anything beyond the very first attack. By far the optimal strategy is to attack once and then dash behind the target, resetting your combo so you perform your opening attack again. This is because some weapons like the axe and rapier have blazingly-fast pokes that do solid damage, capable of stunlocking enemies and pounding bosses into a pulp. Better yet is if your weapon is enhanced with electricity, as it will continue to damage and paralyze enemies while you're dashing behind them—a maneuver that even keeps even the final boss fully locked down and helpless! The other enhancements (poison, fire) are hilariously useless in comparison, applying a single damage DoT (as in, one damage) that does little more than color your foe a light shade of green or orange. Seriously, if you find a lightning rapier somewhere—no matter the level quality—prepare to steamroll through the game faster than a Ferrari through a sand castle.

You may be wondering if there's any incentive for fighting enemies you can easily flee from, and my response would be "kind of". You receive both gold and experience from squashing your foes, but the former is so scant as to rarely matter (again, shops price gouge like crazy). and you only need a small amount of the latter to beat the game. When you level up you can increase one out of six of your stats, which sounds like an interesting choice—except that it isn't. What you'll end up doing nine times out of ten is increasing VIT to 13 and then, depending on the weapon you're wielding, dumping the rest into either STR or DEX. Sure, you might be tempted to spend your points elsewhere, but considering that you only net 6-8 levels before your run concludes, it's hard to beat the unstoppable combo of HP & DPS. And considering how floaty, inconsistent, and obfuscated the combat feels, you really won't want to play more than you have to. Seriously, the game needs to sit down and figure out what Hyper Light Drifter and Curse of the Dead Gods did right, because it's barely better than a Newgrounds flash game.

There are a couple more systems Loot River includes that range from curious (using run modifiers to unlock the true last boss is neat) to obnoxious (why send the player back to the hub after every stage? Why make some of the charms so ineffectual and others OP? Why does the fetid shawl drop over and over and over again?!) but I grow tired thinking about this game more than the developers clearly have. Loot River lacks common sense, too eager to blend ideas and playstyles together while doing little to make itself enticing, cohesive, or properly balanced. Its combat is messy, its equipment is boring, the money is useless, and experience is practically predetermined—but the most odious culprit is the titular loot. Loot River is not keen on doling its items out to you, and even when it stubbornly does, expect it to be hot garbage most of the time.

While playing through Loot River, I was reminded at times of the equally-strange Loop Hero... but any comparison I could draw between the two will betray how distant they are in quality. Loop Hero may fall short of its true potential, but one can walk away from it having been satisfied by the puzzle presented—or at least, tickled by its mechanics. Loot River on the other hand, is half-baked, routinely imbalanced, and—at most—mildly entertaining when it works as intended. Which is not often! Perhaps one might find it fascinating from a cautionary, post-mortem perspective, the same way that failing a midterm test can convey the importance of routine studying. As for me (and much to Loot River's chagrin) the only thing I found notable about it is that it's one of the firmest "do not recommend"s I've played in a long while.

Moonscars - Thoughts

Left in the wake of Salt and Sanctuary was a tantalizing concept: Dark Souls as a 2D metroidvania. Ska Studios showed it was possible—with a one man team of all things!—so indie studios got to work on creating their own Frankenstein's monster. Numerous notable titles emerged from this trend such as Blasphemous, Ender Lilies, and GRIME, with the tally only growing each year. But this sudden burst in popularity brought with it a muddying of the genre, blending many of these gothic-medieval games into a gray soup of stamina bars, cryptic lore, and corpse runs. It became harder to stand out, harder to tell at a glance what your game did different from the myriad of others.

Moonscars tries to leap ahead of its kin thanks to a strong art style and gorgeous animations, but it never fully emerges from the muddy swamp. Rather, it is stuck waist-deep in mediocrity, vainly reaching for the feet of its golden idols.

Before I begin, let me just state that Black Mermaid should be proud of the work they've achieved here. To come out of nowhere and drop such an impressive, gif-juicy game like Moonscars is admirable, even if the experience is far from perfect. There's a lot of praiseworthy material here: the world is somber and alluring, attacks have great weight and flourish to them, and the smeared, smudgy art style is a clever fit for the game's earthern theme. The magic system is also an interesting departure from genre conventions, utilizing a replenishable resource that doubles as your healing pool. Since magic can only be recovered by attacking, it stops you from having to constantly return to a save point to restore health, while simultaneously encouraging a risky, aggressive playstyle. It's a smart system... 

... would that I could say the same for the rest of the game.

The boldest idea Moonscars brings to the table is its roguelite perks: transitory passives that reset upon death. Although you can hold up to five perks, there are a scant six in total to choose from, with a majority allowed to be taken twice. This means you're likely to end up with the same exact build every time: two 25% heal increases, two 10% crit increase, and whatever fifth suits your needs at the time (like the full hp heal). Toward the latter half of the game you'll come to lean more on the spell cost reduction perks, but it hardly feels like a game changer. Eventually you'll realize that perks largely serve as a "death tax", momentarily weakening you until you slaughter a handful of enemies to get back up to speed. And considering how the game bizarrely has endgame enemies provide the same amount of experience as its starting foes, expect to warp back to the beginning to do some menial, risk-free grinding over and over again.

What you won't grind for, strangely enough, is experience. And that's because there are no level ups in Moonscars—only spells, trinkets, and permanent upgrades scattered throughout the wild. This renders the power curve distinctly flat with a slight uphill slant; although you'll be stronger at the end of your journey than its start, it'll be mostly due to the hours of play time you'll spend studying enemy attacks, as well as your own. The only vital items to hunt for in Moonscars are the damage upgrades, but they suffer from a bizarre artistic flaw: looking like every other sparkly item on the ground. This deflates the joy found in exploration, as you have barely any upgrades to keep an eye out for—and those you are in need of look like every other useless trinket that'll clog your inventory.

Plus, it's not as if exploration is one of Moonscars' key features. Despite having all the telltale signs of a metroidvania, the world of Moonscars is practically on rails, guiding you from one area to another. You can't stumble upon anything you aren't supposed to, nor fight any of the bosses out of order. Only when you find the game's lone mobility upgrade does the world open up a little bit, but even then the new paths will lead to dead ends until you visit them in a specific sequence. The final act in the game kills the metroidvania comparisons outright, devolving into a string of dull arena fights against enemies in flat arenas that you've dispatched a dozen times already. Lastly, the in-game map is horridly unwieldy, lacking markers for both switches & doors, as well as scrolling agonizingly slow (seriously, what is it with metroidvania games having glacial, impractical scrolling?!)

Perhaps you're hoping that the lore of the world can keep you hooked, but the story is sadly ripped wholesale from From's catalogue. The analogues to Dark Souls/Bloodborne are glaring: the medieval kingdom has fallen into disrepair, Clayborn are Undead, getting cleft is going hollow, the moon is a major antagonist, and every NPC is an asshole that speaks in riddles. There's a kernel of a good idea here—namely, every death letting you slough off a useless skin that may or may not come back to haunt you—but the storytelling in Moonscars is needlessly convoluted and poorly explained, throwing line after line of dialogue at you that ultimately reveals nothing. The gargoyles in the hub are the worst offenders, prattling on without end while glibly mocking you the entire time. While there are major character reveals and plot developments, nothing in Moonscars is surprising because nothing is expected; the story is a nonsensical proper noun salad that vacates your mind as soon as you turn off the game.

Combat stays strong for the most part, but even it starts to stagnate by the end. Despite the alluring animation of the game's heavier weapons (like the hammer and painwheel), Moonscars values quick attacks over outwardly impressive ones. This, combined with the slow start-up of spells and high damage of parries, funnels you into a rapidly striking playstyle where retaliation is king. This only becomes more true as the game gets harder, with enemies lobbing off half of your health bar in a single, wide strike. And even when you realize the power of the parry, it remains a temperamental and finicky maneuver, no matter how often you use it. The best tip I can give is to try and parry enemies before you think you need to.

Speaking of enemies, Moonscars could've benefitted from a larger bestiary. What's here is thankfully varied, but the game runs out of new monsters in its last third, a problem further exacerbated by the shift to arena battles. To mask this shortcoming, old foes are reintroduced with an immunity to physical attacks—a gimmick you're either going to find mildly interesting or painfully annoying. While this does prompt the player to reexamine their spell loadout, flying foes are an eternal nuisance, as there aren't a lot of quick and effective aerial spells. It doesn't help that the skybound enemies are some of the worst in the game, whether it be the floating priests that spam a powerful AoE heal or the tiny gargoyles with their deceptively wide spears. Bosses at least provide an interesting challenge, but not only are they few and far between, but half of them are also aerial foes, meaning your solitary midair swipe will be getting quite the workout.

Moonscars makes a valiant effort but ultimately falls short of greatness. Everything besides its animations comes up lacking: an uninspired world, lifeless map, hitchy combat, low build variety, and square room after square room of enemies made immune to 70% of your combat repertoire. Despite my cartoonishly long list of grievances (that continue to unfurl and bounce down a staircase), I nevertheless had fun with Moonscars, and would recommend it only to diehard fans of the genre. The game has inarguable foibles, but the worst of its sins are still forgivable, merely needing more polish rather than a drastic overhaul. If I was to make a single, potentially-damning comparison, Moonscars feels like the Mortal Shell of the 2D Soulslike genre.

Raft - Thoughts

Amid a sea of crafting games, Raft asks an interesting question: what if you had to take your base with you when you traveled? Or rather: what if the only way to travel was to take your base with you? At first it seems a cruel joke, your buoyed home little more than a block of wood set mysteriously adrift. But by the end it'll feel like home—your home, complete with its own shoddy craftmanship, loose inventory, and piecemeal renovations. With this home, you'll sail across the endless expanse of blue, looking for other survivors, uncovering new schematics, and maybe even bringing some animal buddies onboard.

Raft justifies a playthrough based off of its houseboat concept alone, but where it really shines—as hard as it is to believe for an open-world crafting game—is in its story missions.

A word of warning I'd issue to new players is that Raft's food and water meters are grueling taskmasters. They deplete so fast at the start of the game that it's far easier (and less resource-intensive) to simply die and wait for an ally to revive you. Even when your kitchen can finally serve enough food and water for your crew, you'll be rapidly depleting its stock at all times. This is doubly true for the story missions, where you're docked at a single location for days at a time, devouring every fish, fruit, and vegetable in sight. The sooner you can establish a self-sustaining farm the better—and the larger you make it, the less often you'll have to hear groans of "we're out of watermelons again!"

What complicates this is that real estate cannot be found—it must be built. Combing the ocean's surface for detritus is the best way to gather raw materials for an expansion, but raft tiles aren't cheap, requiring a constant upkeep thanks to the ravenous shark biting at your wooden heels. Trawling the waves grants a steady but measly income, only allowing you to splurge on a home renovation once every few days. This, combined with the food drought, encourages you to always stay on the move, dropping by islands just to deplete them of their resources, like a button-up villain from an eco-friendly kids cartoon.

On one hand, the inexhaustible need to find more resources keeps Raft interesting, rarely making it so you can sit idly by and watch the waves. But on the other hand, due to the game keeping you constrained to a single raft, it can feel frustrating being beholden to the meager drip-feed of flotsam—especially when you hit a dry patch on the ocean. Other games like Valheim and Terraria allow players to split up and specialize, so one player can focus on fighting, another on gathering, another on building, etc. But Raft glues everyone to the same location, its freedom sharply ending at the boundary of the boat. Sure, you can still specialize in a way, but your roles will change moment-to-moment, determined by what resources are in which chest. As a survival game, it's a fascinating cooperative experience that demands flexibility; as a crafting game, it's an inconvenient, boring, and glacial crawl towards affluence.

But luckily, the story more than make up for this.

Before you get too excited, Raft's plot itself isn't anything to write home about. There's plenty there for the player that needs backstory in their games, but at no point did it ever pique my interest. No, where Raft captivates is in the sprawling design of its unique story islands, blending together item gathering, platforming, and the occasional puzzle solving. It harkens back to the PC FPSs of yore like Half-Life and Undying, where janky jumps and obscure paths forward were features and not flaws. Since this kind of unguided design has been absent in modern gaming (sans Destiny), it was refreshing to be thrown back into an open environment with nary a hint as to what I'm looking for. And thankfully, Raft never gets too bizarre or entrenched in moon logic; the entire campaign can be solved without a guide, as long as you're willing to experiment every now and then.

Plus the variety in the story missions is great—especially for an indie studio! Each islet has its own distinct themes and obstacles, with commonalities between any two kept to a minimum. You'll venture to some makeshift shanty towns, to an abandoned biosphere, and even to an arctic base sleeping in the shadow of a nuclear plant. What's great about Raft is that it keeps you wondering what's around the next corner, curious what's been hidden behind every locked door you come across. Sure, a lot of it is fairly mundane (expect to find a lot of scrap metal and cooked beats), but the game always goes off the rails at the right moments, slapping you across the face with some unexpected surprises. Playing with friends or family makes these moments even better, as you'll occasionally hear confused, breathless reactions while you're carrying out some menial task on the ship ("Help! There's a vulture dropping boulders on me!")

What really sweetens the deal (for me) is that Raft is a quick play, letting you speed through the game in under 24 hours. That might not sound quick, but I think it's exceptionally brief for a crafting game featuring nearly a hundred recipes. It won't all be smooth sailing—you'll run into the some resource bottlenecks like iron and titanium ore—but you can hack away at the story every time you sit down to play. For some folks however, Raft might feel too small—an issue exacerbated by the fact that there's no reason to continue playing after the story concludes. Well, unless you want to keep working on your dream house and don't mind scaring away sharks and seagulls every two goddamn minutes for the rest of your life (seriously, where were the endgame upgrades to repel them for longer?!) But in an era where games are encouraged to keep you playing as long as possible, I found Raft's brevity to be a plus—especially since short-but-meaty coop experiences are too few and far between.

It's obvious Raft was made by a small but passionate team. From the moment you dive in you'll have to adapt to some strange quirks that aren't likely to get patched out, like how opening a chest will show your backpack in the center and push the chests' contents off to the side, or that waiting long enough after a death lets you safely teleport your body back aboard your vessel (thus bypassing any kind of penalty). There's also not a lot of variety in the random non-story islands, nor is there enough titanium to build everything in the game (unless you REALLY like to scrounge). But if you're okay with the blemishes and ugly bumps, Raft's ride is a joy to undertake, one that will take you to some strange places. The game may lack the rags-to-riches glow-up of Terraria, but it's fun seeing how your modest, waterborne craft gradually transforms into a floating fortress, one that's capable of ferrying to the ends of the earth and back again.